Goodreads can measure precisely the tiny minority I am in with this book – 4%. Yes, we are the disbelievers who gave it two stars, that ignominious raGoodreads can measure precisely the tiny minority I am in with this book – 4%. Yes, we are the disbelievers who gave it two stars, that ignominious rating which says “this wasn’t bad enough to hate but neither was it good enough to like”. It was a snooze, it kept trying to drag itself up to the level of vaguely interesting but would then be torpedoed by another description of a room or a woman who never speaks or weather. This was mutton dressed as lamb – high literature with a soft centre of fruitcake flavoured science fiction, which was the invention.
The plot is that our unnamed fugitive from the cops rows like mad across the ocean and randomly lands on an unknown island where an experiment is being conducted. Much puzzling loafing around ensues. This was published in 1940 so it is SF from the 30s – Frank Belknap Long, Murray Leinster or A E van Vogt would have done way better with this fever-dream mad scientist fantasy, and they would have cut it down to 35 pages and sold it to Amazing Stories in 1937
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If Bioy Casares had submitted it as we have it here the MS would have come right back to him with a stiff letter – “too much repetition Mr Casares, how many times to we need to be told about the museum and the rooms and the silent woman, and how long does your hero take to catch on to the simple fact that he can see but not be seen by these people” etc etc.
This book has been praised as the inspiration for Last Year in Marienbad, the 1961 French avantgarde movie headache, and for Lost, which I never saw, thinking it looked very dodgy. And Jorge Luis Borges thought it was perfect, and he was a genius. Well, as my old granny used to say, it takes all sorts to make a world....more
I feel myself to be the punctuation in the very sentence I am writing. The image of a shadow of a memory of an eyelash of a face of a memory of… er, wI feel myself to be the punctuation in the very sentence I am writing. The image of a shadow of a memory of an eyelash of a face of a memory of… er, where was I? Ah yes, musing on the incomprehensibility of incomprehension. The maid quit, I have no idea why, but she was complaining a lot about an image of a shadow of an eyelash of a memory of… no, wait, I think that was me. Or the cockroach. I squashed it, by the way. Just like the emptiness that should have been inhabited by what we call God squashed me. Did I say I have a third leg? I should mention that, it’s very important. I think it’s symbolic but every now and again I bang it on one of my exquisite yet amateurish sculptures and tears fill my eyes that otherwise are so empty because of the total meaninglessness of everything in the entire universe except my own statements about the universe’s palpable meaninglessness. And all that stuff about eyelashes and legs. I needed failure in my life it was the only way to fill the void left by the absence of God or the cockroach, one of the two. So I wrote a novel, the very novel that I feel I am the punctuation in. And I also needed to be moist (page 57) and I found nothingness was moist. Well it certainly wasn’t the cockroach, darling, that would be ridiculous....more
If you’re iconoclastic you’re acceptably daring and impudent about some respectable person or thing, so you could say rude things about The Queen’s drIf you’re iconoclastic you’re acceptably daring and impudent about some respectable person or thing, so you could say rude things about The Queen’s dress sense or you could say The Beatles’ songs all sound the same, that kind of thing. There are magazines dedicated to saying unkind things about contemporary celebrities, so I guess that’s all rather iconoclastic. Back in the 8th century though it meant something tougher, it meant ripping a picture of Jesus or Mary or a Saint off a church wall and burning it. There was a Byzantine Emperor called Leo III who decided that Christianity had slid backwards towards worshipping idols and they all had to go.
You can see how it happened. The poor uneducated people got the idea that you couldn’t pray directly to God or Jesus, you had to go through one of his minders. It’s like if you have a problem with your bank account you go to a local branch, you won’t be able to get the chairman of Lloyds or Natwest on the phone. Mary was the top one, she was the main prayer call centre manager, then came the saints and martyrs, of which there were a great many. But eventually the people started to ascribe magical properties to the images themselves – in a similar way they used to like to visit a shrine which had a clipping of a fingernail of someone who was eaten alive by wolves whilst preaching from the Gospel in the year 285 in Cappadocia.
