Bonkers in The Balkans: I Hate Martin Amis Et Al by Peter Barry

You've got to have pretty big cojones to call your first book "I Hate Martin Amis Et Al", especially if you are an unknown Aussie writer. So kudos to Peter Barry on that. You sir, have come up with the best title for a book in years. But you have, in borrowing the once great author's name, also set yourself a very big challenge. Will it be Money or, God forbid, Yellow Dog? Natural aversion to Australian writing aside, I'm glad to say it is very much the former. Milan Zorec is one extremely fucked up guy. A failed novelist, he joins Mladic's army during the 1995 Balkan War (yes, timely, I know), not out of any ideological Serbian inclinations but to experience something original, something publishers cannot say they've seen before. While hiding in his sniper's nest, he indulges in fantasies of revenge against publishers and literary agents who have passed him over, reliving one particular incident that crushed his spirit with an odd mix of nostalgia and malice. With its rumination on the state of modern literature, some fairly successful lampooning of the brighter literary lights, and a terrifying glimpse into a conflict that is only beginning to get the attention it deserves from the book world, I Hate Martin Amis Et Al is an excellent, twisted novel.

A Final Consolation?: The Girl In The Polka Dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge

So will bridesmaid Beryl belatedly bag a bona fide Booker? It's as hard a question to answer as it is to ask five times quickly. Two years after her death, Beryl Bainbridge's final novel, The Girl In The Polka Dot Dress, has finally seen the light of day. It's as if, in a scene reminiscent of Monty Python, the great Dame has popped her head out of the grave to remind us all that she is "not dead yet!" and demanded to be back in contention. The weight of goodwill alone should put her in good stead. I mean, everyone loves Beryl. Not enough to ever give her a Booker, but certainly enough to invent a special one just for her. Now it appears the Best of Beryl might have been a tad premature. Stop the press! A carcass might actually take home the big one, either on merit or, like Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, as a consolation prize. Could it possibly be true?

The short answer, I'm afraid to say, is no. Indeed, not only does Bainbridge stand little chance of winning, but I'd be surprised if she were even invited to be in the wedding party. The Girl In The Polka Dot Dress supposedly draws on the author's personal experience of a road trip she took across America in the late 60's and reframes it to imagine the mysterious girl (Bainbridge calls her Rose) who was implicated in the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. It is episodic, picaresque and takes on all the classic tropes of the buddy novel. Rose even gets a gruff American sidekick, the brooding, questionably-motived Harold. It also has an element of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the idea of a stranger in a strange land - this time a prissy girl in overwhelming middle America - searching for a mysterious guru, Dr. Wheeler. Alas, none of it really works to lift this beyond the barely functional. I never came to care about Rose, nor whether she would find the elusive doctor. Harold was an irritating stick in the mud. Every stop on the journey came across as a contrived set piece to expose a slice - sometimes seedy, often irrelevant - of America. Even the brief encounters with Sirhan Sirhan, which I'm sure were meant to fill the reader with dread, failed to stir me.

The Girl In The Polka Dot Dress will go down as a minor work in the Bainbridge canon, if it is remembered at all. Consolation prizes aside, I'd be shocked to it see on any list come October especially given the calibre of Commonwealth fiction coming out this year. But let's face it. Beryl doesn't need another consolation prize. It would be beneath her, so to speak. The time has now come to let this sleeping Dame lie!

Battle of The Sexist: Nitwit Naipual Does It Again!

I tend not to begrudge writers their Nobel Prizes, but holy crap... V.S. Naipaul... I'm speechless. Before he won the thing he was shameless in his fishing attempts. Not that anyone cares about author's biographies on the inside flap of books, but Naipaul had the wankiest line of all time in his. It read (and I paraphrase here), "V.S. Naipaul has won every major literary award in the world except the Nobel Prize." Wow. Staggering. I guess he was confident that when - there was no "if" for Naipaul - he did win it, all his works would have to be reprinted, at which time he could remove the line and replace it with something to the effect of "In 2001, V.S. Naipaul was the greatest writer ever to win the Nobel Prize, an award that was invented over a century before and only given out as practice for when they could finally build up the courage to bestow it upon such an extraordinary human being."

