"White Nights" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

An incredibly lonely young man meets a manipulative woman in a story filled with ambiguities, contradictions and half-turhs.

 A short story rather than a novel; nevertheless I regard it worthy of a blog entry in its own right. It is Dostoevsky after all. And absolutely jam-packed with interest.

It is subtitled: “A sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer.”

Plot with spoilers.

The unnamed narrator is a very lonely man, so lonely that he talks to houses. His awkward manners have driven away any friends he might have had. He regards the people he sees every day on the street as his friends, although he can never summon up the courage to talk to them. As a result, “They, of course, do not know me, but I know them.” Even his emotions are controlled by others: if the people he ‘knows’ are smiling he feels happy etc. 

But in this season of 'white nights' (June 11th to July 2nd when there is twilight at midnight because St Petersburg is so close to the Arctic Circle) people are starting to go off to their summer estates so he's missing even these familiar faces and he feels lonelier still.

So lonely that he even anthopomorphises the houses he passes in the street. He imagines one “cute rosy-pink” (and feminine) being painted yellow [which was the colour of lunatic asylums] thus being defiled by barbarians. Is this some sort of rape fantasy; does it imply a patriarchal assumption that a ‘used’ woman is defiled? There's something creepy about his loneliness.

He's also, by his own account, inexperienced with women. “I am a complete stranger to women. ... I am twenty-six and I have never seen any one” though he later qualifies this by saying that he has met two or three landladies [I presume they are lower class so they don’t count; I wasn't sure whether he is a virgin because in those days sex with prostitutes didn't necessarily count]. 

He encounters a girl weeping on the embankment. He passes by, unable to speak, until a drunk chases her and he runs after then to save her from being insulted. The ice broken, he walks her home and begs to meet again the following night. He's so lonely he has fallen in love at once - he tells her “I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year.” This behaviour might today be seen as a bit stalkerish.

The second night, she asks to know his 'history'. He grows alarmed: "Who has told you I have a history? I have no history. ... I have lived ... keeping myself to myself, that is, utterly alone.” He then goes into a long speech which reveals almost nothing of his 'history' (he doesn't even tell her his name). Instead, he calls himself “a type ... an original ... an absurd person ... a dreamer” and this initiates a long speech full of passion and long paragraphs that reminded me of the character of the Underground Man in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. 

She then tells him her 'history'; she too has a highly-restricted social life being (literally) pinned to the skirt of her grandmother in the evenings. Nevertheless she has got a boyfriend who has promised to marry her when he gets back from a year making money in Moscow. However, the year is over and he hasn't returned. The narrator suggests she writes a letter but she already has and she asks him to deliver it which sounds a bit manipulative to me.

By the fourth night when the boyfriend still hasn't shown up she decides to dump him and the narrator professes his love for her and she accepts. They make plans to marry. But as they return to her home, the ex-boyfriend turns up and she goes back to him.

The next day, alone again with his landlady, he imagines growing old, a lonely man. 

Style

The opening line is: “It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.” The concept is that these are extracts from a diary, but right from the start, Dostoevsky directly addresses the reader in the character of the narrator.

Ambiguity is built into the dialogue through the repeated use of ellipses. This reminded me of how the dialogues in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James frequently used this device to enable to Governess to make assumptions about the motivations of the other characters.

Unreliability is also an integral part of the story. For example, on the third night the narrator tells us “she has not come” when he arrives at their rendezvous and then, after meeting her, "she arrived a whole hour before I did.” Much of what Nastenka says is either manifestly untrue (she can't always be pinned to her grandmother since she is able to meet the narrator on the embankment four nights in a row) or self-contradictory. 

And there's a lot that isn't said. The narrator never tells us his name and gives us very little of his history. Nastenka refuses to specify the "pranks" that got her into trouble when she was fifteen.

Characters:
The narrator-protagonist is unnamed. He calls himself a dreamer. He is socially awkward, interacting so badly with those who try to befriend him that he drives them away. As a result he is lonely. He is too shy to initiate conversations and when chance in the shape of an alpha male who tries to assault a weeping young girl leads to an encounter, he almost instantly and rather creepily falls in love with her. He is passionate and unrestrained and self-obsessed and emotionally crippled and perhaps unreliable and lying to us. 

