"Tropisms" by Natalie Sarraute

 One of the classics of the nouveau roman movement.

This extraordinary piece of experimental fiction consists of 24 vignettes. Many of these are written in such a cryptic form that it is difficult to decipher what is happening (you have to read it more than once). Not one of them contains a named character: they are all referred to by pronouns such as 'they' or 'she'. 

It's a bit like reading a book of poetry except that it is written in prose. It's a bit like looking at a work of abstract art. It reminded me of Erik Satie's music such as his Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes: short and mannered but haunting.

Sarraulte defined 'tropismes' thus: "ce sont des mouvements indéfinissables, qui glissent très rapidement aux limites de notre conscience ; ils sont à l'origine de nos gestes, de nos paroles, des sentiments que nous manifestons, que nous croyons éprouver et qu'il est possible de définir": they are the indefinable movements, which slither rapidly at the limits of our consciousness; they are the origins of our gestures, our words, the feelings that we show, that we think we experience and that it is possible to define". In plants, a tropism is a movement towards a stimulus, thus phototropism is when a plant turns towards the light and geotropism is when a root grows downwards under the influence of gravity.

So tropisms is like stream of consciousness except that it is dealing with preconsciousness. The book feels a little like reading James Joyce merged into the terse dialogue of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

The Guardian (21st October 1999) said "Sarraute's are tropisms with a human face, the buried, never quite conscious to-ings and fro-ings of the psyche that accompany all social contact, ... She is the unforgiving zoologist of our dissembling species, as observed in the habitat she shared with it, of 'civilised' Paris."

The first piece describes people window-shopping. In the 12th a teacher empties Proust and Rimbaud of their power. In the 21st a woman who used to be a "good" (ie docile) girl is now grown up and, submissively listening to others talk, she is overcome with an urge to feel, "shouting incoherencies".

A lot of the tropisms deal with relations between people and how the interior feelings are at odds with the external behaviours. There is often a sense of menace. For example, in the 19th when a man lets others crush and stamp on him and make him blunder into things; it is difficult to know whether he is deriving masochistic pleasure from this or is just too weak to stand up for himself. In the 4th piece there is a strange, sexual and cruel verbal ballet taking place between a man and some women: he seems to enjoy his power in directing the conversation. In the 5th a woman is lying in bed, absolutely still. ‘She hears someone come into the house and go into the study. Her husband? She dares not move. She senses that “the slightest act” might be a “provocation”. In the 15th “she so loved old gentlemen like him” but he grabs her and squeezes “harder and harder” and she can’t get away until her parents arrive.

It reminded me of Fleurs du mal by Baudelaire. 

It's a remarkable book.

Selected quotes:

• “And the quiet little children, whose hands they held, weary of looking, listless, weighted patiently beside them.” (Ch 1)
• “And he sensed percolating from the kitchen, humble, squalid human thought, shuffling, shuffling in one spot, always in one spot, going round and round, in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn't stop, as if they were nauseated but couldn't stop, the way we bite our nails, the way we tear off dead skin when we’re peeling, the way we scratch ourselves when we have hives, the way we toss in our beds when we can't sleep, to give ourselves pleasure and make ourselves suffer, until we are exhausted, until we've taken our breath away ...” (Ch 2)
• “And they talked and talked, repeating the same things, going over them, then going over them again, from one side then from the other, kneading and kneading them, continually rolling them between their fingers this unsatisfactory, mean substance that they had extracted from their lives ... kneading it, pulling it, rolling it and until it ceased to form anything between their fingers but a little pile, a little grey pellet.” (Ch 10)
• “There were a great many like her, hungry, pitiless parasites, leeches, firmly settled on the articles that appeared, slugs stuck everywhere, spreading their mucus on corners of Rimbaud, sucking on Mallarmé lending one another Ulysses or The Notebook of Malte Laurids Bigge, which they slimed with their low understanding.” (Ch 11)
• “But they asked for nothing more, this was it, they knew it well, you shouldn't expect anything, you shouldn't demand anything, that's how it was, there was nothing more, this was it, ‘life’.” (Ch 16)
• "Here we are at last all together, good as gold, doing what our parents would have approved of, here we all are then, well behaved, singing together like good little children that an invisible adult is looking after, well they walked gently around in a circle giving one another their sad, moist little hands.” (Ch 23)

Tropisms was voted 73rd in Le Monde's most memorable books of the twentieth century. 

