Paul Auster- Winter Journal

Winter Journal

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2012

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Hand To Mouth - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - The Brooklyn Follies - Travels in the Scriptorium - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“Most other people, your wife included, with her unerring inner compass, seem to be able to get around without difficulty. They know where they are, where they have been, and where they are going, but you know nothing, you are forever lost in the moment, in the void of each successive moment that engulfs you, with no idea where true north is, since the four cardinal points do not exist for you, have never existed for you. A minor infirmity until now, with no dramatic consequences to speak of, but that doesn’t mean a day won’t come when you accidentally walk off the edge of a cliff.”

After his last piece of fiction, 2010's Sunset Park, Paul Auster suggested (though I can't seem to find the quote) that he might be done with fiction. I don't quite believe that, at least not completely, but for now it has resulted in the author switching his focus primarily to an alternative obsession and writing a thematic sequel to his first notable work. From almost thirty-five years ago that book was The Invention of Solitude, consisting of Auster's personal memoirs relating to the recent unexpected death of his father. I found it to be a powerful, absorbing read. Approaching Winter Journal, though, I was admittedly more apprehensive.

Cool Auster

As Auster recognises in his prose, Winter Journal was 'inspired' (if that isn't an inappropriate term) by the death of his mother, naturally causing another outburst of emotions and memories from an extremely introspective writer. As a die-hard Auster fan I was quite happy to read another memoir, but already it became hard to ignore the fact that he might have already drained his personal anecdotes in previous releases. The aforementioned Solitude took a serious look into the structure of his family and upbringing, The Red Notebook (later released as part of The Art of Hunger) took a scattershot look at notable incidents of coincidence and apparent fate in Auster's life, and Hand To Mouth was a more amusing, honest look at Auster's life as a struggling student and aspiring author.

That leaves the twenty years or so since Hand to Mouth (1997) to cover, and while that seems a long enough time I doubt that the latter, success-filled years of an established author are anywhere near as interesting as his origins. Auster must have realised that, and as a consequence Winter Journal again takes in the whole scope of Auster's life until that point, this time (as the title suggests) looking at it all from the perspective of a much older man observing the changes and declines in his physical well-being. Not really an immediately exciting concept, I know.

Henry Holt & Co. Publishing

The key stylistic choice that essentially defines the novel as a whole (and which I probably should've mentioned by now) is that Auster goes the Slaughterhouse-Five route of chronologically flying all over the place with each paragraph- loosely following his themes to connect each one. As a result of this division each paragraph gains its own sense of relevance and own artistic identity, of a fashion; quickly switching between drama, tragedy or comedy when required. There's also the sense that each segment carries its own sense of poetic integrity, its own evocative notions and balance of ideas and style. Earlier on in the book I found this seemed to make an easy read, such was the variety.

Unfortunately I found it became less and less interesting the further I read. Despite being only 230 pages long in a typically-modern large font, Winter Journal outsays its welcome two thirds of the way through, where the lack of a particular journey and too much of a focus on mundane life events (mundane to me, anyway, obviously not to Auster, but compared to his usual standards of intricate stories quite mundane) made it fairly clear that Winter Journal is ultimately a self-indulgent project. Don't get me wrong,. Auster has clearly achieved enough to justify a personal side-project, and there are some genuinely emotionally resonant sections, but as a whole there's not enough interesting content to keep this up to Auster's usual standard. Considering  that his next book Report from the Interior is a companion piece, I'm worried that the inevitable future review of it will be even less flattering.

Norman Mailer- The Armies of the Night

Armies of the Night- History as a Novel/The Novel as History

Penguin

Norman Mailer

1968

"There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you."

My book-buying approach is very scattershot; though I do have a system; the vast majority of them are randomly bought from usually the same bookshop (Oxfam Bookshop Hereford, I salute you)  and chosen through a combination of randomness and snobbery. When I find an author I really like, I hold off on running through their bibliography until I've completely finished the works of other authors (which almost never happens). I usually only use Amazon when there's something new (*cough* Murakami *cough*) that I really want or when I'm down to the nitty gritty of the last few pieces of a particular author and hoping they'll turn up second hand is a bit naive (though it does happen more often than you'd expect). The real big downside of picking books via author 99% of the time, particularly second-hand, is that I end up with a selection of books of which I know very little about. 

This is really a long-winded way of explaining how I came across Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, why I bought it, and how its subject matter and style caught me unprepared, yet somehow managed to fit a pretty interesting style of important 20th century world literature that I didn't even know I was interested in; the non-fiction novel. The first Norman Mailer novel I read was An American Dream, and it was right up my alley, as, like Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr. for example, it took elements of classic hard-boiled pulp fiction and set them in a very cynical low-life modern almost-dystopian America. In contrast, the non-fiction novel, a genre of which Armies helps define, loses the advantages of true fiction but still presents the real world experiences of the author as an almost-unbelievable fantasy. The recognised originator of the genre as we know it was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and, like Capote, it's very easy to see the influence of Mailer's previous fiction directing the style of his prose.

Angry young Norman

Covering the 1967 anti-Vietnam War March upon the Pentagon, Mailer dramatises the events, his own personal experiences, by first writing as an omniscient narrator and making himself a separate but central character in part one of the book, entitled History as a Novel. Here Mailer details the planning and then procession of the march, using lavish, fiction-like prose to introduce his fellow conspirators, media observers, and opposing political figures. The intended effect seemed to me to intentionally portray the proceedings as somewhat fantastical, in the sense of its reliance on eccentric characters as much as pure luck and disorganisation. Mailer portrays himself as particularly ridiculous, self-important and comfortably at home as a ring leader of a circus of hippies and beatniks. To be honest, I found his personification to be rather annoying, as I did the narration, as I struggled to care enough about his sardonic over analysis of almost every mundane detail. As a result, I found large portions of the book a chore to get through.