Nastenka, the young girl. At first sight she is also emotionally crippled, being (literally) pinned to her blind grandmother's dress. Nevertheless, she has rebelled. When she was fifteen she “got into mischief; what I did I won't tell you; it's enough to say that it wasn't very important.” As a result, she has been effectively imprisoned at home. But this can't be true because she has no problem meeting the narrator on four consecutive nights. She's a liar. She's also a manipulator. When the narrator urges her to write a letter to her boyfriend, it appears she has already written one which she wants him to deliver. She teases him along - even when they are waiting to together to meet her ex on the 3rd night, she takes the narrator's hand because, she tells him, she wants her boyfriend to see how fond she and the narrator are of one another; when, also on the 3rd night, they decide that the ex isn't coming she tells the narrator: “We shall always be together shan’t we?” and he thinks “Oh, Nastenka, Nastenka! If only you knew how lonely I am now!” - and when on the fourth night he finally confesses his love for her she acts surprised but she is clearly pretending: “I knew you loved me long ago, only I always thought that you simply liked me very much.” In the end, when she decides that she has been dumped by her ex, she almost immediately settles for second-best in the form of the narrator ... and then dumps him with alacrity when the ex turns up. She still wants to string him along, telling him in a letter he receives on the morning after the fourth night: “You have forgiven me, haven’t you? You love me as before? ... You will like him, won’t you?” Talk about eating your cake and still wanting to have it! I reckon the narrator has had a lucky escape.

Nastenka's grandmother is blind and has hitherto strictly controlled Nastenka, She was concerned that the lodger with whom Nastenka does fall in love is "youngish" and "pleasant-looking" (according to Nastenka). Nevertheless, towards the end of the story she is looking for a new lodger and she seeks an eligible young man because she wants to get Nastenka married off. 

Matrona, the narrator's landlady, is described as “always thoughtful and depressed” in the Second Night and she isn’t bothered about the spiders’ webs in his room, but by the last section (Morning) she has cleaned the place so that, as she says, “you can have a wedding here”. She seems to mimic the narrator, starting as a dreamer and later becoming actively involved. At then end, when he imagines growing old, it is her he sees. 

Cultural references:
During the narrator's long impassioned speech during the second night, he lists a number of things of which he dreams:

• “Friendship with Hoffmann”. I presume this is E T A Hoffmann, a leading romantic writer in the 19th century, whose stories formed the basis for Offenbach’s opera ‘Tales from Hoffmann’, and one of whose short stories inspired Tchaikobsky’s Nutcracker suite
• “St Bartholomew’s Night” Does this refer to the St Bartholomew's day massacre in France?
• “Diana Vernon” who is a character in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy
• “Playing the hero at the taking of Kazan by Ivan Vassilyevich” Ivan Vassilyevich is the tsar better known as Ivan IV 'the Terrible'. He besieged and captured Kazan in 1552, massacring the mainly Tatar population and putting an end to the Khanate of Kazan which was incorporated into the Russian Empire.
• “Clara Mowbray” is the heroine of another Waverley novel by Sir Walter Scott, this one called St Ronan’s Well.
• “Effie Deans” is yet another Scott heroine, this time from The Heart of Midlothian. At the start of the novel she is in prison for child murder. After her half-sister Jeanie walks all the way to London to secure a royal pardon for her, Effie flees with her lover. Years later she visits Jeanie as ‘Lady Staunton’ and explains to Jeanie “I am a liar of fifteen years standing”. Is she the model of another mendacious woman?
• “The council of prelates and Huss before them”. Jan Hus, a Czech theologian and proto-Protestant, was convicted of heresy at a church council which he attended after being given a safe-conduct; he was burnt at the stake.
• “The rising of the dead in ‘Robert the Devil’”. This is a chorus from act 3 of the opera Robert le diable by Meyerbeer
• “Minna and Brenda” are characters in ‘The Pirate’ by - guess! - Walter Scott
• “The battle of Berezina” was an action of 1812 in which the Russians failed to destroy the retreating French under Napoleon as they crossed the river of Berezina. 
• “Danton” is, I presume, the French revolutionary
• “Cleopatra ei suoi amante” is Cleopatra and her lover. Another doomed love affair.
• “A little house in Kolomna”. Kolomna is the name of the district in St Petersburg where Dostoevsky lived for a while.