October 2024; 84 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Wild Houses" by Colin Barrett

A thriller written in such wonderful prose that it must qualify as a literary novel. 

An innocent young lad is kidnapped because his elder brother hasn't paid a drug debt. The owner of the safe house, Dev, where the lad is kept has moral qualms about what is happening. And the lad's girlfriend, seventeen year old orphan Nicky, has to try and save him.

It is related from the alternating perspectives of Dev and Nicky. Both have moral decisions to make, a journey to travel. Dev's is perhaps the more challenging: he too is at risk from the kidnappers. Bullied at school, he never fought back. Can he find it in him to fight back now?

The victim is a boy named Doll, young and fresh, the very essence of vulnerability. The kidnappers Gabe and Sketch are men who ooze the threat of violence. And yet, much of the time, as they feed Doll, and let him shower, and find videos for him to watch, they seem kind and thoughtful, even caring. But just under the surface is their unpredictability and this keeps the reader always on the edge of his seat rushing through the pages.

But don't rush too fast. The prose is as fine as in any novel. There are descriptions to die for:

• “Georgie was a tiny, highly strung dog with a candyfloss coat covering a ribcage as fragilely fine-boned as a chicken’s. He had demonic yellow teeth, a wizened rat-like face and a moist, bloodshot, perpetually beseeching stare.” (Ch 1)
• “He was clean-shaven and if it wasn't for the missing runner and the nasty notch over the corner of his eye, he would have looked like any young fella you'd see shaping around the town on a Friday night, punctiliously spruced for the disco; short black hair brushed emphatically forward, and so sodden with rain and product it gleamed like melted tar, the top button of his baby-blue shirt closed clerically at the throat, dark jeans and the scouring bang of aftershave crawling off him like a fog.” (Ch 1) There are so many wonderful moments in this paragraph. 'Punctiliously spruced' and 'scouring bang' are fabulous pairings. The 'any young fella' turning Doll into an Everyman. The use of the word 'clerically' to describe the shirt, summoning and reinforcing the image of innocence. The way that his aftershave 'crawls' off him ' 'like a fog': we've all known young teenage boys who splash on so much cheap scent that it lingers around them.
• “A face on him like a vandalised church, long and angular and pitted, eyes glinting deep in their sockets like smashed-out windows.” (Ch 1) And this is one of the villains and he is represented as something sacrilegious and damaged.
• “The jangling dentition of crockery.” (Ch 7)

Sometimes the author makes comments about characters that are not strictly true:

• “Mothers have powers, and Dev's mother had them all. She was relentless, clairvoyant, could bend her son's will so adeptly to hers it felt like it was happening the other way around.” (Ch 6) But Dev's mother never realised that her son was being bullied at school, so much for her clairvoyance.
• “The Ferdias had the unreliability, but also the dangerous decisiveness, of creatures who did not understand their nature and did not care to understand it.” (Ch 10) But there are moments when the Gabe and Sketch Ferdia show, or at least appear to show, the glimmerings of self-awareness. 

Perhaps these moments are there to suggest that even an omniscient third-person narrator writing in the past tense might be unreliable. 

Selected quotes:

• “There's nothing wrong with talking to God. That's just pleading your case into the air and there's no harm in that, lots of people do that, my own mother used to do that. The trouble begins when God starts talking back.” (Ch 2)
• “The morning sky through the long curtainless window above the sink was as blue and clean as the ring of flame from a gas stove. It looked like the sky of another planet.” (Ch 5)
• “He could hear the shower going. He knocked and Sketch opened the door a crack. Behind him, steam and heat, the clamour of the water hammering the bottom of the tub, the kid's body a smudged pink presence on the other side of the curtain.” (Ch 5)
• “A gull was locked in mortal combat with a styrofoam carton.” (Ch 7)
• “When it came down to it, you were a kind of janitor or superintendent of your body, responsible only for its sanitation and presentation. You fueled it and disposed of its waste, showered it, dressed it. You brushed its hair and you cut its nails. But you could choose not to do these things and your body, regardless of your neglect, would simply carry on for as long as it could.” (Ch 12)
• “That was what made it all so difficult. You couldn't do anything until you did another thing first.” (Ch 12)

Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize 

October 2024; 255 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Journey of Simon McKeever" by Albert Maltz

A celebration of the resilience of an ordinary man.