This might just be my inability to find much (or any) interest in American politics; something that I'd previously found with another landmark non-fiction novel, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Thompson's take on his experiences held a more directly cynical tone, but the overall effect of overall ridicule left the same impression- and, despite my familiar enjoyment of Thompson's acidic observations, I found that book to be boring as well. In the much-shorter part two of the book, subtitled The Novel as History, Mailer drops the act and switches to more direct, analytical prose taking a mostly-serious look at the experiences he fictionalised. I found this to be far more readable, immediately comparable in style and clarity to the work of George Orwell, particularly The Road to Wigan Pier.

In a sense it would be rigbt to admit that I was disappointed by this book, having enjoyed An American Dream so much, but my failed expectations shouldn't be made into criticism. In truth, despite somehow just hammering out a moderate-length review, I'm really not the person to be reviewing Armies of the Night because I think my mind actively rebels against notions of politics. Nevertheless, I'm not going to let this put me off any more Norman Mailer in the future, particularly in the hope that understanding the ideologies of the man more will probably give me a greater enlightenment of what Armies of the Night was really saying. Might not be the near-future, though.

Paul Auster- Hand To Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure

Hand to Mouth- A Chronicle of Early Failure

Picador Press

Paul Auster

1997

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Travels in the Scriptorium - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“But money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.”

One of the more obscure entries in Paul Auster's bibliography (which after ten years I'm finally getting near to finishing), Hand to Mouth is a prequel to his name-making 1982 debut The Invention of Solitude- the collection of introspective personal memoirs surrounding the death of his father. Again taken with the need to chronicle his own life, this short tome covers the period of Auster's experiences from his latter university days up until his first serious attempts at novel writing, and so mostly consists of self-admittedly overzealous failed writer angst, mixed-up with his memories of some very odd people whom influenced him on the way. It's also a very brief read, as Auster purposefully condenses experiences and descriptions of others that others may have dwelled upon into barely 160-pages.

Auster is super cool.

This brevity is the key to Hand to Mouth's final status as an amusing, but unfortunately irrelevant read- even to someone as fascinated by Auster's long-form prose fiction as I. The appeal of the book was obvious; the chance to perhaps further understand the creative process of a literary hero, but such opportunities seemed few and far between. Though Auster describes the extent of his earlier self's desperation, the introspective self-analysis contains more than a hint of embarrassment at the naivety of youth, and lacks enough detail to suggest important life-points. I get the feeling that Auster wanted to recapture the autobiographical spirit of his predecessors (such as Jack London with John Barleycorn), but was probably too much of a normal person to stand out.

As a result, his exploits meander from slightly interesting, such as his travels to France and Ireland, to generic normality, to absurdity- the latter referring to the time he spent serious time and effort trying to create and have published his own baseball-inspired card game. Auster's baseball fascination nearly always results in easily the worse segments from his fiction, and does so again in this autobiography, where it just seems so stupid and pointless it actually seemed to bring him down in my estimation.

As an Auster devotee (as, I imagine, 95% of the people who read this book will be), I found it amusing and mostly likable enough, but disappointing with that. There are certain aspects which relate to the motivations of characters in his book (particularly the sublime Moon Palace), probably more than I noticed, but not enough for it to seem revelatory. If any non-Auster fans come across Hand to Mouth, I'm sure they'd probably appreciate it as a decent, well-constructed light read also, though little more than that. In essence it's a curio, a self-obsessed long essay that Auster likely never intended to make waves but which he probably felt he needed to write.

Jack London- John Barleycorn

John Barleycorn

Jack London

1913

“The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the ‘kick’.”

It took me a while to get around to reading a Jack London book, but it was inevitable following the pattern of my reading habits for a long while- probably a decade, actually. I've always known that London is considered as one of the elite peers of American literature, one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, up there with Hemmingway, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald as authors who shaped the Western art form for all to follow- in a fashion bridging the gap between the classical US authors of the 19th century who were still heavily influenced by Victorian literature, and the outragous post-World War II hippies and beatniks who fill so much of my time now. I bought two charity-shop copies of London books in quick succession, leaving me with the choice of what to tackle first.

One of these was a Penguin Classics collection of some of London's most famous and most successful shorter stories (including White Fang and The Call of the Wild- the former of which I oddly remember seeing an animated children's TV series, many years ago), the stories that primarily made his name and stand out the most on a fairly-packed bibliography. The other one was a much different prospect; the controversial autobiographical work John Barleycorn. Truth be told, the back cover blurb sold me immediately, since rather than promise stories about a bunch of wolves and whatnot, it promised 'the first intelligent literary treatise on alcohol in American Literature' (Oxford World's Classics edition), with London writing in detail about his massive consumption of alcohol during his younger days; with the name John Barleycorn from the old US folk song used to represent alcohol as a familiar acquaintance.

I've always been interested in quality literature permeated by chemically altered states, and I genuinely think that the best US fiction of the second half of the last century revolved around the influence of certain such texts, by Bukowski, Kerouac, Burroughs et al, and, with that in mind, John Barleycorn read to me like an incredibly important influence; the similarities to Bukowski's novels primarily jumping to mind in terms of the construction of the story, its pacing, characterisation and chronology. London forsakes much of a sense of typical storytelling structure through his constant introspective analysis regarding the physical and mental effects that his huge alcohol intake had upon him. The real people he describes meeting during his youthful days working on the ocean and docks seem to be heavily styled to emphasize their wildness, (reminding me most of On the Road) , which is fun to read, but as a counterpoint he refrains from following an obvious chronological narrative, instead perhaps assuming that the reader is familiar with his life and career already.