By all accounts Naipaul is a shit. Just ask his old buddy Paul Theroux. Heck, Naipaul even makes Saramago look like a saint. So about three minutes after apparently swallowing a fraction of his pride (and broadcasting it on The New Yorker website), the schmuck has gone and done it again. In an interview with the Royal Geographic Society, he deigned to say that no female writer is his literary equal. Not even Jane Austen. The reason? A woman's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world... Inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too." There are so many things wrong with that statement I don't even know where to start.

Suffice to say, as good a writer as Naipaul might be, his embarrassingly limited appreciation for anyone other than himself is laughable. Or maybe we've just misunderstood him. Perhaps it was a rare admission of his own fallibility. Then again there's something to his statement. I can't think of many women writers who are his equal. His superior, sure, but not his equal. Oh wait... Wait... Alert the press. I just thought of someone I'd put on par with him. Yes, it's fellow Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek. Ooooh... That must hurt.

Decoding Schulz: Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer

About half way through reading his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I began to suspect that Jonathan Safran Foer was something of a master illusionist. His tricks are spectacular, but ultimately they are all smoke and mirrors. Not that this revelation stopped me reading him. Eating Animals, his tract on ethical vegetarianism, is a well thought out piece of moral argument with a truly wonderful opening chapter. And I got extremely excited when I heard that his next project would be an experimental engagement with one of my favourite writers, Bruno Schulz. I put in my order well before the release date and waited. And waited. And waited. One trick Foer can't pull off, it seems, is getting his publishers to release the bloody thing on time!

Anyway, some six months later Tree of Codes finally landed in my mailbox. For those of you who have been living on Planet Grisham, it is neither a novel nor a short story. At its most basic, Tree of Codes is a cut and paste exercise with Schulz's classic story "The Street of Crocodiles". Excision, re-arrangement and absurd spacial relations are used to construct a supposedly organic new text that creates meaning from a work already deeply imbued with artistic significance. The pages are literally cut to pieces and the story must be read by lifting each page and reading only those words that have survived the snip. If you lay the page flat, random words from pages to come filter through the gaps, causing a confusing dreamlike flurry of verbiage. It is, to say the least, intriguing. The story itself, however, is not a patch on Schulz's original. The two share the same esoteric Walserian qualities, but Schulz was the real deal and Foer, I hate to say, just isn't.

As a physical object I loved Tree of Codes. It is a singularly persuasive argument against electronic reading - there is no way this could be recreated on a Kindle or iPad screen. However, as a reading experience it was an experiment that, if it were in the science world, would yield little to no result. The findings, as they say, would be inconclusive. Perhaps, Foer would have been better off making meaning from the meaningless (say, a shopping catalogue or dictionary). Or perhaps he should have tried to make meaning from literary dross (an instantly forgettable short story in Reader's Digest or something by Candace Bushnell). In his Author's Afterward, Foer says that he considered both these options but chose The Street of Crocodiles because he thought the raw material for the experiment needed to have significant literary merit in its own right. Unfortunately, his affection for the original seems to have clouded his judgement and we are left, yet again, with some very beautiful smoke and mirrors.

Roth In The Round

Ho Hum Hurrah! Pop the champagne, Philip Roth has won yet another prize that isn't the Nobel. Yes folks, the great American superhero and yellow raincoat-wearing fogey has scooped himself a Booker. Sort of. One of the meaningless minor ones (second only to the prestigious Best of Beryl) but a Booker nonetheless.

Old news, I know. But what is far more exciting is the spectacular dummy spit by Man Booker International judge and Virago founder Carmen Callil who wouldn't have put Ol' Phil on the long list, let alone the shortlist. In a refreshingly humorous burst of vitriol, Callil said that she didn't even rate him as a writer. "He goes on and on about the same subject in almost every single book," she is reported to have said, inviting obvious comparisons between the 'last great America author' and other cultural luminaries such as AC/DC, Michael Bay and Dan Brown. But she didn't stop there, adding, "It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe." Right, so Callil isn't a fan of tea-bagging either.