Set in 1947, in the USA. Simon McKeever has worked hard all his life but now, aged 73, he is crippled by arthritis and unable to work and his pension is handed over to the proprietor of his Care Home. A chance encounter makes him believe that his arthritis can be cured by a doctor in LA. So, penniless, he decides to hitch-hike there.

It is a modern version of a pilgrimage to a religious site with a cure-all saint. In some ways it is a secular Pilgrim's Progress. The hero must overcome challenges and obstacles. Some of the people he meets on the journey will help him, some will cause him problems. He will be daunted. Perhaps his journey is no more than a fool's errand. But in the end, this book is a celebration of indomitability and the fact that most people are prepared to help their neighbour. 

On the journey, as you would expect in a story of this kind, McKeever remembers his past. He is an Everyman figure for that American generation, remembering the hardships of the depression, the fight for the working man to get fair treatment, the joys of a beer, and a dance, and a woman. There are sadnesses: how else did he end up alone and impoverished? But, in the end, he reminds himself of the pipelines and bridges he has built "to move the world one inch forward". (Ch 18)

It is written in a straightforward style. It's an utterly simple plot. The characters and the settings feel as real as the seat I'm sitting on. There is no great drama but that's the point: this is the story of little people. It gains its power and its beauty from that.

Albert Maltz was a novelist and screenwriter. His novel about the Germna resistance, The Cross and the Arrow, was distributed to US soldiers fighting in the Second World War, like The Great Gatsby. He worked on Hollywood screenplays until he was blacklisted (with Donald Trumbo) for refusing to testify before the Committee for Un-American Activities; he was sentenced to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.

In this novel, Maltz praises the work of other left-wing writers such as Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle about the horrors faced by the working man in the Chicago Meat-Packing Industry. 

Structurally, it reminded me of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce but Simon McKeever is so much more down to earth.

Selected quotes:

• “They were granted tobacco at the Home - a weekly ration of horse manure or mattress sweepings or whatever else the poetry of old men's bitterness might choose to call it.” (Ch 1)
• “Most people are half scared - did you ever think of that? Scared of what other people will say, scared of their boss, scared of their own hearts even.” (Ch 1)
• “As for himself, he knew beyond argument that each stage of life brought its own adventure when a man wasn't dead in his heart. There was a profound satisfaction in observing life in a sixty- or a seventy-year-old way; it was quite different from any other way, or so he had found.” (Ch 3)
• “There was only one thing important to a man: the road he had decided to travel. Any problems that arose were no more than hills to climb.” (Ch 3)
• “All tasks worried him dreadfully until they were completed.” (Ch 3)
• “From thirteen on I wiggled my rump like a dog with fleas.” (Ch 3)
• “Ain't you had the lesson yet that your worst enemy is the man who's done you a bad turn?” (Ch 5)
• “For an old man every year is the time of the locust.” (Ch 9)
• “He yearned and needed to believe that there was meaning to his life, and that there was a joy in being a Man - even a common, anonymous man - and that Men together were more than beasts in the field.” (Ch 13)
• “Some get tired and some lose their way. Some are ground down by others and some get turned mad. But the Earth still turns, and only a man has the power to dream. Up from the apes by his own doing, and that's the bright glory of it.” (Ch 14)
• “A life without happiness wouldn't be a good life at all, would it? but I guess a life without disappointment wouldn't be real.” (Ch 17)

October 2024; 234 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Agnes Grey" by Anne Bronte

 Anne Bronte's first novel was originally published as part of a three volume novel in which Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte made up the first two-thirds. As a result it received faint praise from the critics at the time, as being not so shocking as WH but having nothing like the bestseller status of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, another governess novel published shortly earlier.

I think the early critical response is justified: it is a very pale version of her sisters' works.

It is told in the first person (with a strange lurch into the third person at the end of chapter 7, when offering herself a character reference) and the past tense. At the start and the end, as if to frame the narrative, the narrator addresses the reader directly. 

