Blue Nights by Joan Didion (2011)

 This is very much Part II of the story that began in her previous book The Year of Magical Thinking. It covers not only the death of her daughter Quintana, but the first inklings the author has of declining capabilities as part of her ageing. Much of the same territory is compassed in a similar way, which means we have punchiness here also, concern with family modes here also, self-criticism to a strong extent here also. I pondered after having read the previous book whether she would feel able, once the focus shifted entirely onto Quintana, to address that daughter's nature and experiences more directly, particularly the alcoholism which seems to have been key to understanding her. In a sense she does, and then again doesn't. She tiptoes carefully to her sometimes drinking too much, and explores timidly the pressures that may have brought that about, but that's as far as it goes. There are also hints online at potential sexual abuse of Quintana, which as far as I can determine are unsubstantiated - she does not address these, and perhaps didn't need to? I'm not an expert. I will say I don't feel any more enlightened about Quintana after this episode of the story; she's still an enigmatic figure whose personality is not overly clear to me. Subsequently, Didion is good at picturing the unsteadying quality of the first realisations of her own frailty. When energy starts to get compromised, and interest in/hunger for the world and its machinations (her stock in trade as a journalist) starts to flag, she feels disarranged, her anchor dragging, certainties failing. On the whole, this doesn't quite have the bright thwack of the previous volume, and its sense of structure. And I will admit to one particular writing trope starting to pall a little: she uses repetition for effect often. A phrase will be considered telling, either something somebody said which seems significant, or a summary line which 'encapsulates perfectly', which will be used again later (in a separate paragraph, or in italics, or both) to harden emphasis. This trope is great when used judiciously - I got the emerging feeling here that there were occasions which could have done without the repetition, particularly when there are a string of them, old ones compounding more recent examples; the sense of significance lessening just when it ought to intensify. 

Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti (2006)

 This is the third collection by Ligotti I've sampled, and perhaps there's less to say here. This is a lot later on in his career, with the intervening titles often being currently available only in crazedly expensive limited editions, or insanely rare old paperbacks, making them also crazedly expensive. So who knows how the story unfolded, specifically? Here he has reached a place of virtuosity in terms of deft play between psychology and concept. Many of these are very satisfyingly clever. They occupy themselves with a lot less of what would be called horror tropes, and a lot more with states of mind, particularly among groups. But these are odd, slightly "off" groups, who are loners and eccentrics, with artistic leanings. They are taken to classic Ligotti territory, like almost abandoned towns, old gas stations, backstreet shopfronts which double as rarely-entered galleries, and so on, but there's a push here for the weird to be exemplified in peculiarities of mind and philosophy, and conceptual twists, rather than anything too monstrous. Look forward to the "missing" (bar a huge account balance) entries in the bibliography to be reinstated, so as to trace back. Only a novella and a philosophical non-fiction to go, I think.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

 As with so many writers, I've not read Didion before. No idea whether this is a good place to start as a whole, but it's certainly a good book. It's the story of her husband's death, and her daughter's life-threatening illness, which both happened in late 2003. What marks it out is a toughly enquiring tone, coupled with an honest self-appraisal. Her daughter Quintana was going through a coma-like hospitalisation at the time of her husband John Gregory Dunne's death. They were starting on dinner in the midst of the long vigil going back and forth to her bedside in a New York hospital when Dunne collapsed and died from a massive heart attack. Didion admits that she was not in the mental space where this could happen; in other words was subject to shock, despite the fact that he had been told often enough by doctors of the occlusion he had being nicknamed "the widowmaker". She looks back afterwards and sees what may have been signs, but at the time of the death is utterly sideswiped. This, with the ongoing situation with Quintana, brings on an array of reactions and interpretations as the weeks go by, all swirled by shock, but also all marked with her distinctive "cool customer" attempts at toughness, and her honest subsequent reflections on vulnerabilities and delusive paths of thought. Her analytical mind, which seems a, if not the, prominent element of her personality, is relentless, even when it's encountering her own unwillingness or inability to reach a bulwark of understanding. She has a journalist's almost kneejerk reaction about going to the literature, and includes excerpts of things she was reading which shed sometimes temporary, sometimes profound, light on her understanding of the experience, from articles in medical journals, to what might be called superior self-help books. She also revisits their family life and social life, where particular details seem to provide explanations of the undercurrents of where she's got to now. The prose is punchy and direct, whilst retaining emotional strength, which makes it engrossing. Its honesty also tells the story she probably wasn't thinking of, where we get to see her privilege and assumptions. One thing it doesn't tell is the deeper story of Quintana: a bit of very quick internet research reveals her alcoholism, which is not mentioned here at all. The next book I have by Didion is called Blue Nights, and is about Quintana's death in 2005, so I wonder whether she will feel able to engage with that fact at that point. We'll see.

My Favourite London Devils by Iain Sinclair (2016)

 Iain Sinclair has hitherto just been a name to me, and the associations suggested had a particular flavour; he seemed always beloved of what I would call 'fanboy' types. In-crowd 'boys'. Now I'm initiated, and the evidence is mixed. It was hard to go from Gene Wolfe to this one. Whereas Wolfe's calling card was labyrinthine plot and conceits, Sinclair's ramifications are in the prose, and the referencing. Where Wolfe was concave, allowing us as readers to push into his space, have some agency, Sinclair is highly convex, and we have to sit and 'listen'. These are all pieces, I think, written as introductions to new editions, or occasional journalistic pieces, about authors who treat of London in a big way. So he's excused, in a sense, for being on the plane of provision. They vary in treatment a little, from where the fascinating details of lesser-known authors' lives and publishing histories are allowed to breathe, to desperately hyperbolic coverage of the legends of 'legends' like Ballard. Sinclair in this mode (I am assuming there may be different ones for fiction and other pieces) is endlessly referential and declarative, heroising these figures almost to the point of having them leering over us, backed by a significant sunset, their rock-of-ages-like visages slaking off the sweat of greatness. It's all frankly a bit much. It's overwrought and exhausting, but the element which goes furthest to performing a saving trick is the information locked away in this convexity. I'm guessing the fanboys revere the style as poetry, loving the namechecking and dramatic, essentialist language. I feel tired. 