Prize chair, and token American, Rick Gekoski wasn't impressed, labelling Callil disrespectful. Justin Cartwright (aka The Other Guy On The Panel) has stayed totally shtum on the topic, lest it hurt his chances of one day picking up a real Booker. Plus, with the 60,000 pound prize money, Uncle Phil now owes Juzzy a fancy dinner next time he comes to town.

Who doesn't wish that this sort of shit happened with other literary prizes? Maybe then people would bother to pay some attention to the dirty, spiteful world that is modern literature. Bring on round two!

Reconsidering Roth (Joseph, Not Phil)

German Literature was the great bludge subject of my undergraduate degree. Firstly, it wasn't taught in German, which is fortunate given that I speak barely a word of it (aside from schizer, but that's more from allusions in South Park to types of Teutonic porn). Secondly, it had the coolest, funniest lecturer, whose translation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is still the unrivalled standard in his homeland and who once entertained us with an hilariously mocking rendition of the Bavarian thigh-slap dance. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I had already read half the books, including my all-time favourite novel, Franz Kafka's The Trial. The subject was, as I saw it, a chance for me to boast to a German native of my personal connection to my hero, even if years later it would prove to have been a load of hokum. But beyond the brilliance of Brecht, Borchert and Boll, despite the discovery of another all-time favourite, Heinrich Mann's The Man of Straw, German Lit was not a complete winner. There were a few dreary moments, not the least of which was Joseph Roth's unbearably drab supposed masterpiece The Radetzky March. Yeah, it was grand. It was sweeping. But most of all it was dull. I swore that I would never waste my time with Roth's treacly nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire again.

Then, recently, a strange thing started happening. People whose opinions I respected, and whose tastes have always been quite similar to my own, began extolling the virtues of the tragic imp. I had lumped him in with the verbose vomiters of the German old-school but, according to his ever-growing cheer squad, he was much more closely linked to the Walsers and Kafkas of this world. I was shocked. Nowhere in The Radetzky March did I see signs of malevolent, hidden forces crushing the average man. At no point was my mind, to use the vernacular, fucked. I did a quick search and was pleased to find that the majority of Roth's novels - and there were a lot of them (is there something about the name that makes an author so prolific?) - are short and so I figured it couldn't hurt to give him another try. Scanning a few blurbs, the one that seemed to have the instant appeal was Rebellion.

The novel starts off with a crippled organ grinder... A crippled organ grinder? Yes!!! This is already my sort of book. And it just keeps getting better. Returned from the first World War, where his leg was blown off, Andreas Pum is a hopeless beggar until he marries a fat, wealthy aristocrat (yeah, in German lit they are always fat) and gets a taste of the high life. All is going swimmingly for about ten pages until he is mistaken for a fake, wrongly considered the aggressor in the resultant altercation, decks a cop, and is thrown into jail. Through no fault of his own, the life of this simpleton-come-good turns to crap. And then he dies. Perfect!

Roth is cold and brutal about the societal winds of indifference that might just as well blow us over as lift us up. Rebellion is a cynical little gem, spiteful and pithy but kept in check by a true master. It has single-handedly changed my opinion of Roth and caused me to order almost his entire catalogue. Which makes me wonder whether I have to revisit some of the other German Lit disappointments - Fontane, Christa Wolff, some others I have chosen to forget. Perhaps it is wrong to base one's opinion of an author on a single work, even if it is held out to be their masterpiece. And now there is a deeper, burning question simmering in the backgound... Must I read another Dan Brown?

Frischin' For Luckies

Only a month or so after stumbling across Krakatit, a previously unknown (to me at least) book by one of my favourite authors, Karel Capek, it seems I've done it again. And this time it was even weirder. Every now and then I do an Amazon search to see if any 'new' books by my favourite obscure European authors have popped up in translation. Capek, Bernhard, Bjorneboe, Frisch, Hrabal, Lem. I know they all have works that have either never been translated or the English editions of which have long been out of print and so I hold out continual hope that spiffy new copies will magically appear in the field of search results. It is a generally fruitless endeavour. Once I found Capek's The Absolute At Large. Another time it was Bjorneboe's play Amputation. But for the most part I come up with bubkes.