Specifically, Bronte tells us from the start that this is a work of instruction. She says: "all true histories contain instruction” and she hopes that her history “might prove useful to some” (Ch 1) Then, in chapter 4, she says “My design, in writing the last few pages, was not to amuse, but to benefit those who might concern ... if a parent has, therefrom, gathered any useful hint, or an unfortunate governess received their slightest benefit, I am well rewarded for my pains.” In fact, Agnes is a bit of a goody-two-shoes. She rarely refrains from preaching a moral lesson. For example, in chapter 5 there is a debate about whether "creatures were all created for our convenience" and whether that means we have the right to "torment them for our own amusement". (This is in the context of the governess killing a brood of nestlings rather than letting her young pupil torture them to death; Anne doesn't seem to extend the argument to fox-hunting.) 

Later chapters have more moralising: 

• “He that loveth not, knoweth not God ... He that is born of God cannot commit sin.” (Ch 11)
• “If you cannot feel positive affection for those who do not care for you, you can at least try to do to them as you would they should do unto you; you can endeavour to pity their feelings and excuse their offences.” (Ch 11)
• “It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.” (Ch 17)

There's a certain amount of similar sermonising in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and I suspect Anne was a bit too fond of pointing out where her acquaintances strayed from what she saw as the true Christian message. 

Part of the problem is that Agnes suffers badly from the PLOMS, the ‘poor little old me syndrome’. She sets almost impossibly high standards of conduct for others. She is forever taking offence and then suffering in silence, only to pour our her grievances on her readers. As one of her pupils says: “Do, pray, try not to be so touchy! - there’s no speaking to you else.” (Ch 14)

I felt the plot lacked an overall structure; it was a bit memoirish (I understand it was based on Anne Bronte's real experiences). Penniless girl becomes a governess in a family where the children are spoiled rotten. She lacks any authority and finally, in an attempt to assert herself, is dismissed. She now goes to another family of spoiled brats but does a little better, having learned lessons. We're nearly half-way through before the possibility of escape appears, in the shape of a marriageable man, and now one of the spoiled brats has to jeopardise her chances. The second part actually unfolds as a plot; the first part seems to be merely introductory.

The characters are almost all one-dimensional. The rich families who employ her are almost all spoiled or selfish or tyrannical or inconsiderate. The clergyman she falls for is perfect in every way, if a little uncommunicative (he plays his cards so close to his chest that they seem to be inside his shirt). As for Agnes herself, she was meek to the point of toothlessness, long-suffering and patient and much too good to be true. Only Rosalie had anything approaching a character arc and they was straight from the stereotype and therefore as predictable as sunset.

The prose had its moments. Bronte was afraid of neither irony (“Mr Robson, the scorner of the female sex, was not above the foppery of stays.”; C 5) nor metaphor (“Then, ordering his sister to hold the reins, he mounted, and made me stand for ten minutes, watching how manfully he used his whip and spurs.”; Ch 2) nor using the pathetic fallacy. Describing the journey to her first governess appointment, the narrator says: “I looked back again: there was the village spire, and the old grey parsonage beyond it, basking in a slanting beam of sunshine - it was but a sickly ray, but the village and surrounding hills were all in some sombre shade ... I saw the sunshine departing, and I carefully avoided another glance, lest I should see it in gloomy shadow, like the rest of the landscape.” (Ch 1) She started her second job in the same way, on “a wild, tempestuous day; there was a strong north wind, with a continual storm of snow drifting on the ground and whirling through the air.” (Ch 7)

But the book does have perhaps the best last line I have ever read: “And now I think I have said sufficient.”