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe (1972)

 I can't remember the last time I finished a book, and then started reading it again immediately. This broke that hiatus. I enjoy being challenged intellectually, when I feel there's something to be 'found out'. When the 'challenge' is simply inexplicability, I find it not only uninteresting, but not a challenge - it feels lazy, and the excuses made for it ("a real representation of the unknowability and illogicality of life") bring on a feeling of false "depth". This is not only in the former category, but is impressively so. It is composed of three related novellas. The first, the title novella, takes place on Sainte Anne, one of twin planets, the other called Sainte Croix. The main character is a boy, who is growing up with his brother in his father's house, in a town by a river estuary near the sea called Port-Mimizon. It's a slightly down-at-heel almost pioneer place, quite warm and semi-tropical, but his father's house is much more well-heeled, and the equivalent of a brothel; the "girls" are always round about, in working times and otherwise. This is perhaps the first sign of Wolfe designing a slightly different morality for these worlds, where this aspect is not particularly remarked upon. Nor are other differences in this world that feels a lot like our own: the boys' tutor is a robotic one, but very humanoid in some of its reactions and modes, by name Mr Million. Slaves are traded at a market in the town. The matter-of-factness of the presentation of this gives an insight into the world-creation which is being essayed here. Key moments in this period of the boy's life are pictured - his discovery of his aunt in a distant room of the house, his diagnosis of some of the hitherto unexplainable aspects of Mr Million's teaching. This is also the time that his father first begins to take an interest in him and his brother; they are probably just pre-puberty. His father has more interest in him than his brother - he is singled out to undergo sessions downstairs in his father's study/laboratory. He is drugged and analysed, going through very long (all night long) occasions which almost amount to interrogations. They exhaust him, destabilise him, slabs of time become a blank, but they also bring some fresh points clear: he is not strictly his father's son. He and his brother are genetic replicants, made by his father, of himself. His father is another example of this, made by the man whose face is still represented on Mr Million's headscreen. His aunt is similar, and so on. The revelations come strongly - his father trades/traded in children, there are many clones all around the planet, and scientific experimentation has become allied to exploitation. As he gets older, he begins tentative explorations into female friendship with a local girl, met at the park, by the name of Phaedria. It is with her and his brother that a plan is hatched, on the basis of a rumoured "secret horde" that his father keeps hidden. Once they realise the extent of his father's disinterest in them personally, and he particularly is weighed down with all the drugging and harsh experimentation, he can virtually fulfil a generational repetition and kill his father, carrying on with his supposed extensive resources. At this point we are informed that the plot is being retold by the boy, now man, following a period in prison for this crime. Late in the piece, before the murder is done, the house receives a visit from an anthropologist from Earth via Sainte Croix, Dr Marsch, who has been directed to their address as an old one for a famous theorist, Dr Veil, who developed a hypothesis regarding the aboriginal people of Sainte Anne. This was that they were not wiped out, as previously thought, by the first wave of French colonisation, but instead had such shape-shifting, merging capacities that they replaced the invaders with themselves in the colonialists' skins. First not knowing what the visitor is on about, it is quickly revealed that Dr Veil is in fact the boy's aunt, when Marsch is led to her to ask if she can shed any light. The novella ends with the "boy" now in charge of the denuded, peeling, tired house and wondering if he can continue it in some way. The second novella is called 'A Story' by John V. Marsch, and purports to be a representation of what the anthropologist from the first novella at some unknown point wrote when his imagination was fired from all he discovered about the aboriginal inhabitants of Sainte Anne, known in his anthro-speak as the Annese. It concerns tribal people conducting their lives in the wilds of the planet before colonisation. The light of this world is not sunlight, everything takes place under a different register, a much deeper, bluer one. There is a story of twin brothers, born out in the landscape (there are no houses, just temporary camps), one of whom stays with his mother, the other is drowned when being washed in a nearby river by his grandmother. As a point of crux, it is revealed much later that this brother was not drowned, and was saved from the river, but the two have grown up completely apart and come to very different allegiances in life through the environments in which they were succoured. The landscape is variable, a mereish waterworld low down, a very green midbelt, and stony mountainous areas. A river is dominant through all, and the sea is there, but distant. The animals of the landscape are not dissimilar to those of Earth, but with key differences, with some being good eating, others wildly dangerous. There are also a variety of more sentient beings - at least in the minds of the characters, where not only are there peoples from different sectors, but also beings which only appear at certain times, or beings which take on different looks depending on how they're being seen. Trees are sentient, and are deeply valued and respected, as key presences to be pleased and understood. The sky is full of meaningful constellations with 'native' names, who have influence upon events. The whole atmosphere is felt through a spiritual lens, and significances play out in those terms, both harsh and sweet. The other important element, which is related, is that of the psychic and dreaming: many decisions are made because of dreams or visions, dreams are recounted as reasoning, beings are seen differently and tellingly in dreams, merging of reality happens between visions and dreams. The culmination of the piece is in the meeting between the two brothers, the capture of the "surviving" one and his fellow travellers (a crew of humanesque aboriginals and "Shadow Children", wispy-visaged and -bodied, now here, now gone, sometimes harsh fighters, sometimes incomparably weak) by the "rescued" one in a pit near the sea and the river's mouth. Right at the end, after one brother has vanquished the other with the help of a Shadow Child, a strange streak shoots through the sky and something splashes down in the sea near the rivermouth. Beings are standing on the beach speaking an unheard-of language. Going to investigate, the Annese are nonplussed; we recognise the portentous arrival of the first visitors from Earth. The last novella is called V. R. T., and takes place in the main on the sister planet Sainte Croix. It involves a skeleton structure of an officer going through some muddled files in a dispatch box regarding a prisoner. There are various notebooks and journals, as well as loose pages, and a good number of tapes of free conversations and arrest interrogations. These elements are presented as the officer wanders through them, very broadly in some sort of chronological order, but swapping between different parts as his mood takes him. It quickly becomes clear from some of the tapes that Marsch has been detained when he arrived back on Sainte Croix after his time on Sainte Anne, and is suspected of something, possibly anti-government activity. But he is unsure what they are after, and why they don't believe him. His papers are about what happened once he left the house of the boy and his family in the first novella. He recounts being directed to a beggar and his son who claim to be Annese: Marsch is still at this point trying to work out his own theory about possible aboriginal survival. Trenchard and Victor, his son, design a boat journey in the nearby area to convince Marsch that they know what they're talking about, taking him to sacred sites and points of significance. He is convinced enough to set out upon a much longer journey into the interior with Victor (Trenchard is too decrepit to go to those lengths) in the hope of finding a cave in the riverbank in the mountains which may have survivors living in it, as well as possible relics of the 'lost civilisation'. The two of them encounter some of the animals mentioned in the second novella, and a couple of gruesome others, have all sorts of difficulties which are toughly overcome, often by Victor in terms of local understanding, and Marsch in terms of heft. As these documents proceed almost sequentially, there is the feeling of a loss of fulcrum, a gradual change coming over the mind of Marsch. And then a point is reached when he discloses that Victor got too near the edge of a precipice alongside the now deep-valleyed river, and fell to his death. Other documents relate the experiences of Marsch as a prisoner, in very deprived circumstances, and further utterly inhumane ones, attempting to communicate with other prisoners via tapping on pipes, trying to work out where he is, being taken for interrogations, and so on. There is a salutary eventuality about two thirds of the way through these papers, where the voice of the narrator, formerly Marsch, slips over into being that of Victor, and back and forth. A clear reference to Veil's Hypothesis in the sense that it's unclear how much of the prisoner is Marsch original, or, alternately, Victor-overtake. And who knows what the circumstances were. Based on prior evidence, there's no reason to believe that anything untoward occurred - Marsch's stories have not been deceptive. Presumably Victor's shape-shifting spirit had begun to meld itself with Marsch's either before his death (evidenced by the slight shift in angle in Marsch's account) or after it - this exactitude is left uninvestigated. As of course is so much in this piece - one of its major praises is the completeness of the worlds and their norms created, where what's left out is what might easily have been lost information, information never written down, things not considered important in those immediate circumstances. Add this phenomenal attention to detail to extraordinary complexity of vision and concepts, and one can begin to recognise the level of the achievement here. A swim in delicate, dislocating waters.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (2021)