Nastenka also has read the entire oeuvre of Sir Walter Scott (her favourite is Ivanhoe). She has also read Pushkin. Her granny refuses to let her read French novels.

The lodger-boyfriend takes her and granny to the opera, starting with The Barber of Seville by Rossini. This involves a woman (Rosina) who is kept secluded by her guardian (because he wants her dowry, does Nastenka's granny have a financial motive to her holding on to Nastenka?). Count Almavira wants to marry Rosina and to gain access to her disguises himself as first a poor student, then a drunken soldier and then a singing teacher. Rosina at one moment agrees to marry her guardian but is later persuaded to marry the Count, so another example of a flip-flopping woman. The 'Barber' himself is Figaro (Mozart's opera, the Marriage of Figaro, is based on the sequel which was regarded as subversive to the point of seditious when it was written). 

Questions I still haven't answered:

1. Why is the narrator anonymous? (And ‘the lodger’)
2. Is the narrator reliable? To what extent can we trust what he says?
3. Is Nastenka manipulating him? He tells her to write a letter to the lodger ... and she already has it written!
4. In the first part, is NP really a rather sinister stalker?
5. Does NP actually post the letter to the lodger? He offers to be an intermediary but is this so that he can keep the lovers apart?

Selected quotes:

• “In these corners ... quite a different life is lived, quite unlike the life that is surging round us, but such as perhaps exists in some unknown realm, not among us in our serious, over-serious, time. Well, that life is a mixture of something purely fantastic, fervently ideal, with something ... dingily prosaic and ordinary, not to say incredibly vulgar.” (2nd night)
• “The dreamer ... is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort. For the most part he settles in some inaccessible corner, as though hiding from the light of day; once he slips into his corner, he grows to it like a snail. ... Why do you suppose he is so fun of his four walls, which are invariably painted green, grimy, dismal and reeking unpardonably of tobacco smoke? Why is it that when this absurd gentleman is visited by one of his few acquaintances (and he ends by getting rid of all his friends), why does this absurd person meet him with such embarrassment, changing countenance and overcome with confusion, as though he had only just committed some crime within his four walls?” (2nd night)
• “He cannot himself remember what he was dreaming. But a vague sensation faintly stirs his heart and sets it aching, some new desire temptingly tickles and excites his fancy, and imperceptibly evokes a swarm of fresh phantoms. Stillness reigns in the little room; imagination is fostered by solitude and idleness; it is faintly smouldering, faintly simmering, like the water with which old Matrona is making her coffee.” (2nd night)
• “Today was a gloomy, rainy day without a glimmer of sunlight, like the old age before me.” (3rd night)
• "Why is it that even the best of men always seem to hide something from other people?” (3rd night)
• “My God, how it has all ended! What it has all ended in!” (4th night)
• “I saw myself just as I was now, fifteen years hence, older, in the same room, just as solitary.” (Morning)
• “My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?” (Morning)

Novels by Dostoevsky reviewed in this blog:

• The Brothers Karamazov
• The Double
• Notes from Underground

Originally published in Russian in 1848

I read a translation into English, part of 'Greatest Short Stories of Dostoevsky' published by Fingerprint in paperback in 2025

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

"TIME / LIFE" by Catherine Mayer

 

An exploration of love in the face of loss.

Dory Silver, a journalist whose partner Morgen, a musician, is seriously, perhaps terminally, ill, is on stage to interview tech billionaire Elo Ó hAllmhuráin (pronounced O’Halloran) when he takes her into the future in his time machine to prove to her that time travel is possible. Unfortunately things go wrong. Stuck in the future, Dory remembers her life while trying to find a way to escape back to the past. 