Unfortunately I can't actually say I enjoyed the overall effect of London's style for this book, and it actually took me much longer to finish it than it usually does for a 200-page piece. I found that the lack of detail about his life a whole at the time, and his rather straightforward presentation of his younger character prevented me from caring enough about him to want to read on. I also found his musings on John Barleycorn (a nickname that became a drag to read so often) to be repetitive, detached from emotion, and lacking in much of a revelatory impact to conclude things. London's general prose skills are clearly exceptional, written in the Americanised English that always reminds me, through Hemmingway to Steinbeck, of Charles Dickins. It did come across as dry to me though, especially with a lack of story to drive it.

I seem to be criticising the book quite a bit here, but I think that has a lot to do with my own personal biases coming into play. I was looking for London to be another great storyteller for me to indulge in, but I chose a book that focuses on being self-analytical without giving much in the way of further context. Hopefully I'll enjoy London's short fiction a lot more, and it'll put John Barleycorn in a more interesting light. As a taster of London's skills, it was interesting, if a little disappointing, but not off-putting.

Paul Auster- The Art of Hunger

The Art of Hunger: 
Essays, Prefaces, Interviews, The Red Notebook

Penguin

Paul Auster

1993

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life”

It's an obvious sign that you're obsessed with a particular author when you get unreasonably excited at the thought of reading their miscellany. Things like essays, unfinished scripts, correspondence and interviews might seem self-indulgent or irrelevant by people not quite so obsessed, but to you each individual random article is a potential goldmine of revelation. There are only a few authors in my collection who I've cared enough about to buy their assorted leftover crap, such as Douglas Adams' posthumous The Salmon of Doubt, Terry Pratchett's recent A Blink of the Screen, and, the master of extra-curricular collections, George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant. As anyone who's ever looked at this blog more than once might see, Paul Auster easily ranks alongside those greats as someone who's entire bibliography must be mine.

In many ways I think Paul Auster is potentially the ideal author for such a collection, since the works in his bibliography are extremely self-referential, drawing upon Auster's self-confessed obsessions (questions of identity and chance) and weaving them around absorbing narratives that always encourage the reader to think. He also a massive student of literature himself; each of his books is influenced by a seemingly limitless number of classic and cult classic authors whom laid the path out for Auster to re-imagine and re-invigourate. It's Auster's studentship that provides the foundation for this collection The Art of Hunger, released early on in Auster's career as a novelist but far enough into his life to be able to select a range of his non-fiction written from the 1970's onwards.

As indicated by its subheading, The Art of Hunger is split into four sections based on format. The first section collects a large selection of critical essays on literature, and was undoubtedly the section which dragged the most in certain places. Heavy critical literary analysis is never really fun to read, even if you're a fan of the subject matter. I hate to admit my own ignorance on this sort of thing, but I'd never read any of the main prose texts Auster wrote about in these pieces,  and while they each began on an interesting note, Auster's tendency to assume reader knowledge regarding the fairly obscure people and movements doesn't help maintain interest. Despite the heaviness of these essays, there are some interesting indications as to how Auster developed many of his ideas. The essays on poets and poetry, meanwhile, completely lost me since I just can't get into poetry. There's also an excellent article on French street performing legend Phillipe Petite that I very much enjoyed. 

The second section, the self-explanatory 'Prefaces', did nothing for me, since the majority of it was one Auster preface to a poetry collection that I couldn't begin to care about. It was the third section, 'Interviews', that gave me more of what I wanted; insight into the imagination and creative process behind some of my favourite books. One particularly long interview from 1990 sees Auster ruminating over the inspirations both direct and subconscious for his novels up to that point, from his autobiographical debut The Invention of Silence to the brilliant Moon Palace- as an aside, I was curious but not shocked to discover that his second fiction, In the Country of Last Things was something he started writing as a college student and eventually returned to after making his name.

The final section with the much more interesting title of 'The Red Notebook'  is the highlight of the book. It's comprised as a collection of short memoirs from Auster's life, each barely longer than a few pages, where the author highlights curious incidences that drove him to contemplate the powers of coincidence. Some are perhaps much less impressive than others, but the cumulative effect very much establishes the basis for one of Auster's obsessions that he toys with in his novels; specifically regarding the power of chance to change the course of an individual's life. Split into very small chapters, one includes Auster further extrapolating on the random phone call that inspired the beginning of City of Glass (first part of The New York Trilogy). It's far from Auster's best work, but it's a bemusing, thoughtful short piece, and the hidden gem I was hoping for when I picked this book up.

That's not to say that without it The Art of Hunger would be unenjoyable, but the more relaxing ending took my overall enjoyment of the book up a notch. Still, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody without a real attachment to Auster's bibliography since it's a rather self-indulgent compendium, but I did find it mostly interesting.

Hunter S. Thompson- Hell's Angels

Hell's Angels

Penguin Modern Classics

Hunter S. Thompson

1966

“The Angels don’t like to be called losers, but they have learned to live with it. “Yeah, I guess I am,” said one. “But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.”

Another of the many books that I've been meaning to read for some time, Hell's Angels is the book that, upon publication, introduced the wider literary world to the talents and hell-raising attitude of the now-legendary Hunter S. Thompson. Now, almost fifty years after that book's publication, Hunter is obviously much more well-known for the iconic, genre-defining explosion of gonzo known as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the book with which ninety-nine percent of the author's fans discovered him (and through Terry Gilliam's cinema adaptation). I belong in that group, and Fear and Loathing made me realise immediately that I wouldn't be happy until I'd read Hunter's entire bibliography. From that bibliography, the entry which stood out most prominently as the book I felt most likely to further encapsulate the bizarrely magnificent style of Fear and Loathing is now the subject of my latest literary thoughts/ramblings.