 What a mixture this novel is. And mainly a mixture of the strongly successful and mystifying failure. It's the story of Hans, an ageing East German writer and broadcaster, and Katharina, a young East German embarking on a career in set design. Their meeting and relationship occurs in the late 80s, so we also have a portrait of the end of the East German state. The story is ostensibly recounted via Katharina looking through boxes of old documents from the time, and has each document and what it brings up as a kind of starting point for a rumination. This structure is quite tenuous, where there's nothing obvious or specific about each piece she's examining, there are only the thoughts she has, which together add up to the story. One could be forgiven for forgetting that the boxes are being opened, or things looked at. What's great about the first part of the book is the limpid picture of that political climate seen through the lens of these two; nothing particularly didactic or overweighted, just a mood emerging through the exigencies of their lives. Despite their age difference, there's excitement in getting together. And probably some thrill in the subterfuge necessary, because Hans is married with a son a little younger than Katharina. I know very little about the author, but it has a feel of being autobiographic, or at least I wouldn't be surprised to find that she had many of these experiences in one way or another. So far so good. Then Katharina goes to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder to start a job in a theatre, and ends up having a night with one of the young men also working there. Hans finds this out, and it triggers all his insecurities. Even though they've been pretty relaxed in how they've related to each other up to this point, he goes full controlling-crazy, berating Katharina for her wickedness and betrayal, and harping on the lapse constantly. This is understandable in its initial explosion. But as time goes by, nothing ameliorates or develops. He just goes on saying the same things, punishing Katharina petulantly, neither of them engaging in order to get a discussion happening which gets them to a split or a reunion. This is what I would identify as the major failure of this book. The characters as set up initially don't fulfil their arc. Hans glooms into repetition, Katharina never gets angry, never reacts with any spike of resolving intention. And given that I'm surmising that Erpenbeck "is" Katharina, what does that say about her understanding of herself, depiction of herself? For the rest of the book, Katharina emerges as a blank jelly, "receiving" the impressions of Hans and others, and not doing anything decisive. She is harped at, and cries. She feels low. She brightens again when Hans seems a little less accusing. But the feelings engendered don't lead anywhere at all really, she's just waiting passively to see what happens to her next. Hans is sending cassette tapes of grievances (!), expecting her to reply with her justifications, and she does so willingly, always going with the systems he sets up, becoming tearful about it, and then going with it again next time. Presumably in coming to these justifications she must have felt something in terms of his criticisms being unfair, some element will have been wrongly put or place emphasis where it shouldn't have been, but if these thoughts have come up she hasn't followed them, just remained a repetitive "receiver". Something in this reminded me a little of The Portrait of a Lady, and its picture of lockedness. Somehow, though, James managed to flesh out the bitter, low-lit fight between Isabel and Gilbert. Here there is just abjectness and almost no dynamic. All this time, thankfully, the cool and pointed depiction of East Germany going through its death-throes continues, which is a saving effort. There are a couple of points in the second half where there is a dip into almost-experimentalism which is a bit odd, but not too troubling. I wonder if the autobiographic part of this which I am positing created its own block in Erpenbeck. Hans comes across as a whole character, and is ridiculously childish and crazingly melancholic alongside his cleverness, whereas Katharina is not ultimately believable. 

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie (2024)

 Yet another aspect of the current appetite for fragmentary memoir brought into focus. This one is a series of short glimpses which occurred surrounding the author's 60th birthday, looking back to prior life as well as forward to how the world might survive given current pressures, particularly those of a natural and climatic kind. Some are quietly touching, some a bit watery and thin. I haven't read Jamie before, so don't know how this compares to her other work. But what it says to me is that the feelings which occasioned these pieces were probably strong, and that were the reader with her, or able to inhabit her mind at the time, the impact would also be. Instead, the reader is reading this book, and attempting to inhabit her mind through its resources, and coming up with something that I would attest is probably lesser. It does resound, but very mildly on the whole. And it's very interesting that the longer the piece, the greater the impact - she's seemingly a writer who benefits from accumulation. Of course, one must come to the possibility of the conclusion that the written equivalent of an experience will always be lesser than the moment itself. So then it becomes a matter of what means are used to develop the written version towards impact, so as to represent something of its 'hit'. There are moments in the prose here which push that envelope, but a fair amount which don't. I'd be tempted to call this something of a missed opportunity - but it has mild charms.

The Bookseller's Tale by Martin Latham (2020)

