I went to do a stock signing at Blackwell’s on the Holloway Road last week. It was great to see the book on sale on the Holloway Road itself. The store manager Kevin Molloy was a really nice guy, too – he’s even reading the book himself. Walking down the Holloway Road made me think I should do a little photography project down there and put it on my blog. One day, soon, when I have the time…..
If I describe the plot of this book, it will sound incredibly boring. Even a brief summary is boring, unless of course you happen to be interested in the visceral realist poetry movement in Mexico City in the 1970s, apparently a satire of the real life infrarealistas of which Bolano himself was a member.
Fortunately, the book is not really about visceral realism or Mexican poetry. At least, that’s not what I got from it.
The structure of the book is confusing. The first 100 pages or so are narrated by a young poet called Juan Garcia Madero, and then just as you are becoming invested in his character and life, he disappears altogether. The next 500 pages are narrated by about 50 different characters across decades and continents, with the only continuity provided by two other poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, who we now realise are the main protagonists. Then at the end, Garcia Madero reappears and begins narrating right where we left him, back on New Years Day 1976, to tell us about the search for a minor poet called Cesarea Tinajero.
OK, it still sounds boring. But it really wasn’t. Viewing the two characters through the eyes of so many different people was fascinating, especially as their views were contradictory and they sometimes even argued with each other across chapters. The only people whose heads we never got inside were Belano and Lima themselves, and this created a strange feeling of knowing the characters well but not as intimately as you’d expect after 700 pages. There was always a distance between the characters and the reader.
In a speech accepting the Romula Gallegos prize for this book, Bolano said:
To a great extent everything that I have ever written is a love letter or a letter of farewell to my own generation, those of us who were born in the ’50s and who chose at a given moment to take up arms (though in this case it would be more correct to say “militancy”) and gave the little that we had, or the greater thing that we had, which was our youth, to a cause that we believed to be the most generous of the world’s causes and that was, in a sense, though in truth it wasn’t.
This made sense to me having read the book. It does feel like a melancholic, nostalgic look at the youth of a particular time and place, the energy and vitality and passion and ultimate failure. The cause he’s talking about here was socialism – Bolano returned to Chile in 1973 to help “build the revolution”, and was lucky to survive when Allende was overthrown by the CIA-sponsored Pinochet coup.
Bolano doesn’t deal with any of this directly in the book, but there is an overwhelming feeling of sadness and futility. The poets themselves are forgotten – when a character in the book compiles a list of all Mexican poets of the last 50 years, Ulises Lima doesn’t even appear. The poet they model their movement on – Cesarea Tinajero – was published only once in the 1920s, and her poem consists only of some strange symbols. Their quest to find her feels futile too. They are chased all the while by an angry pimp and his violent sidekicks and only escape, as Bolano himself did from Pinochet, by pure luck.
I’m not doing a good job of explaining why I liked this book. I think I need to think more about it. I’ll update the review if I can make it more coherent at a later date.
* in Crouch End.
Hey, it may not be the New York Times bestseller list, but it made me proud when I walked past my local bookshop, Prospero’s Books, and saw my book at #4 on the Bestsellers Chart.
I even asked someone to take a photo. Come on, it’s probably the last time in my life that I will see my name next to Barack Obama’s 
Interesting piece in The Guardian recently about the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and his alleged ties to the Hoxha regime. I went to see Ismail Kadare speak at the Southbank Centre in London last year, and he addressed this issue very effectively, I thought.
He said that the people who tell him he should have spoken out are basically saying to him “You should have died.” That’s what dissent would have cost him in those days – the regime simply didn’t tolerate opposition. He would have been thrown in jail, or killed. He could perhaps have tried to defect to the West, but then of course his family would have suffered, and his friends, and anyone connected to him. So he did what many people did under Communism, and what many people have done under all kinds of authoritarian regimes at different times. He lived his life, and he made compromises in order to stay alive.
It’s easy to look back now and ask how he could have lived in such times and not said anything. But I ask myself what I would have done in his shoes. I’d like to think that I would have been a brave dissident speaking truth to power, but honestly I don’t know. How much do I even exercise my freedom of speech right now, in a country where, despite the growing culture of government surveillance and control, I am still free to speak out? Don’t I make compromises myself, in much easier conditions? Would I really speak out in a place where the urgency to do so was much greater, but the cost was also so much higher? Having never been in such a situation, I don’t think I can say.