Naturally it took me literally ten years to get around to reading Hell's Angels, in the meantime getting more of a fix from Hunter S. through collected editions of his many newspaper and magazine articles, such as The Great Shark Hunt and Generation of Swine. Those high-tempo drink and drug-fueled paperback collections gave me the fix I needed, but the itch remained. When it finally came time to read the lovely Penguin Modern Classics edition of Hell's Angels I ordered from Amazon, I was left with not a small amount of trepidation, powered by random comments I'd heard and read over the years suggesting that it wasn't actually particularly good, at least not by the author's standards.

For the first one hundred pages or so of Hell's Angels, I found myself in agreement with such negative criticism; Hell's Angels didn't seem particularly interesting. In hindsight, the reason for my slight dislike for and slow progress through the book was due to a seed of misapprehension planted in my mind so many years ago where I assumed that Hunter's inimitable style was something that had just jumped into the world, full formed, presumably with his first article. The idea of literature as a progressive chain absorbing its own influences, stewing in its own juices, replicating the adapt or die notions of evolution... these were concepts that didn't occur. The fact is that Hell's Angels, as the earliest Thompson book is naturally the book where his style was most primitive.

Spawned as a heavily extended magazine article for The Nation in 1965, Hell's Angels is a roughly chronological look at the world's most famous biker group through the early-to-mid sixties, where Thompson heavily analyses the group's public image across mainstream America in contrast with his own conclusions, made from essentially ingratiating himself in to their ranks.From the opening pages Thompson dives right in to the subject matter, with little to no thought in explaining the set-up. Details of the Angels he met and how he came to meet them are scattershot around the book, which helped delay the moments where I really began to understand the book. This is not gonzo journalism of the sort Thompson would excel in, but the early stages are very much there in places. After persevering through a multitude of quoted newspaper and magazine statements, used by Hunter to portray the media's supposed warped excessively negative opinion on the gang, I found the authors voice really came to life as he spent more time giving his (often painfully) honest opinions.

At the books conclusion, Thompson neither condemns nor condones the often brutal and always anti-social behaviour of many of the Angels, leaving the reader to contemplate their own opinion, all the while hinting that the issue was really a lot more complicated than that. I found the book to be very well balanced in length and tone, as well as very informative with the benefit of interesting subjects... but it still wasn't quite the Hunter S. Thompson I know. I don't wish to bash Hell's Angels at all (I gave it 4 stars on goodreads, rating fans) because it's one of the better pieces of extended journalism I've ever read (I even think I slightly prefer it to In Cold Blood) but the problem is that Thompson's later prose voice is so iconic and instantly recognisable that this earlier, tamer version lacks the spark I associate with the author. I'm aware that it's an unfair criticism to slate an author's earlier work for not holding the same quality as their work to come, but then I'm probably a pretty unfair reviewer. At any rate, I'm glad I finally got Hell's Angels off from my mental to-read pile, and even though it didn't quite live up to my former expectations as an adolescent, it was ultimately an interesting, satisfying read.

George Orwell- Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia

Penguin Classics

George Orwell

1936

Other Orwell Reviews- Burmese Days - A Clergyman's Daughter - Homage to Catalonia - Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

“When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.” 

The first time I read Homage to Catalonia, a borrowed copy about six years ago, I didn't really like it. This left me with the nagging sensation that this was unacceptable; a feeling that grew with each subsequent novel by George Orwell that I read. I habitually drew out the process of reading through bibliographies of my favourite authors, and when I finally finished off the set with Burmese Days I still couldn't get over it, so a re-read was absolutely necessary. I fear that when I first read it I rushed it and was far too distracted, but I found it to be not what I was expecting. My love of Orwell was, at the time, completely entwined with my love of Nineteen-Eighty Four and its subversiveness, and I felt a lack of similar traits made it seem, well, just not cool enough to care about.

Upon re-examining the book, the things I found most immediately curious about Homage to Catalonia were firstly the sheer nerve of the whole thing, and secondly the more passive, observational tone of the prose. Orwell barely touches on his arrival in Spain in the midst of civil war nor his reasons for doing so (most of these details are saved for the two appendices- more on those later), with his need to join the fight against the progression of fascism in Europe really needing no justification. The relative lack of political commentary, usually so prevalent in Orwell's books, is very noticeable, and is almost certainly what upset me about it upon first read. Bearing that in mind as I started again gave it a better chance for its particular style to sink in, but in hindsight the genuine lack of that cutting, insightful analysis Orwell is so revered for does leave Catalonia a step behind his best work.

What Orwell does instead is write a very descriptive and well-constructed account of his time trudging across Spain with a misfit militia, occasionally encountering great danger, constantly enduring great discomfort, and eventually becoming an enemy of the police state. It has all the ingredients of an enthralling narrative, and Orwell's typically dry prose becomes much more observational than usual (except for perhaps Down and Out in Paris and London). As an Englishman myself I tend to read Orwell's work in one hundred percent relation to British society and sensibilities, and so the humid Spanish atmosphere comes across as positively alienesque, reflected through Orwell's disposition and occasional struggle to communicate away from home. The heavily observational style hugely benefits in this regards, capturing this period in time superbly and leaving me enthralled at times- but I have to reiterate that the lack of a more powerful, decisive analysis of the events as a whole leave this trailing Orwell's best.