Selected quotes:

• “Her husband was a retired tradesman, who had realized a very comfortable fortune, but could not be prevailed upon to give a greater salary than twenty-five pounds to the instructoress of his children.” (Ch 1)
• “I had never been above twenty miles from home in all the course of my twenty years sojourn on Earth.” (Ch 6) The book records that some places were beginning to be linked by railways (Ch 7). Until the railways arrived, the vast majority of weddings in England were between two people from the same parish; within a few years after the railways had arrived the vast majority of weddings in England were between two people from different parishes.
• “The human heart is like india-rubber, a little swells it, but great deal will not burst it.” (Ch 13)
• “Who ever hung his hopes upon so frail a twig?” (Ch 21)
• “Alas! how far the promise of anticipation exceeds the pleasure of possession!” (Ch 21)

October 2024; 190 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Aunt Bessie Assumes" by Diana Xarissa

 A 'cosy' murder mystery set on the Isle of Man. 'Aunt' Bessie (an old spinster who has provided tea and sympathy to generations of disaffected teenagers) stumbles over a dead body on her early morning walk along the beach. With the local bobby on the beat, and the receptionist at the police station, and a friendly Inspector from 'across' (the water, ie from the mainland), she forms a small posse of investigators whose strength seems to be Aunt Bessie's ability to tune in to the local 'skeet' (Manx for gossip). 

A classic of its kind, perfectly paced with not too many suspects and some nice red herrings. The prose is stripped to the bones to provide narrative without frills; the characters are as standard and as stereotyped as any you will find in the subgenre. 

Selected quotes:

• “Kys t’ou?” she asked. “Ta mee braew,” Bessie answered with a grin. “Actually, I’m not really fine, I’m quite upset, but I don’t know how to say that in Manx.” (Ch 7)

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Permafrost" by Eva Baltasar

The first-person narrator is a suicidal lesbian from Barcelona. The first few chapters explore ways of ending herself: in chapter one she is in a high place, considering jumping, in chapter four she is next to a railway track. It feels a bit like jumping into freezing water. 

Except that in this water float not cubes of melting ice but jewels. The writer is a poet. She treats words like atoms of love that can be arranged and rearranged into molecules of magic. She crafts her sentences until they crystallise into the perfect observation, which not only paints what she's describing with unflinching accuracy and purity and clarity but also performs a forensic analysis which gets right to the heart of what it is and displays its simple truth. For which credit must also be given to the translator, Julia Sanches.

The plot? This is a bit too nouveau roman for a plot. It charts the narrator drifting through life, on a quest to find a reason to continue living, although the word 'quest' suggests a much more purposeful journey than this conceptual dérive. 

There are some moments of deep humour, such as when she castigates "unscrupulous people certified in first aid" who "foil death with cardiac massages and Heimlich manoeuvres. ... You can't even ram an olive pit down the wrong tube without them forcing you to spit it out, even if they break ribs or puncture lungs in the process. And there you are, covered in dry-martini puke, the olive pit hurled like a trophy at a corner of the room." (Ch 3)

The first few chapters (the ice plunge) are a difficult introduction but keep going: you'll get your breath back soon!

Described by Charlotte on goodreads as 'stream of pretentiousness'

Selected quotes:

• “I take a breath and make it mine as it courses through my animate airways.” (Ch 1)
• “‘When you grow up, you’ll understand,’ Mom never tired of saying. I must not have grown enough.” (Ch 2)
• “There's nothing more blinding than blood.” (Ch 6)
• “I harboured a deep insecurity that was fanned by my old-fashioned parents. ‘You can even draw a face out of a six and a four,’ Mom used to say, exercising the frank concern with which she kept my self-confidence in a near-vegetative state.” (Ch 7)
• “My life had been waylaid in a space that rippled with emptiness.” (Ch 7)
• “Doubt: the rift through which the world's heat slips in, a brazen violation of the permafrost.” (Ch 8)
• “Family, a first-rate solvent!” (Ch 10)
• “Some individuals can only grow as amputations.” (Ch 10)
• “In photos ... I always look like I've been superimposed. As if someone more childish yet far more powerful than any of us had a collection of paper-doll mes in various positions and decided to cut along my dotted outlines before pasting me into photos of other people who would later insist that they knew me.” (Ch 10)
• “I’d chosen Brussels because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was a city I knew I would like.” (Ch 12)
• “A considerate sister is like an information leaflet for contraceptives, with a list of contraindications and side effects as dangerous as a Gorgon.” (Ch 15)
• “Two or three customers shuffling around in their magnetic fields of loneliness.” (Ch 15)
• “Like coral snakes, not all marriages are poisonous - though it's best to keep your distance, just in case.” (Ch 16)
• “Modern psychobabble is like methadone for imbeciles!” (Ch 16)
• “As pure as a morning of blue skies.” (Ch 33)

October 2024; 122 pages

Eva Baltasar has also written Boulder. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Mrs Hemingway" by Naomi Wood

If you want to get any sense of how Ernest Hemingway became a Nobel laureate and progenitor of a stylistic school in literature, don't read this book. Read one of his novels instead. This book focuses on the women he married to the extent that he might as well have been a car salesman as a writer. 