This novel gives us two monks from this period of image smashing. Part One is all about Andronikos who refuses to make a new avowal of faith giving up icon worship so he shows the abbot a clean pair of heels, holing up on an island with the idea of living there in total isolation for the rest of his life. We are inside his head for 70 pages and it’s an uncomfortable place to be. But flashed through with beauty, as when he finds himself in the middle of the annual migration of storks from the island.
Part two gives us 80 pages inside the head of Ioakim, 70 now, who was a young man when Andronikus gave himself up and was condemned to death by the abbot – and what a strange sentence he was handed – he was forced to talk himself to death. Really!
Well all of this ancient theological fighting and anguish is an allegory about politics, that seems clear. It could be specific to Turkey in the 1960s, when it was written, or it could be a general bitter meditation on, say, the iconoclasm wreaked by the Soviets under Khruschev upon the great icon of all, Comrade Stalin, and by extension, the whole of the communist project since the 1930s. That’s how I read it. As a non-believer of course I could not invest much sympathy in some monk moaning about his muddled up magical mumbo jumbo being taken away from him, but as a typical armchair socialist, all of the betrayals, denunciations, splits and counter-accusations of the left boiled to the metaphorical surface in these two long painful meditations.
Recommended for anyone looking for something bittersweet and off the beaten track...more
There’s a kind of cheap thrill to dishing out one star to a Nobel prize winner and a guy I previously gave 5 stars to for the brilliant One Hundred YeThere’s a kind of cheap thrill to dishing out one star to a Nobel prize winner and a guy I previously gave 5 stars to for the brilliant One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it has to be done because on a sentence by sentence level this this thin story in a thin book is as dull as ditchwater which has lost the will to live, all about some honor killing but of a guy not a woman, the alleged deflowerer of a returned bride. Yeah, we are in a society where if the bride isn’t a virgin she’s returned – “this one’s secondhand, I ordered new, I want my money back”, so the brothers of the unfortunately-all-too-consummated sister go and shoot the alleged deflowerer. I didn’t care who shot who or how many chickens were cooked or how or what the dress looked like or why or how many complicated street festivals there were for who knew what obscure saints and who saw who do what at 3.32 on the fateful afternoon or which sisters of which family were able to levitate and how many times the brothers told everybody and his uncle and his uncle’s uncle that they were going to shoot Santiago Nasar and when and how and where and which and why nobody called the cops and all this and that. But that's just me, I hope you like it....more
What I learned from this novel is that if you look intensely and soulfully at a painting in a gallery and the artist himself happens to see you doing What I learned from this novel is that if you look intensely and soulfully at a painting in a gallery and the artist himself happens to see you doing it and conceives the notion that you and only you alone have perceived the true great meaning of this work you might find yourself cajoled, inveigled, drawn in, stalked obsessively, obsessed over night and day, belittled, berated, bewildered, bamboozled, brutalised and finally stabbed and killed in a blizzard of male rage in just exactly the same way these ghastly things are done in any old vulgar sex crime you might see on Forensic Files or in the pages of your local tabloid, and so the moral is clear : if out of the corner of your eye you do see the famous artist looking at you looking, you should beat it out of there as fast as your little feet can carry you and don’t look back until you’re back behind double-locked doors, because he might, just might, be the protagonist of an existential novel from the 1940s....more
If not in seventh heaven, I was at the very least embracing Jesus Christ somewhere in the fourth.
1923 : YEAR ZERO
You rarely had a country that got so
If not in seventh heaven, I was at the very least embracing Jesus Christ somewhere in the fourth.
1923 : YEAR ZERO
You rarely had a country that got so revolutionised in such a short time as Turkey after 1923 – the language changed alphabets, the calendar was changed, people were told they should have surnames which they never had bothered with before, religion was separated from the state, people got civil rights, polygamy was outlawed, women got the vote and access to education, the fez was banned, the fedora hat was in, all weights and measures were westernised, ballroom dancing was encouraged, the list went on.
Without mentioning Kemal Ataturk’s revolution by name at all, this novel gently, I might say soulfully, satirises this Westernising head-on full-tilt copy-pasting rush in the perfect metaphor of the amorphous semi-official organisation called the Time Regulation Institute.