 A bit of info: the author and I are roughly contemporaneous. He's a few years older than me, started working in a bookshop the year before me, and we've spent a good amount of our lives bookselling; he's made a career out of it, though he's not keen on that description, whereas I've strayed into repping and publishing. We've seen approximately the same things from not dissimilar vantage points. So, of course it's interesting to see any contrasts between us. This book is filled with interest, in the compendious sense. It's a wide-ranging look, ranged around where human beings encounter books - so, bookshops, libraries, of course, but also the streets. And how we relate to them once we've grabbed them and taken them home to be with us, or consult them in a library chair. And also some shots of history to tell us how they began and what other forms our more familiar modern examples grew out of, and the key industries and cultural leanings which gave them form. He has a fun way of drawing out psychological points concisely, figuring the book "thing" as a relationship. I'm guessing from some of his angles that he's thinking broadly in psychogeographic terms. My instinct here is to draw back and see what this achieves in this case. For me, it introduces on the one hand a pleasing warmth, a sense of exploring connections, on the other a kind of forced quality, where tropes are identified in a search for defining illustration which don't bear out in the cool quiet of ordinary observation. We have blanket statements about (I'm paraphrasing) "staircases inhabiting our dreams" when discussing interior architecture, or talk of customers stopping short on entering his bookshop, eulogising the atmosphere. Also quite a few examples of dreams he's had exactly echoing a point he's making! And his preoccupation with women kissing books is a worry. There's a definite romanticising going on here, but perhaps that's what partakers of psychogeography want? If they do, more power to their elbow, as long as it's identified as such. At the cooler end, this tendency is enriching and efflorescent, at the warmer it's approaching the selling of snake oil. I'd want more of a documented sense of his warping intention here, rather than a presentation of this information as cold hard fact. There are some fascinating excursions, though: apparently there are recent developments in the study of street literature, tiny ephemeral pamphlets sold by pedlars, which are uncovering the genre's true extent, believed to be game-changingly significant; there are similar developments in studying the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts, which I'm less convinced by, but open to. The form of this book is governed by it being a compendium, literally a magazine, in the military sense. And his very fluid style helps to cover over the "and then......and then......and then...."-ness of this. It flows between tendencies to the academic and Sunday Magazine-writing pretty successfully, though is best read in smaller chunks. As might be expected, I was very focused when it came to the last chapter on his own life as a bookseller, and throughout the book on his attitude toward the workings and significance of bookshops now. The aforementioned romanticising inspired concern; also I think I've worked out what's missing from my point of view, which is related. Reading this book as a book trade layperson, so to speak, one would get a pretty rosy image of a palace of dreams, chock full of delightful eccentricities of stock and staff, and a huge upthrust of inspiring waft to fertilise us. I can only consult my own feelings: I get a lovely sense of anticipation when entering even the most modest bookspace - there's a charity bookcase on the way out of my local supermarket at one end of the spectrum, there's Shetland's only "proper" secondhand bookshop in a glacial valley, opposite an old mill, where a noisy burn powers toward the voe below right by the windows, on the other. But that feeling is not overwhelming and crazily significant, it's the simple delight of the lucky dip. It's modestly enriching and then life goes on, other things are attended to, and I'm not theatrically concerned with any peculiarity of stock or staff. I do though have secondhand bookshop dreams, where I'm finding unparalleled rarities tucked away. And I do have new bookshop dreams still, despite having been away from the trade for 18 years, but they are blocked things, where I can't work a till, or keep going round and round trying to fix a problem in the typical circular way of dreams of that nature, so it's interesting to have it confirmed that I'm not the only one with these elements embedded! I worked at Waterstone's (as the author still does as manager of the Canterbury shop) for five or six years from the mid-nineties to just after the millennium. Now, perhaps Canterbury is an extraordinary branch, I've never been there, but certainly the two branches I worked in, and all the ones I visited as a rep, are incredibly neutral places, very much fulfilling the chain-shop mantra of samey dependability. Some of them are/were in lovely buildings, which lent some charm, but the corporatism certainly dulled that down. And certainly, to also give away the game from an insider perspective, the corporate "mind" dominated proceedings in a highly unromantic way behind the scenes. Perhaps we need to wait for his update-book on his experiences, after retiring from the work? I'm guessing he's had to edit himself for the purposes of continuing employment. Part Two could be intriguing.....  This is what I think is missing - this rosiness doesn't speak of some of the really bad stuff that goes on. I remember a "notable" manager of the Bath shop in my time had a truly woeful attitude to reps, and had infected all his staff with the same, though he and they weren't the only ones by a long chalk. I heard he went on to work at the head office - goodness knows what damage he did. And the snottiness which comes from being a major player and therefore abusing your "power" out into the trade, laying down the law to get what you want, despite the fact that it really negatively influences, for example, small publishers. And mismanagement and pettiness on other counts arising from chainism - whole "programmes" on removing posters from the wall of your goods-in and staffroom back area, presumably in answer to some sort of inane "tidy walls mean tidy mind" anal screwup. The absence of really any politics and the resultant imbalance of the portrait here is telling. There is a sanitised complacence in the trade still: it exists as a dominant bookseller and a few huge multinationals, with an "allowed" scattering of independents. It will be good to see that hegemony break up if the very current period of political veil-lifting is successful. I also hear that Waterstone's is now largely centrally-bought, with centrally-approved "OK" titles (largely multinational) only, with only tiny budgets for local purchases. I hope the booksellers are making the most of the few things they can still do these days in order to enjoy the work. The customers will hopefully provide a good amount of that. 

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (2015)

 This one has crystallised something for me. On the one hand, it's quite an interesting attempt to get to the psychological nitty-gritty of a mind working across its life - the task of getting all that into words. On the other, there are lapses in that scheme. On the back cover, a quote (not the blurb) claims that this book is fiction. It certainly doesn't feel like it. It reads like deep-in psychological memoir. Maybe a few odd things have been fictionalised? If so, the main felt thrust is still definitely autobiographical. Bennett is clearly after a picture of the workings of her mind, in waves alternating between the heavily serious and the humorously light. In the serious parts she approaches profundity by expert digging into the spaces between thoughts and the quotidian increments by which they develop, and also reflect of course, the colours of moods. In the lighter parts she seems to have taken on some of the nuances of her Irish home, despite being a Wiltshirewoman. I kept being reminded of the voice of Aisling Bea in these sections, for some reason. They're quite dry, and not at all ostentatious. All of that effort is quietly rewarding, though it rarely reaches the level of poetry. There's a matter-of-fact tendency about it, which lends it the quality of a stare in the face from someone who's quirky. All of which is fine - you feel the seep of the personal surrounding you. But then there are the lapses. Given that everything is so based in psychology, I'm given to trying to find psychological explanations for these. So, why would someone writing like this for the majority of the time find themselves swinging into a dense little pocket of academese: "...the consolidated outcome which is typically produced when a protracted and half-hearted analytical process aggravates the superior auspices of an exasperated subconscious"? Is it an attempt to say "this thought is too difficult to face head-on, I have to hide"? I hope it's not "I'm a deep thinker you know". There are skitterings of this all through the book, and of course they irritate. Perhaps she simply wants us to know that she's sometimes irritating? A "true picture"? If that's the case, there are some other lapses which magnify that impression. These are the swings into freebasing modernism: "When passed betwixt and entered fully, pails were swung and notches considered [......] oh, all things considered and not one mentioned, since all names had turned in and handed back". Just words, and only words, really. They need to better affect each other. Which brings me on to the crystallisation mentioned at the start. We are in the midst at present of a welter of this kind of thing. The best way for me to describe it is to talk about it as a personal experience I think. Since everyone's a writer these days, that has imprimatur. It comes from that feeling you get when you have a friend who's a writer (heavy emphasis). They talk about their writing (ditto). That's not at all completely off-putting, sometimes quite interesting, and some of their insights are valuable. Going to visit them isn't awful to anticipate. You sit down with your cup of tea, near the fire, and get into it. Revelations are exchanged, streams of ideas are followed. But at some point the atmosphere starts to feel a bit leaden. The air is full of condensation. The aforementioned seep of the personal predominates. At the end of the session, they see you out, and you're exposed to the wuthering elements as you set out for home. You realise you've been ensouped in what I call Wet Air. The Wet Air impression is made of two things: the intensely personal project ("my writing") and of course the contrast with Dry Air. Here in the early 21st century we seem to have a deep predilection for staying in Wet Air, effectively our mania for memoir, and consistent hunger for trying to dig further into personal revelation in writing. It's the great project of the times. Whereas, for example, a piece from 1934, or 1888, is pretty well pure Dry Air. One doesn't feel mired in the reading. We seem to have made a temple of the self in writing nowadays. Writing is therapy, and about the writer. It's only incidentally for the reader. Perhaps it's a stage we have to go through. The advent of psychology culturally working its way - now, which is it? - into or out of our systems? It seems to have been going on since the first mutterings of modernism in the late 19th century; I'm wondering if this period is its last gasp, or, conversely, its final overcoming/domination of "the narrative", for the moment at least. But there's no denying that Wet Air, once you name it, becomes hugely recognisable. It's an interesting place to visit, always an experiment with some payoffs, but the lasting impression is of wondering how much further it can go, and when the mode will change up. And a complementary impression of what has been lost in all that Dry Air of former times. 

Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson (1996)

 This book comes readymade with good wishes for me, being a reader of some of the Moomins series when young. This is my first exposure to the author as the writer of anything more. The straightforward relation one can make is with regard to "magic" I guess. There's a kind of connectedness to the rawness of child emotions, or folk emotions, in those childhood books which gives them their own colour, an unusual and delicate one. And this is somewhat the same, but muted. The question I would ask is whether the muting is from me, or from Jansson's intentions. Is she writing differently because this is the story of her real life? Finding a tiny rocky island with her partner, going through a wildly uplifting period with the help of bluff and eccentric locals to build a cabin on it, experiencing the sea and the wind across their blissful summer quietness and the storminess nearer to winter, finding near the end that they have to leave as they begin to find the physicality needed to cope a stretch. Or am I less susceptible? I know some little elements of these feelings as the resident of an archipelago, and having spent a good amount of downtime in wildish places, and having a love of islands which keeps their terms in my imagination. So I do get to some extent the groundfeel which is immanent in how she scribes it. It's probably both: this delicate but frank colouring is another tangent of the part of her which brought forth the Moomins. But also I am registering that there is a difference - her imagination is engaged in a very different way. It has the taste and colour of an unknown fruit from a place far away from your usual territory - not mouth-twisting and sour, or unbearably sweet, or blastingly weird, but instead a savour you haven't quite ever tasted before. Mild, strange, unpinpointable as yet, but you could get used to it.

Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (1991)

 Well, I'm a convert. This was published five years after his first collection. He seems to have settled into a more uniform mode in this one. The tone is one of American small and middle-sized towns, and of night. Some are lonelier and darker, some marked with the colours of downtown and carnival. The Lovecraftian part of him records a lot of this like an anthropologist of the less often touched parts of the secret soul. It also has the weightiness of that kind of prose, a formality. Then his Poe side takes up the heavy skein and thwacks it alive with something like poetry. It's a very involving mixture, though, like Lovecraft and Poe, it definitely survives better in small amounts. The image-making is shot through with shadows, and a weird kind of "bright murk". This is I'm guessing influenced by the artworks of horror during the period in which he grew up, or the design ethos of movies of that period - scarecrows under moonlight and so on. But his originality comes in, it seems to me, in a willingness to take that trope and extend it intellectually - we are led into refinements of mood and psychology which plumb a further sea little sailed upon. And it's this effort which marks him out for me - there are very few writers I've read from recent times who have the chutzpah to do this, to even want to do this. It's redolent of the intellectual appetite of writers of longer ago, who are my main fare - a crazily comforting thing to find that someone still "respects" that space - has the wish to go there. One other thing: I wonder if David Lynch was a fan. There's something about the "burnt people" in the last (2017) series of Twin Peaks, existing as blackened shadows buzzed alive with sporadic blasts of electricity in what appears an abandoned 50s small-town service station, emanating evil, which is very Ligotti, somehow.

Portable Magic by Emma Smith (2022)

 Can't say I'm not relieved that this one is over. It feels, to use a shortcut, like a very "Islington" book. The chattering middle classes of the twenty-first century performing. That's not to say that there aren't interesting things in it. One is left with the feeling of having been apprised of a few worthwhile titbits of information, and having waded through a slough of other stuff, mainly "theoretical". It strikes me that the author is the equivalent of someone like David Olusoga - a retailer in a thirsty domain, books in her case, social history via houses in his. The thirst brings us to them, and the hyperbolic stew of language pushes us back again: the "subverting of expectations", the "disjunctions between form and content", the "dematerializing the book as object". It's not that statements of that ilk are not true or correct in some cases, it's the toxification that comes from overconcentration on signifier-language over straight statement. It's also the case that too much of that kind of Islingtonism is indeed a drawing away from useful truth, an obfuscation. So any power that might have come from the piece's simpler facts is traduced. Olusoga operates in such an interesting territory, its only practitioner, that one still looks forward to his programmes, despite expecting to be irritated. Unfortunately Smith's is very trodden ground. The case (she calls it that) that she wishes to make here is that the form of books is as important as their content. She seems to feel that this is new and exciting. I have no idea how new it is (has no-one covered the importance of form before? I'd be surprised) but it's definitely not exciting. Books ultimately are about content, and form can take on importance in some cases. That's it. And the proof of the pudding is in the feeling one has on finishing: I've not been told anything conceptually new. I am enlightened about some interesting instances of form in books. I wish I could thank her for those, and do, but with the proviso that I'd like to have been saved the energy of dealing with everything else.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti (1986)