Two days ago, for no particular reason, I did a search for Max Frisch and was glad to see a collection of his plays that I have not yet read. Naturally, I ordered them but, truth be told, it was a hollow victory. I don't really like reading plays. Stoppard aside, unless I'm watching them or acting in them I just don't see the point. My sudden inexplicable bout of Frischination had not been sated. Imagine my surprise, then, when I stumbled across a newly published, hardcover edition of a novella of which I had never even heard sitting on the shelf of the bookstore around the corner from my office. The very next day! Wrapped in plastic, no less!!

An Answer From The Silence, newly translated by Mike Mitchell (he of Kafka, Bernhard and Goethe fame), tells of young Balz Leuthold's quest to live at the very edge of existence. Leaving behind a fiancee and a lover, he sets off on a hike into uncharted mountain wilderness and disappears. Like always with Frisch, the narrative floats around in time and space, utilising flashbacks, shifting perspectives and sudden schisms between frivolous naturist ponderings and outbursts of intense despair. While Balz takes in the beauty of all that surrounds him, his fiancee and lover, forced to come together in the hope he might be found, must fashion an unnatural accord. In the great swirl of the narrative, Balz becomes something akin to Schrodinger's Cat, with Frisch seeming to posit that we might all be thought of as alive and dead until we rise above the challenge of merely existing. Balz's eventual reappearance is a hard-fought redemption. He has frostbite, will probably need his arm and foot amputated, and will have to sort out his love life. But, he is finally happy.

This short work, Frisch's second, has all the hallmarks of what made him such a great figure in modern philosophical literature. Resting on the twin Frischian pillars of existentialism and nature, it serves as an accessible, if discomforting, introduction to his longer novels or, for those of us who are already fans, a welcome alternative to having to read plays and pretend we like them. I'm now going to play in traffic.

David Foster Wallace's The Pale King: Tupac's Back Bee-yatch!

David Foster Wallace has been a constant lingering presence in my adult reading life. That isn't to say that I'm obsessed with him like so many other people I know, but he always seems to be there, particularly at the major junctures. I started reading Infinite Jest at the commencement of my honours year at university and, though I read many other books while dipping in and out of it, that behemoth kept me company until the day I handed in my thesis. Indeed, I ended up dedicating the bloody thing to Wallace's masterpiece, much to the chagrin of many more deserving loved ones and acquaintances. Now, quite a few years later, The Pale King pops up just as I get my marching orders from my apartment. I am forced to move in with my parents until the new house is ready, an unintended consequence of which is the luxury of a few days straight reading. Three days, to be precise. No need to dedicate a thesis to this one.

I don't intend to bang on too much about The Pale King. Enough has been written in the blogosphere to make Wallace's own prolific body of scribblings seem like mere pamphlets. Nor do I intend to harp on about how his suicide in 2009 robbed the world of one the greatest literary talents of his generation. Frankly, it angered me, though not as much as the subsequent idiotic rush to print anything he might have jotted down. His Amherst undergrad thesis, Fate, Time and Language is now a must-have for Arts students everywhere. Except it is rubbish and should have been left in his adviser's filing cabinet. There Is Some Water, his 2005 lecture at Kenyon College, is slight and hardly important. And don't even get me started on Everything and More. It's starting to look like Wallace is the Tupac of modern literature.

The Pale King is, and demands to be read as, an epitaph of sorts on his writing career. It is the novel he had been working on for years before depression got the better of him. A relatively slight 560 pages - well, slight for Wallace, probably less so for Camus - it is about the IRS. Yes, that's right. 560 pages about tax. Now, I've read the Australian Tax Act. It is of a similar length. And it is the most boring collection of consecutive verbiage that I have ever encountered. Which means I approached The Pale King with considerable trepidation. Thankfully, Wallace's lyrical gusto had me overlooking the subject matter for the most part. Sure, there are bits that drag and bits that needed a rewrite or a good edit. But there are also large sections that just sing. Like the first Author's Note, about four chapters in, in which Wallace 'the author' intrudes to comment upon Wallace the character and the nature of autobiography. Brilliant. And like the Chris Fogel novella, probably the longest riff in the book. Infuriatingly boring and engaging at the same time. Then there is the chapter that, in my opinion, far outshines anything else in the book. Or anything else Wallace ever wrote. It is a protracted conversation between Shane Drinion, the most boring man in the office, and Meredith Baxter, the most (only) beautiful woman and it is simply breathtaking. Nothing I can say here can possibly do it justice.