No one quite knows what it’s for, including the people who work for it. The only specific thing it ever does is try to get people to set their clocks and watches to the correct time, in some fairly vague hope that this will energise all of Turkish society. Halit says
We’ll give our people a consciousness of time….Civilization took the greatest leap forward when men began walking about with watches in their pockets
The Time Regulation Institute is at the same time a con and a dream, both cynical and sincere.
IT TAKES ITS TIME
This novel itself passively resists any notion of western efficiency as it bumbles and stumbles along, digressing all over the place into tales of aunts and sisters in law and sisters in law’s former husbands’ mistresses and so on. For me there were a few too many cousins and parties. But Mr Tanpinar is a very affable host. And he has a wicked sense of humour. Here’s one lady sorting out another’s problem :
One of my friend’s husbands was a little too interested in young girls. The poor thing didn’t know what to do. Finally I had to intervene. I said, “Sister, all you have to do is throw on a middle school uniform and get one of those caps.” At first she said not a chance, but now the silly man never leaves home.
3.5 stars rounded up to four because of its gloriously jumbled bumbling rambling portrait of Turkish life, love and loafing....more
At the end of my review of Redeployment by Phil Klay – unflinching tales of American Marines during the Iraqi occupation – I said “I would like to reaAt the end of my review of Redeployment by Phil Klay – unflinching tales of American Marines during the Iraqi occupation – I said “I would like to read a collection of fictions from the Iraqi point of view, but I doubt if one exists”. As soon as I heard about this collection I thought well now, somebody wrote exactly what I was after. And now having read it, well, now I think, not really. This is not to say Hassan Blasim isn’t a good writer. I think he probably is. But I couldn’t get on his wavelength.
In the West we are all so familiar with the point of view of the poor benighted American soldier, mostly in movie but also in fiction like The Things they Carried by Tim O’Brien, and we are entirely starved of the perspective of those invaded, those conquered, the occupied, displaced, despairing drone-bombed masses. I wanted their point of view. But what I got in The Corpse Exhibition which is unflinching and ultraviolent tales of the Iraqi occupation and civil war was cultural vertigo and claustrophobia. There was way too much casual supernaturalism and fantasy here for me (prophets, angels, djinns, as it says in the blurb so I can’t say I wasn’t warned). And there was almost no context. Saddam Hussain gets a single mention. All the killing and chopping up seems to be inflicted by one group of unnamed Iraqis on another group. Reasons are never even alluded to. These stories don’t deal in reasons. They shrug – who knows why? No one knows why these things happen. I guess this was a collective portrait of what’s called a cycle of self-perpetuating violence, and the derangement of the senses that follows if you’re stuck inside with no exit sign to be seen....more
I’m wondering whether I’ve read too many short stories, which is a terrible thought as I’ve got a whole pile of unread short story collections right hI’m wondering whether I’ve read too many short stories, which is a terrible thought as I’ve got a whole pile of unread short story collections right here. Maybe I’ve read too many novels too! Maybe I’ve read too many words! No, no, this is madness. Take a deep breath… These gloomy thoughts came to me because this is a really decent collection of stuff by Mr Tsiolkas, I can’t fault it at all, tough situations, lurid sex, violent outbursts, all the ingredients to keep the Kitchen Craft Master Class Induction-Safe Stainless Steel Stock Pot bubbling merrily, and yet it appeared no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. A well written pestilent congregation of vapors, for sure. One miserable circumstance after another. I seem to remember praising some authors for their uncompromising rigorous bitter angry painful exposures of the oppression of modern life. Seems inconsistent not to do the same here. Aw, you know what, I’m gettin’ old, folks.
2.5 stars, but if you ain’t read too many depressing short stories, could be an exhilarating 4 for you....more
Thank you Christos Tsiolkas... you finally made my mind up for me and I have flung your horrid novel away from me in a graceless convulsion which mixeThank you Christos Tsiolkas... you finally made my mind up for me and I have flung your horrid novel away from me in a graceless convulsion which mixed repulsion and depression in equal parts, with a dash of glee.