 The date 1986 above reflects the volume's first publication. It seems to have had a very varied publishing history with different or augmented contents. I read the Penguin Classics recent reissue. First thing to say is that I loved the game I was invited to play as reader with these. Especially in the earlier ones, Ligotti set up an initial minimal scenario which gradually gathered elucidation - not overly unusual in essence, but there was a playfulness in only allowing certain key facets to emerge at preordained times so that the reader got wise to his intent only then. In a couple of this earlier group, 'Alice's Last Adventure' is a good example, there was an additional "meta" quality added which made the mixture even more tasty. Whether he has different modes according to moods, or whether these earlier ones were indeed written first and represent youthful work, I don't know. Because the later ones had less of this quality. One thing which unites them all is a delight in establishing a crepuscular tone. Shifting shadowiness, a sense of not knowing the intent of somewhat inscrutable, often eccentric, often near silent, characters. He alternates between relatively straightforward, though formal, prose and the high scintillations of Lovecraft and Poe, his main influences and most obvious predecessors. Like Lovecraft, this is occasionally vastly overegged. One thing here is a question: does this tendency veer some of this material into pastiche territory? There's definitely a feeling of "this is likely not his natural language" about it, like a striving for their effects. But I feel as though I can forgive him that, because the flavour of his inventions is so powerful. What droops the later stories a little for me at least is a sense sometimes of incompleteness - they are presumably efforts at establishing a mood and enjoying some (admittedly fascinating) plot elements, feeling that the necessity for rounding out can be dispensed with. The reader could feel a little cheated I think - I was disappointed at having to shrug at certain endings. There is an undeniable allegiance to dream-states here, which maybe explains some of this, although the completeness of the early stories would indicate that he's well able to smith this into richer metal. He's superb at that inchoate feeling which comes in the grey-bits-between-ness of dreaming, where locales are shadowy and loom with emotion and significance, and emotions become embodiments of locales, also where there is uncertainty of knowing why shifting events are unfolding as they are, and the place of the main character's emotions in either generating them, or responding to them. There is often concurrent philosophising about the unreal which I find less thrilling. The only other thing to mention is the fact that this is indeed a Penguin Classic (the black ones, not the Modern Classics). For an author who was very little known broadly before this publication, it is an odd step for Penguin - goodness knows what their rationale is for inclusion in this series, with Augie March and some Graham Greenes also in (that I know of). The Modern Classics would seem the right place for all. (But they agreed to Morrissey's autobiography entering the lists a few years ago - so who knows? Maybe he disrespects ideas of canon and insisted that if they were to have it, it would have to be there, as a satirical stab. And they were so desperate for his book, they agreed? Why?) But anyway, the window-dressing is not the story here; here's an intriguing writer.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich (2014)

 This is my first Erdrich, though she's been present in my life through all its adult span. When I first became a bookseller in the mid 80s, she was one of the bright new things, and back then it was remarkable that she was Native American. This one is a rare non-fiction effort; a journey from Minneapolis, where she lives, to the key territory of her people, an enormous lake system in southern Ontario called the Lake of the Woods, which, on the map inside the book, is shown to be not a wide expanse of water in the sense of the Great Lakes, but instead a marsh-originated network of bays and islands with a broader expanse to the south. The journey there and elements of the stay are treated autobiographically, with discussion of her toddler daughter who accompanies her, her new partner (her daughter's father) and some soul-talk about nature and the wild world. She's very direct, simply interested in things for themselves, and only drawing out meanings when there is a cultural significance that she feels is important. The whole area of the lake used to be inhabited by Ojibwe people - it is largely not so now. The dispossession happened not so very long ago, so there are cabins and lodges gradually returning to nature on many of the islands - the atmosphere is one of quiet and greenery and slowness and removedness - another world. Islands are the core of the piece for most of its length, apart from a shortish mention of books very early on, and, at that time also, probably the one thing I don't care for in this piece - an attempt to conceptually rename the native artworks on rocks throughout the lake system as "books". Doesn't fly for me. That sort of gymnastics reminds me of recent academic papers I've read which attempt to claim all sorts of significances for the work being discussed on the weakest of physical premises. Anyway, grouch over, it's minor. Near to the end, books raise their presence in a visit to an island which had been the home of Ernest Oberholtzer, and which is preserved for very limited groups of people to visit, among them Ojibwe who are seeking retreat. "Ober" was a traveller, naturalist, friend of the Ojibwe and book-lover, and his island has cabins studded around it, each filled with his many thousands of books. Your classic dream-island to all extents and purposes. This, some splendid animal encounters, and some really interesting discussion of Ojibwemowin, the language of the people, are the tastiest parts of the piece. This book was first published in 2003 and then reissued in 2014 with an extra chapter of a return visit. I'm glad to have finally read her, and find her writing manner quietly comforting. It's also good to read something which has a different cultural background underlying it - the usual signposts slightly rearranged.

The Door by Magda Szabó (1987)