The author Ernest Hemingway overlapped his wives: the next wife was his mistress towards the end of the tenure of the current wife. Thus first wife Hadley was replaced by her best friend Fife. Ernest was still married to Fife while carrying on an affair with journalist and author Martha Gellhorn who became Mrs H#3. Mary, the fourth wife, started sleeping with Ernest while he was married to Martha. Mary was, perhaps, lucky that Ernest shot himself (accident or suicide) before moving on from her.

This novel focuses on the overlaps. Which was a bit repetitive.

The narrative was from the perspective of the current wife, in the third person. The current time was written in the present tense; the flashbacks were narrated in the past tense.

The problem was that I wasn't particularly interested in the women. Apart from Martha, the other wives didn't really do anything exciting enough to warrant a biography (except marry Ernest). Perhaps this is why they only got a quarter of a biography each. But this compounded the problem. We never really grappled with any of them in depth.

Basically I was bored. I perked up a bit when we reached Martha. Martha Gellhorn was a journalist who became a great war correspondent, reminding me of photojournalist Lee Miller whom I learned about in the book The Age of Light and the film Lee. This book mentions her journalism and the novels she has written but, again, it doesn't really get into her as a writer. Focussing on her as a wife does her a disservice. It is said that she didn't want to become "a footnote in someone else's life" but this is exactly what she has become in this book. 

On the plus side, I realised that I haven't read any Hemingway for a long, long time and I ought to go back to him. 

Selected quotes:

• “The trees’ shadows pour onto the water like vinegar into oil.” (Ch 5)
• “The hangover: such a cure, she thinks, for overthinking.” (Ch 22) I'm not sure whether I like or dislike the double use of think in this sentence.
• “I put the needle on the same place in the same track and I expect a different tune.” (Ch 34)
• “His eyes are like the twin holes of a rifle.” (Ch 37) But does a rifle have two holes?

This was a book about the domestic circumstances of one of the major forces of twentieth century. It's a bit like writing a novel about the catering arrangements during the Olympic Games; I'd rather find out about the gold medallists.

September 2024; 317 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Down the Rabbit Hole" by Juan Pablo Villabolos

 A little boy grows up in his gangster father's fortress, surrounded only by henchmen. Beautiful and heartbreaking.

This tiny novel is narrated by Tochtli (his name means 'rabbit' in Nahuatl, Mexico's major indigenous language), a precocious, seven-year-old boy. He lives, with thirteen or fourteen other people, in a fortress he thinks is a palace with his gangster father whom he thinks is a king; the 'palace' has a room full of money and jewels and even four crowns. We see his claustrophobic world through his eyes. Of course his perceptions are distorted by what he has been told and his limited experience. Sometimes this is darkly funny: he rather likes the French because they have a habit of cutting off heads. Sometimes it is worrying: his dad has to shave Tochtli's head because "hair is like a corpse you wear on your head while you're alive ... that grows and grows without stopping, which is very sordid." (Ch 1) Sometimes it is downright sinister: he plays a question-and-answer game with his dad where "one person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell." (Ch 1) What he knows is disturbing: “There are actually lots of ways of making corpses, the most common ones are with orifices. Orifices are holes you make in people so their blood comes out. Bullets from pistols make orifices and knives can make orifices too.” (Ch 1) Unsuprisingly, his belly hurts all the time which a doctor diagnoses as a psychosomatic illness but "my mind isn't ill, my brain has never hurt." (Ch 1)

'Macho' is good, 'faggots' are bad. He doesn't like things that are 'sordid' or 'pathetic'. 