Because for many pages I was desperately seeking a casus belli. Something I could put my finger on. I was a closet Slap-hater at this point. I couldn't quite admit the horror of this novel to myself. I needed to find something definite, a line in the print where I could say
thus far and no farther
On and on I read. And finally one such moment arrived on page 225.
The scene is the grimy household of Rosie and Gary and their son Hugo who is somewhere between three and four years of age. Hugo is the slapee of the story. Now one of the things about Hugo is that he's still suckling at his mother's breast, which everyone thinks is a bit gross, because he's nearly four, you know, and I was agreeing with this since every single time Hugo hove into view he was like a nipple-seeking missile aiming straight at his mum's brassiere and we would get another description of the act and everyone's reaction to the act.
Every time.
So now here on p225 we have Gary, the sex-starved husband, wrestling with his young son for control of the breasts
She was feeding Hugo on the couch when Gary walked back into the room... He came and stood over them. He watched his son suck contentedly from Rose's tit. 'I want some of that.' Rosie frowned. 'Don't Gaz.' 'I do. i want some of your boobie.' Hugo dropped his nipple and looked mutinously at his father. 'No. It's mine.' 'No. it isn't,' Hugo looked at her for encouragement. 'Whose boobies are they? 'They belong to all of us,' she said, laughing.
Then the atmosphere turns nasty and Gary and the kid begin to squabble viciously about the breasts.
At this point I murmered "Thank you, Christos! At last! I knew you had it in you!" , placed the novel down upon my reading desk and prepared for the traditional flinging at wall ceremony.
*****************
PREVIOUSLY ON "PAUL BRYANT READS 'THE SLAP'"
P 150! - The thing is, I have seven - seven! books I really actually do want to read coming my way very soon. I hear the tramp tramp tramp of the feet of several burly postmen. This book - not so much. But you know the feeling when you walk out of the shop and you get home and you just don't remember stuffing the two packs of sausages, three packs of wafer-thin Wiltshire ham and two small jars of marmite down your kecks? So here I am on p 150. I don't know how I got here or how I'm going to get out of this geyser of Ozzie soapsuds. Can there really be another 330 pages to go?
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The Shangri-Las :
PB, is that a bestseller you got there? Uh-huh? Gee, it must be great reading it all day. By the way, where'd you get it?
Pb (dressed in black leather, channelling Mary Weiss) : I met it in the Sainsbury store – 60% off. You get the picture?
Shangs : Yes, we see
Pb : That's when I became… A reader of The Slap.
My friends were always putting it down Shangs : Down, down Only good for the beach they said with a frown Shangs : Frown, frown They told me it was bad And I knew I'd been had I'm sorry I started it – reader of The Slap
The page 100 decision – to continue or to not continue, that is the question.
Well, what about this blurb on the back? This is bugging me -
This event reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen.
Is that even grammatical? I would have thought EITHER
This event reverberates through the lives of everyone who sees it happen
OR
This event reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it
No need for the "happen". The "happen" is otiose. So the blurb writer can't write.
But... I dunno. Maybe I'll continue. It's so long. These modern writers, they must get paid by the word. Never mind the quality, feel the width.
***
On Goodreads they all stop and stare They can't hide the sneers but I don't care I think I've become a –
Keneally writes a novel which is all about the fate of intellectuals and artists in Iraq in the UN sanctions period. He then saddles himself with two Keneally writes a novel which is all about the fate of intellectuals and artists in Iraq in the UN sanctions period. He then saddles himself with two very awkward conventions which do the book no favours at all. First, I guess if you're writing about a contemporary government, you cloak the country's real name and change all the names of the towns and rivers and so forth. Maybe this is to avoid the lawyers or an icepick in the back of the head. The ghost of Salman Rushdie must appear to writers at this point. So Saddam Hussain is called Great Uncle throughout.