 I'm not sure I have the full measure of this, so will have to follow my nose, and see. It has become in recent years by far her most known and respected novel. Sadly a good amount of its uptick, and the concomitant raising of her other works, has come about after her death in 2007. It's a very concentrated story of the people of a street in Budapest, centred around a "writer lady" who seems like she would be similar to Szabó herself, and another local woman, Emerence Szeredás, who is an older powerhouse who manages a great many things in the neighbourhood, like sweeping the streets and snow clearance, as well as providing home help either to those in need or those who hire her formally. Emerence is the clear centre of the piece, with a character built up of toughness, not-to-be-fooledness, decided opinions, fearless speaking, love of animals, enormous capabilities, and intense secrecy regarding her own private life and home. The writer lady would like to hire her early on, but, to all extents and purposes, has to pass the "Emerence-examination" in order to be allowed to! Thankfully from a practical point of view for her, she benefits enormously from this arrangement, and her life runs somewhat smoothly. Any rumples in the fabric come from the two women slowly getting to know each other: the writer lady's ego, assumptions and pretensions and Emerence's harsh criticisms, differing tastes and wish to control. The slow knowing also reveals quite a bit of Emerence's story in bursts: she comes from the country, had a horrifying family experience in childhood which included the death of very young twin siblings, was engaged to be married but it never eventuated, never got along with her wider family, was governess-assistant to a wealthy Jewish family just before the war, ended up looking after their youngest daughter when everything went haywire during it, lost her faith. In the time of the story, she's become both a proud woman and a secretive one, making sure, in speech or by unopposable action, that people know what she thinks, and don't know anything she doesn't want them to. The writer lady tells us that she's furious with Emerence at points all throughout the early part of the book, but somehow Emerence always wins, is right, knows best, and makes sure she knows it. The writer lady is really the only other character we get to know at all fully, but there're quite a few gaps in that story. There are several other people of the street and area who play smaller parts with occasional quirks. All of them meet both Emerence and each other at various times on Emerence's porch - she's very clear that no-one comes inside. There are seats there, and drinks and food served, and jobs done - it's actually quite a welcoming place where some of the gears of the neighbourhood are engaged and decisions made. This house/apartment becomes the focus of the latter part of the novel. Emerence is getting older, and finally relents at a particular juncture, bringing the writer lady into the house when no-one else is about. She sees how ordinary everything is, apart from the sealed room behind a cabinet - and nine cats! Emerence has always a sense of domineering commonality with animals, and these she has rescued from the streets. She becomes ill, tries to continue her obsessive levels of work in the area, out in all weathers sweeping and clearing. Eventually she retires to her home, unable to continue and wanting to be left alone to get well again. By this time the writer lady is strongly associated with her by the community, and there is acknowledgement by her that there is a bond of love between them, despite the spits and sours of the relationship. But Emerence rebuffs not only all other comers, but also the writer lady, yelling through the door to leave her alone. The community grows increasingly worried. Emerence's speech seems slurred. There's a strange smell coming from under the door. Having promised on her single visit inside to look after Emerence's affairs and the cats if anything happens, the writer lady feels responsible. At an impossible point, where it's clear something needs to happen, but not able to get in, she has to "betray" Emerence by enlisting the local authority to break down the door. Inside is a horrible stinking mess of rotting food which had been brought over prior weeks to succour Emerence, the mess of eight cats and the body of the ninth, also rotting. Emerence has clearly had a stroke, has soiled herself continually, and is in a dreadful state, barely conscious. It's like a nightmare. She is taken off to hospital and not expected to survive. Her astonishing strength wells up under care and her mind clears. Given her pride and privacy, it is thought better for the writer lady to tell her lies, saying that the apartment is all tidied up, and back to its usual hyper-clean state, the cats all well and cared for there - everything waiting for her return. The reality is very different - the apartment has had to be decontaminated, all the furniture and belongings burnt in the yard, the cats darted out the door when it was broken in and have never been seen again. But, most importantly, all this has happened in the full view of the community. If these details were known by her, the sense of betrayal and shame could very well kill Emerence. Contrary to expectations, she continues to improve mentally, experiencing some forms of physical paralysis. Eventually, the doctor of the hospital explains that he can no longer justify keeping Emerence in their care. She needs to be found a home. Of course, Emerence is thinking that she'll return to her treasured original home with extra help. It is decided that, as she is now at her healthiest since the disaster, she must be told the truth. This happens, against the writer lady's best instincts; she is dismissed by a local controller as not understanding how strong and reasonable Emerence is. The effect is much as the writer lady has feared. Emerence's feeling of collapse of pride and betrayal drives a knife between them, and another of their angry scenes develops, but in an atmosphere of resignation for the writer lady, the expectation softening the blow a little. By this time she is exhausted. Having parted in anger, it seems they may never patch things up. Then Emerence has another stroke and dies. The writer lady has circled back to the first page - where she explained that she feels that she, in some senses, was responsible for Emerence's death. There follow a few short chapters speaking, almost hollowly, about the consequences and last efforts resulting from her end. The funeral is held; much against Emerence's wishes, it is a religious one. The writer lady is named in Emerence's will as the inheritor of the contents of her locked room - this is finally opened and revealed to be, as expected, part of the gorgeous furniture of Emerence's Jewish employers before the war, saved from destruction by her. Once the dust has settled, one of the close company of characters is chosen as Emerence's replacement in the community and her building. Another, who had "disgraced" herself in making an offer for this position while Emerence was still in hospital, is, in a last twist, taken on by the writer lady as her new help, despite initial loathing, because of her practical hard-working similarity to Emerence, but also her lack of secrets and "temperament". The anticipation/fear of death works strongly in this - in an emotional range from the personal, gritty here and now back to the political maelstrom and uncertainty engendered by the war. The concentration on key characters means that all life outside their orbit is necessarily a blur. Both the main characters are very flawed, and seen only in their relation to each other and a small set around them - parts of their lives where they might be more relaxed, softly smiling, in a state of greater inner peace, are largely absent. There are moments in the last few short chapters where things seem to take on almost a fabular flavour: a beloved dog "never barks again" after Emerence's death; the furniture in the locked room is absolutely beautiful, but "crumbled into nothing", "turning to powder before our eyes" due to woodworm; the funeral is attended by an enormous number of people, despite Emerence's circle being highly restricted. I'm not sure what Szabó intended by these slips into fantasy - is the accentuation in some way meant to signify the heightened state of emotion following a death? The creative mind of the writer lady dramatising the strung-out atmosphere? In its scene, its concentration, its intense preoccupation with very distinct, proud and flawed, characters in certain aspects of their lives, this is completely engrossing, and very unusual. It exerts a strange fascination.

Essays about Men, Women and Books by Augustine Birrell (1894)

 What a pleasure. That rare feeling when you sink into something knowing you'll be entertained, learn a bit, and are in safe hands. There are nineteen essays here, all of which were journal-published originally. They read almost like book reviews, but in a sense are review-extensions, where the advent of his reading a particular title brings up a discussion about something broader. His allowing of this opening out also allows philosophically inspired wit to creep in, and the nature and foibles of humanity and its pretensions, elisions and perhaps lazy misapprehensions to be discussed. His is an acerbic tongue. The subjects range between the long ago of Swift, Sterne and Johnson to the recency of Marie Bashkirtseff. His treatments cover not only literary critical interpretation, but also deep forays into previous editions, consequences of various edits, celebration and deprecation of the vices of both authors, compilers and editors, and, subsequently, all the outflow of what any given point might mean as applied to our societal norms and prejudices. He's great company.

Fifty Forgotten Books by R. B. Russell (2022)

 I'm beginning to develop a shorthand for a recent change in literature. At the moment, it's LITE21C. When I was young, "lite" literature was what was called 'the beach read'. These were typified by things like lurid covers, foiling of the cover-text and, most importantly, being in A-format (which is those smallest paperbacks, usually 18cm high and 11 across). Bookstands in airports were full of them, yes, which was part of what led to the beach read appellation, but they had a broader cultural signifier of light reading, and were widely available throughout the trade. Nowadays, the threads have changed, most works are not in that format, but we still have the need for light reading, of course. So light reads, deceptively but I don't think altogether intentionally so, are in the same format as the weightier ones. In fact, the level of intention is probably the important thing to investigate. It often appears to lead to confusion, at the least. This is a LITE21C read. I enjoy light reading on occasion, like many. But I do inevitably end up thinking, in these days of can't-tell-one-thing-from-another-ness, that I hope people are still registering the difference. These are mini-essays on the author's favourite 'lost' books, and contain genial stories of discovering them in secondhand bookshops, of characters met whilst doing so, also of a bit of personal history alongside: joining literary societies, starting his own publishing business with a partner, and again the characters encountered in doing so. He is part of a set who are very influenced by writers of the supernatural, like Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft, and who work on producing new editions of them. I really enjoy all the stuff about collecting interesting old books, as it's a passion of mine, and always get pleasure from hearing about the deeper background of authors who are known to me in only a limited way. The classic terms of appealing light reading really. The designation is recognisable not because of any strict determination of content, I think at least, but rather because of the feeling it gives of being a congenial wander through a subject. Perfectly pleasant, and completely unchallenging. Very different to "weighty" reading.