What I do know is that Ismail Kadare is a great writer who made an important contribution. Possibly he would have made a more important contribution by speaking out against the regime and getting himself killed, or possibly he made the right choice in continuing to write – he said at the Southbank Centre that it was important for Albania to have literature in those times, however flawed or compromised. Either way, I understand why he did what he did and I don’t feel in a position to condemn him for it.
One of the things I love about London is riding the double-decker buses. You see things differently from up there on the top deck. You notice things that you’d miss if you were just walking along the street.
For example, this television dumped on the roof of a bus-stop. What’s the story behind that? A drunken bet, maybe? A vengeful spouse? Or just somebody who got really tired of reality TV?
I don’t quite know what to make of this book. There were so many storylines in so many countries at so many different times, all overlapping and sloshing around at the same time, that at times the book became overwhelming. The writing is beautiful, the concept fascinating, but somehow I didn’t find the book as compelling as I expected to.
I went to see Salman Rushdie at the Southbank Centre in London last year and he read from the book and talked about it. It sounded fascinating – the main theme is the relationship between East and West, how each perceives the other, how in the end there are more similarities than differences. It’s also about storytelling – the plot is driven by a traveller from Italy who turns up at the Mughal court with a bizarre, unbelievable tale to tell. His life depends on telling the story and being believed. He’s not the only character in the book who faces this situation – Argalia saves his own life several times by telling tall tales as he goes from Italian orphan to stowaway to fearsome Turkish warrior to powerful Florentine condottiere. Meanwhile the Mughal emperor Akbar has so powerful an imagination that he invents an imaginary wife who acts as a character in the novel.
At times I was swept up by all the beauty in the writing, the dazzling stories within stories within stories, the skill with which Rushdie constantly sails close to the wind, presenting us with increasingly bizarre and unbelievable situations and yet somehow always keeping the story just about believable. But when it was all over, I was left feeling a little disappointed. I think perhaps there was just so much going on that I never developed a real affinity for any particular character. I was so busy trying to remember the names of the enormous cast of characters and how they related to each other, and then having to restart all over again each time the book shifted to a different continent or century, that I had no time or mental energy left over for caring about the characters themselves. So while I enjoyed the story and how it was told, I didn’t really care how it would end. And while the book dazzled me as I read it, I don’t think I’ll remember it for very long.
I was excited to read recently that Jack Kerouac’s unpublished first novel The Sea is my Brother is to be published next year. I thought Peter Townshend wrote an excellent piece about the event and its possible implications.
One note of caution, though: I wonder why The Sea is my Brother has not been published before now. The stories I’ve read about it refer to it as Kerouac’s “lost” manuscript, but don’t explain where it was lost and how it was found. I’d love to discover a new Kerouac masterpiece, but I’d hate to have the disappointment of reading a first novel that had been kept under lock and key for 60 years for the simple reason that it didn’t measure up to his later work.
I guess I’ll have to read it and find out. Exciting news, anyway.
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you are trying to get somewhere but things keep going wrong? You get on the wrong train, get off and go back in the other direction but it takes you somewhere else, then start walking but the streets don’t go where they’re supposed to?
I’ve had those, mostly at times of stress, when I had a lot on my mind and my life felt out of control. This book is one of those dreams, described in detail for 500 pages. It sounds like a nightmare, quite literally. I think in most authors’ hands, it would be. But Kazuo Ishiguro is a natural storyteller and somehow he pulls it off. In many of his books, things are left unsaid or unexplained. His narrative style is subtle and understated. He’s the perfect person to write this kind of book.
The main character is a famous concert pianist called Ryder who arrives in an unspecified town somewhere in central Europe to give a recital. The book covers the three days of his stay in the town. As he stays, more demands are made on him, demands that he can never seem to satisfy. He never has enough time, he is always late, always tired, always disappointing people. His life feels out of control.
One thing I liked was that it was never made obvious that it was a dream. Nothing really outlandish happened – the narrator didn’t suddenly start flying across rooftops (another mainstay of my dreams) or confronting big green monsters or anything like that. The effect of a dream was created through confused logic – events narrated as if they made sense, but with a big contradiction in them. For example, an old porter who carries his luggage at the hotel talks about his daughter and grandson. He’s worried about them and wants Ryder to go and meet them. When Ryder does meet them, the daughter is now his wife or at least lover. The contradiction is maintained through the book and never explained logically. At several times, simple geography is distorted. Ryder goes all the way across town to a party at a country house, and then when he wants to go back to the hotel he discovers that he is actually already back there – he just came in by a different entrance and didn’t recognise it. A ticket inspector on a tram turns out to be an old childhood friend from England. Like everyone else, she expects a lot from him and he lets her down.