The narrative is engaging to the end, where it the book is concluded by two additional appendices in which Orwell attempts to untangle the various political parties and figures that clashes to create the whole mess in the first place. When I first read the book I was excited to reach this, hoping for the real facts of the matter to come to life for Orwell to viciously tear apart. Instead, Orwell actually warns the reader that these segments will be boring for those not interested in party politics, and that the reader should skip these if this doesn't interest them. The first time I tried they bored me to tears, so this time I skipped them. It's a really disappointing ending to the book to be honest, since it really did need a more reader-friendly conclusion to put things more in context.

It's undeniable that Homage to Catalonia is another massively important step on the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially in giving the author a personal view of the advancing effects of facism, but for me my enjoyment came from the differences in Orwell's style here as a first-person non-fiction narrator, creating a more adventurous, thrilling tone in a strange (well, to me anyway) environment. I enjoyed this much more than the first time I read it, though it does suffer in comparison to some of Orwell's bibliography. To me it's more of an intriguing curio that I can't really see myself returning to for a long time, if ever, but it shouldn't disappoint any prospective Orwell completists too much.

Toby Young- The Sound of No Hands Clapping

The Sound of No Hands Clapping

Toby Young

2006

Over a year ago back in February 2013 I read and reviewed long-standing English journalist Toby Young's first novel How To Lose Friends and Alienate People as an example of some lightweight non-fiction, offering a few laughs alongside copious amounts of gossip regarding the strange world Young encounters as he desperately tries to make his name writing in the US. Later adapted into a film starring Simon Pegg (which I just can't sum up the enthusiasm to watch), the book became an unexpected best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, as it documented Young's employment as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, and his inevitable falling out with absolutely everybody. It's a decent book, written by an author who's very comfortable using his particular languid, conversational prose style, and he does a good job establishing himself as a (mildly) lovable loser who always messes things up for himself. It does, however, lose a lot of steam the more it continues on.

It was really just a bit of obsessive-compulsiveness that led me to read the sequel. I found The Sound of No Hands Clapping in a second-hand bookshop, and it sat on the to-read pile for about a year before I very nearly decided to abandon my plan to read it, and give it back to the charity shop. My expectations weren't high, since the hook of the book didn't seem that interesting, and also because in my experience follow-up memoirs from media-types are usually quick cash-ins lacking the heart and the purpose of the originals. The basis of No Hands Clapping is Toby's immediate future following the release of his last book, and his decision to seek his fortune as a Hollywood screenwriter, following a couple of opportunities from both the adaptation of his first book, and a random from an offer from an unnamed Hollywood bigwig to write a bio-pic.

The handsome visage of Toby Young

On the surface this does seem to offer up the potential for some Hollywood insight, but ultimately (spoiler alert), what we get is two-hundred and fifty pages-plus of Toby completely failing to gain any sort of foothold in Tinseltown whatsoever. In hindsight it's almost completely baffling to me how badly planned this book must have been, something that's completely evident in the lack of structure, adventure or character development. I know this is a piece of non-fiction but it's appeal is completely based upon the success and entertainment of Young's first book, which was a much fuller, well-organised narrative that did have some of those things (though not in abundance); but then that book also had the advantage of covering a wider time period in a more interesting set-up. The Sound of No Hands Clapping has none of the advantages of a set-up as interesting as working for magazine publishing dynasty Condé Nast. Instead it's just Toby Young and his long-suffering wife living back in England, snatching at show-business tit-bits, embarrassing in a far crueler way than his hi-jinks of the past.

It's almost as if this book was a back-up plan for Young in the event that his screenwriting career might somehow not take-off, and that as a result he didn't have the foresight to apply himself to settings and situations that might make his book more interesting. The meetings with the mysterious Hollywood bigwig are genuinely interesting, as are other conversations with people in that game, but there's just not enough of it. Instead there's plenty of stuff about Toby Young and his wife, the vast majority of it cloaked in that godawful British tabloid sens of humour where acting like a misogynist is apparently okay if it's self-aware behaviour. Young goes into great detail about his family, which (really boring spoiler alert) grows by two babies during the course of everything else. That's nice and everything, but it's as boring as hell since by this point Toby Young is nowhere near endearing or established enough as a character for me to possibly care. It felt like I was reading some bizarre mixture of Tony Parsons (probably the most boring, pointless author I've ever read, author of Man and Boy amongst other crap) and Jeremy Clarkson, playing a good-old politically incorrect British rugby club bore. These segments killed the book stone dead for me, and as they became more and more prevalent further on, the less and less interested I became, to the point where I was racing through it just to put it down afterwards.

So yes, The Sound of No Hands Clapping is a worthless book; I gave it one star out of five on Goodreads. But at the same time it did have some potential; Young's style is assured and he seemed to have a gateway into a world that would give him some fantastic content, but instead he completely choked on his opportunities and ended up writing about his wife getting pregnant twice. Good for him, but not something that hasn't happened to a few other billion people on this planet.

Jean-Dominique Bauby- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby
1997

“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was a book I picked up on a whim, mostly because it looked like an interesting and very quick read with the promise of some modern day French existentialism. I've long been trying to break down serious works of philosophy, with very limited success, and adding to my frustrations in the past were books including Albert Camus' The Plague and Jean-Paul Satre's Nausea- two books and authors known as the masters of existentialism, but whose work seemed too alien for me, though perhaps I would've fared better with the help of a tutor or some basic research rather than just diving-in head first as I did.

In the past I have  enjoyed the existentialist novels of Milan Kundera, (specifically the classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being), as well as the various elements that pop up in other literature from time to time, partially because the comparatively recent releases combine with a more approachable and humane narration, but more likely because my interests in the genre are amateurish at best and I need all the help I can get. Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiographical modern world classic seemed to fit in to the (made up by me) category of light existential philosophy with everything going for it to begin with.