Descents of Memory by Morine Krissdóttir (2007)

 This is, as far as I am aware, the only substantial biography of John Cowper Powys. There have been pieces dedicated to all three writer brothers, there have been works of literary criticism with strong biographical content, but this is the first attempt to cover him solo from a biographical standpoint. Of course, the Powyses being what they were, there is no avoiding Theodore and Llewelyn, as they were critical in their brother's imaginative and practical life, makeup and exigencies. All the other children of the family are here in reasonable detail also, as are the parents, who were equally influential. Krissdóttir's angle is psychological, an extremely fruitful one when it comes to this subject. Not only was he fascinated by it, allowing it to leak into all his works to varying degrees, he was also subject to great swathes of manias, conceits and theorisings in his personal life, as far as those two things can be separated in such a Herculean being. The picture that is built up is an extraordinary one, of a character seething with ego and not necessarily recognising it, of the eldest of the clannish family running amok with the respect with which he was accorded by them, of early beginnings of somewhat curdled sexuality and decadence, of what became typical brazen selfishness covered over with childlike manipulation, of the eventual development of incredible levels of complexity and vision in novels which have the quality of being both folie de grandeurs and inspiringly magnificent. This piece also releases another vital story, although in a slightly muted fashion - that of Phyllis Playter, his second partner. Records of her in the form of letters or diaries are a lot less common, which explains the partial quality of the portrait. I would have liked to see a little more decision in the analysis of their connection, a plumping for reasons - it seems to me that this has happened in the case of Powys himself, but Krissdóttir has declined to do the same for Playter. There are surely conclusions to which a biographer could come regarding the deeper contexts of their relationship - what we get is a "maybe-ing" instead. The one thing which I think the book is fully missing also relates to Playter, though it may be something to do with length. It's already a very long book, quite appropriately, with somewhat spidery text on 44-line pages with slim margins - it really should have been two volumes, and falls in half very readily. But, having grown familiar to a significant extent with Playter, having had her hard life exposed from both a strictly biographical standpoint and a feminist one, and grown to care about these things, we should, I feel, have had an epilogue about her life between Powys' death in 1963 and hers in 1982. The lack feels like a missing last figure in the pattern. But what is here is an extraordinary and serious revelation, the result of a titanic amount of work, and to be celebrated with not exactly joy, but a feeling of enlightenment.

Five T'ang Poets (Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-yin) translated by David Young (1990)

 This followed on from a 1980 original which had only the first four poets. It's a fascinating thing. The first major question which arose for me surrounded the position of these writers in the Chinese society of the eighth and ninth centuries. Young provides piercing introductions to each, as well as an overall one. I didn't get the impression they were courtiers of the type we can possibly imagine. They seemed independent of at least some of that, though I'm sure there were influences, preferment, pensions and so on which arose from that centre of power. What I was after in thinking about that was a definition of the word "poet" in this circumstance. They seemed glimpsers, still-pensive-moment recorders, rather than prolix commentators. The job of poetry was a little different. Is it poetry at all? Or is it even more concentratedly so? (Don't like the idea of the "it's just different" dull-minded imagined reply.) The "what is poetry?" discussion, especially across cultures, is an interesting one. These things went through my head. The major revelations in the introduction were quite how much leeway there was in terms of translation on the one hand, because of the mechanics of the Chinese language, and complementarily the fact that these works in their original could exude meaning not only horizontally but vertically - the characters as they were written influencing each other multi-directionally. This element is no doubt often, or even always, lost in translation, along with the highly specific cultural references which underlie parts of the expression. All of which has the corollary of congratulation to Young for a book so pleasurable to read. These poems are surprisingly corporeal, but I guess that surprise emanates from too little knowledge. They use very tight images of things, juxtapose them with one another, and extract highly distilled direct meaning - there's nothing particularly identifiable as diffuse here. Or hard to fathom in essence, though in line with the above we may well be missing tangents. There is a definite feeling of looking out at a landscape, the seasons, birds, in many cases, careful feeling of the way through to significance in few words. There is also a slight smile in some, mention of drunkenness and self-pity, loneliness and yearning, again sparely. And sensuality has its part, particularly in some works of the last poet, Li Shang-yin, where images feel as though they could be (highly civilised!) double-entendre. As one perhaps imagines, green is the signal colour throughout. Goodness knows how many times it is mentioned in this book: suits me very well.

H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq (1991)

 I've read quite a few essays which were published before the Second World War, and I haven't yet come across one which valorises overstatement as though it were passion. I don't quite get the genesis of this recent peculiarity, particularly among the French. It seems a superficial understanding, to be frank, of the terms of passion, like a little kid's idea of love. One can imagine the child, having seen some films, emoting like hell, waving their arms about, and saying something hilariously smoochy and over the top. This feels a little like that, but with an academic carapace. The further astonishment is that academia has seriously taken this attitude of "passion" on board, as though it's a new language, a development into subtlety and deeper understanding. I've read a little bit of Lovecraft, and have absorbed whatever that's given me of his way with things, have a sense of how he goes about telling his tale. So when I read things like "a supreme antidote against all forms of realism" as describing Lovecraft's modus, I feel I'm at sea (already, as this is on the first page). Lovecraft seems to use all manner of realistic tropes, for one. One might say it was this situating realism that made more of his fantastic exertions. So, a dubious claim contentually, and then put in this "all forms", "supreme"-ly excessive way, evocative of French academia's worst. But, if one can mentally filter out the noise from all this stuff, there's a load of interesting detail here. Biographical notes filling in a picture of this worried, harassed, bitter, socially limited man in particular. Again filtering like mad, one can build up one's own picture of who he was, how he functioned. Another observation: I can't put this down to Houellebecq alone, because it's more universal than that, but there is the "usual" commentary here about how, in Lovecraft's stories, we come face to face with (definitively and classically) absolute terror, complete horror, etc. It seems to me that, in the stories I've read at least, the impact is not that. It's much more of a hinting. I don't get creeps up my spine, I get a feeling of fascination tempered with the author's love of queasy detail. Biographically, Lovecraft seems "ick"-laden: he had a horror, post the New York years particularly, of other races and their seemingly animalistic qualities; even earlier, he withdrew in a nervous state from the world for a long period, and then delimited his life to gentlemanly and polite pursuits after the big reclusion had ended; he didn't want to much engage with sexuality or the elements of any sort of physical hedonism, certainly not publically anyway. The impact of his stories seems allied to this - a feeling of ick. And, thanks, despite himself, to Houellebecq, I now see this echo more clearly. Lovecraft and Houellebecq are the two primary authors here, but there are a couple of others to mention: Stephen King provides an introduction, and celebrates the author's "passion", whilst also decrying it - very gently; Dorna Khazeni is the translator, who has felt the need to add an appendix listing all the times she found it impossible to locate Houellebecq's sources for quotes. He mentions early on that this book, his first, was "almost a first novel" - giving himself a neat little out for invention? I dunno, it doesn't recommend itself as a cause for confidence. The details through this piece are great, despite one's need to constantly mentally edit as one reads, until Khazeni's appendix is reached. I think on the whole Houellebecq can be relied on for the spirit/essence of his "facts", but can't help feeling a sense of caution.