Tochtli's discovery of room full of armaments disturbs him because his dad told him the room was empty and being in a gang means that he and his dad shouldn't lie to one another. Tochtli resolves the situation by becoming mute (there are several examples in his little world of people who don't speak aloud, at least in front of Tochtli). So his father, who presumably needs to get out of Mexico for a while, takes Tochtli and his teacher, under false names, to Liberia to collect for Tochtli what the little boy wants: the (endangered) Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. And the adventure becomes funnier, more sinister, and sadder.

This is an astonishing book. In its child narrator with a restricted perspective it reminded me of the first part of Emma Donoghue's Room. In the way much of the humour (and the sadness) derives from the reader understanding so much more than the narrator, it reminded me of the Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend. 

Adam Thirlwell, in the Introduction to the & Other Stories edition of the Rosalind Harvey translation of this novel, describes this book as a fugue: "through his permutations of a limited set of perceptions and vocabularies, a devastated world emerges." It is a beautiful piece of writing.

Selected quotes:

• “What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don't cry all the time because I don't have a mum ... because people who cry are faggots.” (Ch 1)
• “The realist's favourite saying is you have to be realistic.” (Ch 1)
• “The best thing about being a king is that you don't have to work.” (Ch 1)
• “To be a king in Africa you have to kill lots of people. It's like a competition: the one who wears the crown is the one who's made the most corpses.” (Ch 1)
• “Today there was an enigmatic corpse on the TV: they cut off his head and he wasn't even the King. it didn't look like it was the work of the French either, who like cutting off heads so much.” (Ch 1)

September 2024; 70 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Roswell Incident" by Charles Berlitz and William Moore

 Did a flying saucer containing extraterrestrials crash-land near Roswell, New Mexico, USA in 1947?

This is the book that popularised the idea that it did. The primary author, Charles Berlitz, grandson of the man who founded the language school, had already written several books on paranormal phenomena including the highly successful The Bermuda Triangle.

The problem is that the evidence is utterly unconvincing. There is no physical evidence (a lack explained away using conspiracy theories). It is entirely based on witness testimony. Worse, the vast majority of this testimony is secondhand. The rancher (called Brazel, bizarrely the nephew of the man who shot Pat Garret, the man who shot Billy the Kid) who allegedly picked up the debris of a 'flying saucer' (or man-made balloon) is dead so we have to rely on what his children, and friends, say that he told them.  Sometimes the chain of witnesses becomes protracted, such as when the rancher's son repeats a story he was told by "a fellow who worked with me on a job in Alaska for a while" or when the rancher's neighbour's wife had a brother who was allegedly on the plane that flew the wreckage to a military depot.

If this was a court case with no forensic evidence and predominantly hearsay evidence it would be thrown out of court. So Berlitz and Moore do what any decent lawyer would do in these circumstances: they use rhetoric to blow smoke into the reader's eyes. For example, they give third-person evidence in the first person. They proclaim that their witnesses are reputable tellers of the truth. And they bring on 'expert' witnesses such as Meade Layne and Reilley Crabbe of the Borderland Sciences Research Foundation which sounds impressive until you discover (not from this book) that this Foundation researches 'scientific' topics such as human auras, telepathy, spirit communications and seances.

There is one first hand witness: Major Jesse A Marcel who was “ranking staff officer in charge of intelligence at the Roswell Army Air Base at the time of the incident.” (Ch 4) The authors make a great deal of (impressive) military credentials including his medals, being shot down, though I'm not sure that any of that attests to his honesty or his reliability as a witness; indeed, being in charge of intelligence might suggest a willingness to manipulate the truth. The authors don't speculate on why Major Marcel waited 31 years before claiming that the wreckage he saw was from a UFO. But he certainly saw the debris that was collected from the ranch and he now (after 31 years) testifies it was "definitely not a weather or tracking device, nor was it any sort of plane or missile.” A number of other witnesses claim the debris was not from a weather balloon but since the authors aren't prepared to say what weather balloon wreckage was like, the reader cannot make up their own mind.

I believe that something crashed. It was probably a high altitude surveillance balloon. Project Mogul was a top secret experimental attempt to use balloons to listen for shock waves coming from Russian nuclear tests; these were the early days of the Cold War. A balloon had been launched on June 4th 1947 and contact with it was lost close to Brazel's ranch. Crucially, the balloons used for Mogul were not weather balloons, using different materials such as polyethylene (which had only begun large scale manufacture in the US in 1944 and was therefore probably unknown to the witnesses). So the 'it was not a weather balloon' can be true and still not require the considerable leap of faith to believe that the wreckage was of extraterrestrial origin. 