But furthermore, Keneally gives all his Iraqis Western names, such as Peter Collins, Matt McCloud, Sarah, Bernie, Alan Sheriff, and so on. This is because he wants to remove the otherness from his characters. "I would very much like to be the man you meet in the street. A man with a name like Alan. If we all had good Anglo-Saxon names...or if we were not, God help us, Said and Osmaa and Saleh. If we had Mac instead of Ibn." Thus says the narrator right at the beginning. This device, well-intentioned as it may be, unfortunately turns out to have the opposite effect. The Western reader is alienated even more from the peculiar situations and melodramatic twists and turns because stuff like this doesn't remotely happen in Western countries. (Stuff like visiting your country's supreme leader who could at any moment pull out a revolver and shoot you, and being forced to dress in a sterile surgeon's suit for the interview because of Great Uncle's health paranoia). So this naming convention saps a lot of the reality out of the whole thing. But even so, this novel reads like a cerebral exercise anyway, all about a guy who is given (by Saddam) an impossible deadline to write a novel exposing the Western sanctions as pointless and inhumane, and whilst the guy agrees with this argument he hates Saddam (naturally) and wants nothing to do with helping him, and conflicted loyalties and artistic compromise and blah blah blah. Oh, and the most beautiful woman in Iraq being the narrator's wife, and the second most beautiful woman in Iraq proposing to the narrator once the other one dies. And blah blah blah.
***CONTAINS SPOILERS I.E. HIGHLY INSULTING REMARKS ABOUT THE LAST PART OF THE BOOK***
Uh oh. Last thing I want to do is fall out with my bookfacingoodr***CONTAINS SPOILERS I.E. HIGHLY INSULTING REMARKS ABOUT THE LAST PART OF THE BOOK***
Uh oh. Last thing I want to do is fall out with my bookfacingoodreadinfingerlickin friends such as Donald and Jessica, both of whom think this is so good you have to invent a new word for it, good just isn't good enough, brilliant is almost an insult. So as you can tell, I didn't share those views. I was so gripped by this book, couldn't wait to get back and finish it today, and then i hit the Doctor's Tale (last third) and the whole thing fell apart like an overripe pumpkin. I loved all the Robinson Crusoe-meets-Knut-Hamsun-in-apartheid-South-Africa. But I didn't love the Doctor's contorted vapourisings on the subject of lowly Michael K. In fact I wanted to Fast Forward very badly. But I had to see where all this handwringing and misunderestimating and fancypants codswallop was leading to. Seems to me that the Doctor is a horrible Sock Puppet through which the Author can write us a ghastly soft rock new age Alchemist daytime tv philosophy essay on the Lowly and Downtrodden, the Great mass of Forgotten People:
"Why? I asked myself: why will this man not eat when he is plainly starving?"
Ah, Grasshopper, why indeed. You have much to learn.
"Then as I watched you day after day I slowly began to understand the truth: that you were crying secretly, unknown to your conscious self (forgive the term), for a different kind of food, food that no camp could supply."
Ah. Yes. Oh, and then it gets Even Worse when Michael K gets a blowjob on the beach. Blimey. I may have got up on the wrong side of the bed today, but I'm quickly developing a theory that Life and Times of Michael K is the intellectual version of Pretty Woman (the movie not the Roy Orbison ballad). Sometimes you have to wonder if you're on the right planet.
Fans of the Book: "No you're not, Bryant, fuck off to your own dismal galaxy and leave us all to enjoy our Nobel Prize and Booker Prizewinner. Here's a spaceship. Now piss off. Pretty Woman? You must be on drugs."
Even now I see a crowd of literary critics and Donald with flaming torches approaching......more
Well Mr Marquez may have a Nobel Prize for his mantelpiece and a pretty good imagination for writing what with the levitating women and babies made of Well Mr Marquez may have a Nobel Prize for his mantelpiece and a pretty good imagination for writing what with the levitating women and babies made of ice cream but he has no imagination at all when he is thinking of his characters names which are like to drive you entirely insane in this novel, will you please look at this. There are five people called Arcadio, ,three ladies called Remedios, two ladies called Amaranta and there’s a Pietro and a Petra which look quite similar, and there are 23 people called Aureliano (17 of them sons of an Aureliano, so this father has as much lack of name imagination as Mr Marquez). It does give a reader brain ache trying to remember who is who and why they are levitating and which one lives to be 530 years old. I think this is a very good novel for people who like to go into trances for hours at a time. ...more
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