I want to see more of that jacket.

At only 140 pages (with larger than usual margins in my edition), as an autobiography it's very short, but this is really the tale of the author's second life, a tragic, poignant and at some points even uplifting one. Jean-Domique Bauby was a successful journalist and editor in his native France until one fateful day in '95 where he suffered a huge stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome, trapping him as an almost completely immobile prisoner in his own body. From then on until the end of his life Bauby could only communicate through blinking his left eyelid, doing so at the right moment to select the right letter as an assistant read through the alphabet. Through this painstaking method he composed this book, itself primarily about his life inside the hospital since his stroke.

The main thing that struck me about this book was the quality of Bauby's prose, which is really, really good, maybe as a result of having so much free thinking time to arrange his thoughts as well as possible. The books short length was likely because of the difficulty of the writing process, but this adds to the quality too, since obviously Bauby isn't able to experience many new things while trapped in his state and to be honest I think I would've lost interest if this had been a longer treatise on the same subject- the fleeting nature of his thoughts and observations add to the ethereal ambiance overall.

I'm hesitant to praise this to the extent that I've read other reviewers do, since I think they're reaching for sympathy brownie points, but I do recommend it to anyone interested in the premise as an interesting curio that should lodge itself in the back of your mind alongside thoughts of mortality and imprisonment. It's very well written, not as depressingly sad as it could have been, and a genuine one of a kind situation encapsulating a life that we probably couldn't otherwise imagine.

Truman Capote- In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood

Penguin Modern Classics

 Truman Capote

1966

“I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.”

When I finish reading a book I always enjoy browsing the Internet to do some amateurish research on it (never before I finish reading for fear of spoilers), usually beginning with the brevity of Wikipedia. Goodreads often follows that with some quick and often utterly infuriating reader reviews, finally followed by whatever random links Google search gives me, where the most interesting stuff usually comes from. I hope that doesn't make me seem unoriginal or lazy, it's just that I'm always curious as to the wider world's reaction to stuff that I've just formed my opinion on, which I suppose is asking for trouble. Anyway, Truman Capote's seminal genre-defining In Cold Blood led to one of those rare occasions where I  agree with a lot of contemporary opinions (as opposed to professional ones where reviewers aren't really allowed to be honest about disliking classics). On Goodreads I decided to rate it four out of five stars. I was momentarily torn on that since I can certainly see why the book is unanimously considered a modern classic but my own tastes knocked a star off... and I'm getting ahead of myself.

Like apparently every other amateur reviewer, my first introduction to Truman Capote was through Breakfast at Tiffany's, which I very much loved. It's an easy book to love; thanks to its novella length it doesn't outstay its welcome; its prose is gorgeous, its characters are mesmerising, a brief glimpse into a perfect fictional world. After reading that it was obvious that my next encounter should be with In Cold Blood, which, from what I knew of it, promised to be a much heavier and more harrowing experience. In truth I knew very little of it thanks to my prior unintentional avoidance of all things Capote, which included the Oscar-winning biography film from 2005. I'd never heard of the Clutter family murders, Dick Hickock or Perry Smith, didn't know of Capote's in-depth investigation of the crime, and, to be honest, didn't even know that this book was non-fiction until skimming the blurb while ordering it from Amazon.

As a result of all of this ignorance I was able to start reading the book with a clean mental palate, which, in hindsight, was mostly for the better. Time for a quick summary; In Cold Blood tells the true story of the build-up and aftermath of the night of November 15th 1959 in Holocomb, Kansas, where criminals Dick Hickock and Perry Smith murdered four members of the Clutter as part of a home invasion robbery that netted them less than $100. Capote began his journalistic investigation of the crime almost immediately afterwards but took six years to finish the book, basing it on meticulous lengthy interviews with the people involved in the case, including the killers themselves. The gravitas of the reality of the situation permeates every line in the book, but, as everyone apart from me already knew all along, Capote isn't simply a normal, plain true crime writer, he's a literary giant; and so In Cold Blood is composed with the care and attention to narrative of a classic fiction. Perhaps more care and attention, necessary in order to manipulate the awkwardness of reality into more palatable, engrossing reading.

At this point the argument emerges of whether such stylish arrangements combined with allegedly manufactured conversations between characters automatically damages the quality or integrity of the book at its core, but to really answer that subjective question you have to decide for yourself what the key purpose of the book is. Now personally I don't really care too much about the absolute one hundred percent accuracy of the story, at least in terms of Capote's presentation (and probable dramatisation) of conversations and his interpretation of the thoughts and feelings of the characters, but I do care about the core message of a book resonating with me through the characterisations and the overall style, which is where I lose lit. crit. points somewhat by admitting that Capote's work here didn't do it for me at the level of my favourite classics.

Dick Hickock & Perry Smith

The key to the book, in my opinion, is the in-depth characterisation of the Dick and Perry beyond just the Clutter murders, though I've read many people focus almost exclusively on the disturbing nature of the crime. Author Tom Wolfe famously coined the term Pornoviolence (in his critical essay of that name) specifically in relation to In Cold Blood and the percieved enticing anti-glamour of the crime existing as the attraction of the book, but I vehemently disagree; Capote doesn't spend a huge amount of time on the night in question alone to the extent that the violent details are tame by modern standards, particularly in the true crime genre. The key to the novel is Capote's deep but not overt analysis of the killers' characters, and he far from glamourises them as people; this isn't American Psycho or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's an often disconcerting look at what might make a complex person capable of committing a psychotic crime. On a personal level I didn't really start enjoying the book much until after Dick and Perry's arrest (spoiler alert), specifically the depiction of the trial and then their times in prison on death row, mostly because of the introspection they offer now they have the time to consider their actions.