What about the little grey men who were supposed to have been captured, dead or alive, and whose corpses are still believed by enthusiasts to be kept in an air force base somewhere? This book discusses them too but never points out that they aren't actually linked to Roswell. Their story also originated in Mexico but in Aztec in 1949. Two men called Newton and Gebauer were selling devices that claimed to use extraterrestrial technology to locate deposits of oil, gas and gold. The technology, they claimed, came from a flying saucer from Venus that had landed near Aztec in March 1948. 

Berlitz and Moore don't mention Newton and Gebauer. Of course not. They spend a lot of time and trouble asserting the credibility of their sources so the fact that this pair were subsequently convicted of fraud might undermine their case. Instead, Berlitz and Moore move on to asserting that there must have been a military cover-up because the military won't admit to having alien corpses in cold storage. 

It's not just the silliness of the claims they make that annoys me, it is the inadequate partiality of the way they treat the evidence. If something doesn't help their case they will scrutinise it, asking questions such as: why did he do this? or why did she not do that? But anything that supports their beliefs will be swallowed without scrutiny.

It is interesting to read this book as a textbook exercise in fallacy, rhetoric and gullibility. Otherwise, it is rather silly.

September 2024; 163 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Order of the Day" by Eric Vuillard

 

Where the Nuremberg rallies were held

Winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt, this short book analyses the inadequate and perhaps criminal attempts to stop the rise of the Nazis.

It consists of a series of brief tableaux in which men meet. First up is a bunch of German industrialists being persuaded to donate money to the Nazi party to fund the forthcoming elections. There is an account of the meeting between Hitler and the Chancellor of Austria in which the latter was browbeaten into accepting impossible demands. There is a cringeworthy luncheon party in which Chamberlain hosts Ribbentrop at the moment that Austria is being invaded. 

In summing up, the book says: “We never fall twice into the same abyss. But we always fall the same way, in the mixture of ridicule and dread.” (Who are all these people?) In each of the short chapters there is a (hindsight-driven) sense of inevitability worthy of a Greek tragedy. Yet, at the same time, the ordinary and the bathetic everyday turn the  drama into comedy, such as when mechanical breakdown and fuel shortages turn the Nazi invasion of Austria into a traffic jam of tanks. 

But is it fiction? The blurb describes this book as a novel. Yet it seems grounded in fact and meticulous research and the author provides a forensic analysis. Does this make it history, rather than historical fiction? I suppose it is the sort of 'true story' in which some episodes have been dramatised, like a TV drama-documentary, a work of faction. Something similar to Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally.

The author's detailed scrutiny apportions unforgiving blame. After the industrialists make their contributions the author comments: "Corruption is an irreducible line item in the budget of large companies, and it goes by several names: lobbying fees, gifts, political corruptions." But in the sentence before he has talked about "kickbacks and backhanders". These, he implies, are bribes. And in the final chapter he lists which of the companies owned by those 'captains of industry' profited from forced labour from inmates of concentration camps. As for Chamberlain's luncheon? “Before the war, Chamberlain, who owned several properties, apparently counted Ribbentrop among his tenants.” (Farewell Luncheon in Downing Street) Surely a conflict of interest! In the end, the author decides that Ribbentrop deliberately prolonged the luncheon to delay the British government's response, aware that the olde-worlde courtesy of the British would trump the urgency of business.

It is beautifully written. It reads as if the author has taken care in selecting every single word. 

Selected quotes:

• “Most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.” (A Secret Meeting)
• “Palladio rather nebulously defines a salon as a living room, the stage on which we play out the vaudeville of our existence.” (Masks)
• “The English aristocrat, the diplomat standing proudly behind his little line of forebears, deaf as trombones, dumb as buzzards, and blind as donkeys, leaves me cold.” (A Courtesy Call)
• “It rained outside and drops struck the pains like a piano sonata played by an inexpert hand.” (A Day on the Phone)

An exquisite miniature. September 2024; 129 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God