I realise that it probably still sounds like a nightmare of a book. It’s hard to explain quite why I liked it. I suppose the premise was so difficult that it was good to see Ishiguro pull it off so artfully. There were also a lot of interesting subplots about the people in the town – an alcoholic old conductor, Brodsky, who’s trying to resurrect his career and win back his wife; a hotel owner Hoffman and his son who wants to be a pianist but only disappoints his parents; Ryder’s relationship with Sophie and the boy Boris; the old porter Gustav and his friends who meet in the Hungarian Cafe. I was interested in these people partly for themselves, and partly because if the whole thing is a dream, then they are clues to the dreamer’s personality: figures from his past, people he feels guilty about treating badly, or perhaps different incarnations of himself at various points in his life.
Despite all the good points, the book did feel very long after a while – the action is deliberately repetitive and circular, and I thought that it could have been shortened quite significantly without losing much of the overall meaning of the book. But I still felt compelled to read on, even though I knew really where it was all going. And at the end of it all, I had that warm feeling of satisfaction that comes from having read a really good book.
This is a rigorous 1950s analysis of prose, seeking to classify different elements of prose as you would classify insects or flowers. From the broad divisions of types of prose (narrative, argumentative, dramatic, informative, contemplative), Boulton proceeds to smaller divisions and sub-divisions, for example listing and defining 36 different rhetorical devices. Despite the intense detail, it was an easy read – the writing, as you’d expect from an anatomist of prose, was quite stylish and always very clear.
The part I found most interesting and useful was the chapter on prose rhythm. Boulton explains how to scan prose as you would poetry, breaking it down into ‘feet’ and then analysing where the stress falls within each foot. For example “become” is an iambic foot, because the stress falls on the second syllable, whereas “outcome” is a spondee, because both syllables are stressed. There’s a great listing of all possible combinations up to the five-syllable dochmiac, and then examples of passages scanned for rhythm. For example in a Bible passage (Psalm 90, v1-9), she shows how the rhythm builds up to climaxes such as the molossus (three syllables, all stressed) – “Thou art God”. Important parts like this are surrounded by weaker stresses to highlight them. When the passage speaks of man’s weakness, the rhythm is faltering, using weaker paeons (four syllables with only one syllable stressed). The rhythm, in other words, reflects and amplifies the content.
I don’t think I’ll spend much time analysing the rhythm of my prose, or anyone else’s, in that much detail, but it’s wonderful to have that knowledge in the back of my head, as a way of understanding why a particular passage may or may not work.
Another useful chapter was the one on the Science of Rhetoric, listing all the main rhetorical devices used in English and their meanings. This is a great reference to have. The ones she lists are: metaphor, simile, analogy, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, euphemism, prolepsis, transferred epithet, syllepsis, zeugma, inversion, hyperbole, litotes, pun, alliteration, assonance, onomatopeia, irony, antithesis, epigram, paradox, oxymoron, repetition, aposiopesis, rhetorical question, apostrophe, climax, anti-climax, innuendo, periphrasis, surprise ending, playful use of colloquialism, conscious use of cliché, quotation, literalism.
The explanations throughout are clear and well illustrated with examples, mostly from older literature like the Bible and 18th century writers, but also some more contemporary (for 1954) writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf. I’ve never seen writing analysed so scientifically before. I’ve noticed that a sentence can sound immeasurably better when the order is altered a little or a word is taken out, but never knew why. This book helped me to understand it much better, and I think it will make me a better writer and reader.
Despite appearances, I have not been promoting myself 24 hours a day
I finished The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie and have started Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. Just don’t seem to have any spare time to do book reviews and have developed a bit of a backlog. Don’t worry, it’s not as painful as it sounds. I plan to do a bit of catching up with myself over the weekend.
My debut novel On the Holloway Road (Legend Press, February 2009) won the Luke Bitmead Writers' Bursary and was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize.
It tells the story of two young Londoners who, inspired by Jack Kerouac's Beat classic On the Road, embark on a similar search for meaning and freedom in modern-day Britain. 
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