The undoubted consensus is that In True Blood is an American modern classic, vital reading for any serious literature fan, but, there does seem to be a similar consensus that it's not a huge amount of fun to read throughout, unlike, say, key work by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailor or Capote's more stylish other smash hit, Breakfast at Tiffany's. The narration is often very dry, which works extremely well in contrast to some of the quotes, but clashes with the clear stylistic arrangements used to drive the narrative of the story. The style also seemed, to me, to demand that the reader take the seriousness of the crime at face value; which is again fine (though limiting) when taking the novel as pure crime fiction, but suffers through its simplicity when pushed into the more uncertain boundaries of pseudo-fiction (I found it impossible to be shocked by anything in the book, especially compared to a contemporary novel like Naked Lunch, for example, released seven years earlier). Finally along those lines, it was hard for me to get fully invested in a non-fiction character study of the two killers when I didn't feel like I could completely trust their stories, particularly anecdotes from childhood that seemed relevant.

But these are criticisms for criticisms' sake, because this is my blog. Though it wasn't the instant favourite I naively had hoped it might be, In Cold Blood struck me hard with a compelling real story put together by an incredibly talented writer. In just the few days since I finished it I've found myself thinking about aspects of it more and more, to the extent where I know this isn't going to be a book that quickly fades from memory. It's an often chilling and almost always fascinating modern classic, and though the style wasn't to my exact taste I can only compel every fan of such literature to find a copy and come to their own conclusions regarding the effects on them of such an experimental idea.

L-Space- Louis Theroux in LA

After posting some brief thoughts on Orwell and I yesterday, I wasn't intending on writing another post quite so soon, but almost immediately ran into another interesting, albeit far more modern, article that took my attention thanks to its author. Louis Theroux has long been a cult favourite of mine and many others; son of iconic travel writer Paul Theroux (and brother to screenwriter Justin), Louis made his name with the BBC in the mid-90's through a series of investigative documentaries entitled Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. In each show the mild-mannered, amiable and very likable Louis threw himself into a particular sub-culture, usually in the US, and tried to understand what made the strange people he met click. As his popularity grew he began to make increasingly serious shows about more dangerous social issues from across the world; including introducing much of the non-US world to the cult of the Phelps family at the Westborough Baptist Church, in Louis' most famous work. In 2005 he released as yet his only book The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, which I own but unfortunately didn't enjoy as much as his TV work.

Louis Theroux & Friend

The article that I read was written by Louis (I have to always call him by his first name because he's so nice, so nice that my Grandmother named her dog after him) and published on the BBC News website as a preview of his upcoming three-part series of documentaries (the first is airing tomorrow night on BBC2 in Britain). It's entitled Louis Theroux: Moving to Los Angeles and exists as a personal take on the making of these shows (themselves named Louis Theroux's LA Stories), where he writes about the effect of temporarily moving his immediate family to Los Angeles at the time. He refrains from detailing too much of the shows' contents and instead talks about the concepts behind them, all the while assembling his own overall impressions of life in such an apparently strange city, which is really what made the article stand out for me.

One of the main appeals to Theroux's persona is his completely convincing presentation of himself as a such a likable English chap in the face of such oddities as porn stars or pro-wrestlers or genuinely disturbing extremists; and it's also his greatest strength in terms of encouraging his interviewees to open up to him. When you consider his life and career as a whole Louis is probably stretching the truth somewhat with his disbelief at the strangeness of LA (in comparison to his time in Johannesburg, for example), but as a fellow Englander it was easy to understand his point of view. I've never visited LA and I probably never will, but it's existence as the global capital of entertainment production has ensured that I've encountered more fictional versions of it than I can remember (off the top of my head, video game LA Noire and superior Buffy spin-off Angel seem most prominent to me).

Serious Face.

Most of this fiction is likely heavily fake, but the concept of so many different versions of this place, twisted this way and that based on the whims of writers and directors, resonates heavily with the unbelievable aspect of the real city. The philosophy of life imitating art is something I strongly believe in throughout everyday life and human behavior, and so the idea of a city that is largely based around fictional versions of itself is fascinating. It's also a little scary, when briefly thinking about how out of control the human race is in regards to its consumption of various forms of entertainment (especially now that 'reality' TV is clearly anything but and just accentuates the issue). Authors like Paul Auster, who I'm currently beguiled by more than ever thanks to Oracle Night, seem to recognise the surreal nature of our reality and presents fiction that challenges our perceptions of it, which is brilliant in a way but also digs further into the massive, unending black hole of transubstantial reality, where, as the classic scientific idiom goes, it becomes impossible to analyse something without effecting it.

I'm going to wrap this up now because I didn't really intend to start rambling on for so long and I've got no intention of trying to write some sort of lengthy essay on such a hard-to-define subject. Also I'm getting away from the original point of the post, which was to link to a very enjoyable and well-written article by a respected journalist. I'm very much looking forward to the three upcoming documentaries, and they''ll almost certainly turn up in the next installment of Not Books, which I've been occasionally working on and discovering that, for someone who writes a book blog, I watch entirely too much television.

L-Space- Confessions of an English Literature Reviewer

I have the day off work, so a lazy morning of watching awful morning television shows while lounging about on the sofa eventually turned into a short trawl through Wikipedia links. Wikipedia is my go-to place in times of boredom, and I've set the random article function as my homepage (which more often than not results in a short article about a village in Eastern Europe for some reason). Through reading an article on litotes (and trying to work out how to pronounce it) I was quickly led to an article about George Orwell's Politics and the English Language (1946) (here, originally published in Horizon magazine), an essay I'd never read before. I found the full essay (here, possibly even legally) and it's fairly short and succinct; a well-written rant against the way that a few factors had been leading to the decline of the English Language.