The Pale King is unfinished, though I suspect it is far closer to completion than we have been led to believe. You may therefore choose to read it as a work-in-progress or, like Infinite Jest, a complete novel that ends abruptly without resolution. Choose the former and you have an enlightening glimpse into the working brain of a genius and will be left to wonder what the finished product might have been. Choose the latter and you have a spirited, sometimes spectacular act of literary ventriloquism on one of the most boring topics imaginable. When all is said and done, The Pale King isn't quite as great as some will have you believe but it is still worth reading even if only for Wallace's stunning wordsmithery (which, ironically, I don't think is a word). In that regard The Pale King towers above all the pretenders. And at least you won't be a total poser lugging it around. You listening to me Arts students?

A Feeble Excuse

Apologies that this month is turning out to be something of a write off on B4BW. I'm trying to move house while ploughing through David Foster Wallace... A truly surreal experience. Full report next week! Also looking forward to reading through all 50 Penguin Mini Modern Classics in less than a month as well as finally sinking my teeth into some graphic fiction (having never progressed beyond GI Joe comics).

Fear And Self-Loathing In Paris: The Tenant by Roland Topor

Back in January I had a bit of a whinge about how my reading year had already been spoiled by the sheer brilliance of I. J. Singer's The Brothers Ashkenazi. Nothing, reasoned January me, could possibly hope to come close. Not to say I wasn't trying. I followed it up with The Border Trilogy for godsakes! But, as I fumbled my way through that and other supposed classics, hoping to find some spark of significance in their pages, I began to resign myself to eleven months of trashy magazines, vampire novels and pretty much anything written by Jodi Picoult. In other words, I was getting ready to give up on reading literary fiction altogether. Well, thank Franz I didn't because, in what can only be described as a random act of obscure reading, I stumbled across a work that has joined The Brothers Askenazi in my all-time top ten list. Take that, Women's Day Recommended Reading List!

Unlike with Singer's book, I have struggled to figure out how best to write about The Tenant, Roland Topor's nightmarish vision of big city alienation and paranoia. A month after the fact, I am still thoroughly disturbed by it. You may already be familiar with the story thanks to Roman Polanski's excellent adaptation, but chances are, like me, you will not have known it was based on a novel. As one friend put it, he had always assumed The Tenant was Polanski trying to out-Kafka Kafka. It is an interesting comment on the public's perception of the great auteur that the film is seen to have sprung from his mind, but it is precisely that perception which has relegated Topor to the shadows and denied him the critical attention he so greatly deserves.

The Tenant is a deceptively simple affair, depicting the mental collapse of Trelkovsky, a young man who moves into a new apartment following the suicide of its former tenant. From the outset, Trelkovsky senses something isn't right. His neighbours chastise him for the slightest of indiscretions. He feels he is being constantly watched. The neighbours try to involve him in a petition, possibly against himself. Worst of all, he feels the needs to change his ways in order to conform to their expectations of how a fellow tenant ought to behave. His descent into absolute despair, needless to say, is fast and spectacular.

Like the greatest works of Poe or Hitchcock, this is horror in its purest form, without the need for anything supernatural to scare the hell out of the reader. As Trelkovsky alienates everyone around him, as his paranoid conviction that his friends and neighbours are engaged in a dastardly conspiracy to actually turn him into the former tenant reaches an horrific crescendo, the book becomes as difficult to read as it is to put down. Indeed, the image of this haggard young man, fully dressed and made up as the young woman who had jumped to her death from his apartment's ledge, is even more harrowing than the denouement at the end of Psycho. And yet, I finished the book with a sense of euphoria, dazzled by the author's ability to toy so effortlessly with my mental wellbeing. Topor's trump card lies in the ending, where we are forced to reassess all that has come before and question it was real or simply a figment of Trelkovsky's shattered imagination.

I suspect The Tenant is the sort of book that lends itself to multiple readings and, as such, I'll definitely be back. I just may need a bit of time to recover before I do. Someone pass me the Picoult...