Orwell's main cause of discontent was the manipulation of the language's various faculties in political writings in order to disguise the nature and/or hypocrisy of its actual meaning, and of the writer or political party behind it. As a natural-born cynic regarding the topic I can't really say much about the political aspect, only that almost seventy years later such techniques are undoubtedly ubiquitous in particular segments of modern society, the most obvious of which is advertising (and we all know advertising rules the world). Orwell wrote the comedy novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying on the subject of advertising, which one day might get re-read and reviewed here.

 

My most necessary rule.

Orwell goes further in his essay by addressing the application of political dialogue in literary criticism, which is, to be honest, what made me thoughtful enough to write this short post. His point is that a lot of literary criticism relies upon the reviewer creating a kind of false sense of immaculate articulation through tossing in to their reviews as many longer words as possible, regardless of their actual effect or even meaning. It's not difficult to recognise Orwell's point (and some of the examples quoted in the essay are ridiculous), and now I'm constantly set to worry that I regularly do the same thing in my reviews; sacrificing accurate reviewing for the sake of flowery prose, thus making the whole exercise a waste of time. Muddying the waters, so to speak.

I think everyone who's ever written a few articles on absolutely anything must be guilty of this to a small extent at least, and it's not something that a writer should overly worry about if it doesn't occur to them that it's something that they're prominently doing already. Personally I am worried, so this short post is an attempt to follow Orwell's rules while talking about them (very meta, I think). I started this blog to hone my non-fiction writing skills precisely thanks to the quality of prose displayed by my favourite authors like Orwell, and almost two years on I think the project is progressing decently, but not perfectly. Ah well, onwards and upwards and all that. At present I'm currently reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (albeit slowly) so that will be on the review schedule, as will the next Discworld book and possibly, possibly the continuation of the Comics Snobbery series. But maybe not.

Jon Ronson- The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Picador

Jon Ronson

2004

“Most goat-related military activity is still highly classified.”

I'm back, feeling strangely guilty about the fact I haven't published anything on my blog that nobody reads in about ten days, which is odd when I remember I used to go months and months without writing anything. Maybe one of the key goals of this blog in the first place, trying to increase my awful writing productivity, is finally getting there. Unfortunately this probably isn't going to be a very long one, simply because there isn't much I found interesting about The Men Who Stare At Goats. I'm not going to completely attack it, but it's barely any more than a two star book thanks to fundamental problems with the set up. Hey look, one paragraph down.

I picked this book up off the shelf at the Oxfam charity book shop (my favourite bookstore in the world) based on my desire to put a bit more non-fiction in my life, and also because I'd seen the loosely-adapted film version (starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges and Ewan McGregor, which is pretty impressive) a few years ago. Although I didn't particularly enjoy it, the premise lodged itself in my brain rather solidly. Respected journalist and non-fiction writer Jon Ronson is one of many to use the period following 9/11 as book material, but rather than settling on the typically serious tone of 'Bush is bad, mmkay', looks at the far more esoterical, quirky, and alternative-reader friendly subject of paranormal abilities, and their application within the US military. Let me quickly say now that this book is probably a conspiracy theorist's dream.

Ronson approaches the task through numerous, numerous interviews with a wide variety of people (many of whom seemed interchangeable to me), presented presumably in a chronological fashion. These interviews form the basis for essentially everything Ronson uncovers and concludes from his studies, and offer him further research ammunition to continue with. The majority of everything he discusses originates from the mind of a man named Jim Channon, who, in the 1960's, attempted to convince his military superiors to adopt and experiment with strange New Age concepts, with the ultimate fantastical goal of doing amazing things like walking through walls or, as in the title, killing goats by looking at them. Ronson follows the progression of his ideas, their apparent final rejection, and then their theorised (by Ronson) rebirth in the midst of the second gulf war.

A goat, yesterday.

All of this as a premise sounds like a great idea for a book, but in reality there are a couple of glaring flaws that heavily damaged my enjoyment of it. Ronson is a good writer, writing in that recognisable, newspaper journalist style that I encountered in War Reporting for Cowards, for example. He presents himself as a likable, incongruous reporter conversing with some equally likable but most likely insane subjects, but does so in such a fashion as to resemble a work of fiction. His characters and conversations are so unrealistically charismatic and quirky that it's difficult to fully invest in what they're saying. This, mind you, wouldn't be so much of a problem by itself if it weren't for the second major flaw in the book; it's virtually all second hand storytelling. Every crazy story, every over the top character and every cynical presentation of the authorities is entirely derived from (admittedly extended) conversations with crazy people. 

I think Ronson himself recognises this, which is why he chose the more dramatic, cinematic conversation style, and also why he tries very, very hard to make his own connection between events and ideas. This is fair enough, and logically done, but again a lack of definitive proof or even realistic evidence means that it all essentially means nothing. Earlier on in the book I found his collection of stories and personalities interesting and appealing, full of charisma and promises of further revelations, but as the book went on I became more and more disillusioned by the lack of real progress. Three quarters of the way through I actually wanted to give up, but my commitment to this bottom-rung blog of randomness pulled me through. Plus, Jon Ronson is a legitimately talented writer who had a good idea for a book, but I can only imagine that researching this topic was a fool's errand. Even if you do assume that the things he talks about are true, it was obviously going to be practically impossible for him to gather secret evidence presumably kept secret by one of the most powerful organisations in the world. I wouldn't rule out reading something else by Ronson, but I'm not in any rush.