It's a lot more than a homage to The Time Machine by H G Wells. It has a clever plot, alternating past and future, with a number of twists. 

There are elements of autofiction. The subtitle is "A Memoir by Dory Silver" and in the afterword, 'A Note from Catherine Mayer', the author continues the pretence that the narrative was sent to her by email. There are real people thoughout the plot eg Hayflick of the Hayflick limit (a maximum number of cell divisions enforcing a maximum human life span), Kurzweil the futurologist, and David Bowie. Both fictional Dory and real-life author Mayer have worked for TIME magazine. In particular there are a number of references to Andy Gill, late musician and member of the Gang of Four and Mayer's partner in real life, perhaps a prototype for the character of Morgen. All these things add verisimilitude (which is something a time travel narrative needs). 

There are a lot of moments where Mayer subtly plays with time. For example, it is suggested that Morgen has Covid even though he developed the disease before it emerged in China: time travel or coincidence? Dory, remembering her anonymity at university, thinks  “Ignorance and curiosity are the true comfort of strangers.” (part 1: 00:00) Dory in the future recalls this statement and thinks it is a quote but can’t remember who said it. Another little hint that the time of one's life can be convoluted.

Here are some more quotes from the text referring to time (and there are many more):

• “Every hour is happy hour. A smattering of customers, seated at the bar, abstracted and solitary, belied that message.” (part 1: 00:00)
• “Every slither of Life becomes memory ... Every memory dissolves. This too shall pass.” (part 1: 01:00)
• “The butterflies had quit the tree to flit in a haze of dandelion clocks.” (part 1: 02:00)
• “Nostalgia rarely survives close inspection. Zoom in on any period and it resolves into pixels, the good, the bad, the banal, the beautiful, all mixed together, as if in varying proportions.” (part 1: 03:00)

But where the book really takes off is in its exploration of the love between hard-bitten journalist Dory and the possibly dying Morgen. Love in the face of loss. It is tender, it is tragic, it is everyday. 

Characters

• As a largely autobiographical narrator-protagonist, the character of Dory Silver is very well developed. 
• Given that Morgen, Dory's partner, spends most of the time ill in bed, it must have been difficult to develop their character, but they nevertheless come across as three dimensional and real. I presume this is because they are based on Andy Gill, although they exist without pronouns and there's a hint that this might not be a cis relationship given that Dory states: “Our biologies may have ruled out natural conception, but nature can be circumvented.” (Part 2: 08:00). 
• The other main character, Elo the tech billionaire, a tech billionaire who has developed phones and tablets, computer games (one is called Morlocks, presumably in homage to The Time Machine), and a social media site called Fleet which fosters extremist views, transcends the initial satire to become considerably more complex and interesting. 

Selected quotes:

•  “Expecting, people call her condition. though she has glowered rather than glowed through these last long months, she takes no comfort in their expiration.” (part 1: 00:00)
• “In the few seconds it took to remove it, decipher the inscription, intimacy kit, and drop it back in its tray, the refrigerator charged her room.” (part 1: 00:00)
• “Hunger shook Dory awake in the morning, tapped her on the shoulder before she finished breakfast and lodged petitions every few minutes for the rest of the day.” (part 1: 05:00)
• “Cities tend to offer more and better insights into civilizations than rural areas.” (part 1: 05:00)
• “You eat what you are.” (Part 2: 08:00)
• “Unstructured time is the agar jelly in which ideas grow, no matter how dangerous these might prove.” (Part 2: 09:00) aka The devil makes work for idle hands.
• “Popular culture might depict cuckolds as avenging furies, but it's their unfaithful partners who behave as if they've been wronged.” (Part 2: 10:00)
• “She had assumed Elo to be criminally reckless in the way of many tycoons, their products and services faulty, their data -gathering dangerous, their contributions to climate change oversized, their wealth obscene.” (Part 2: 10:00)
• “Hatred is a virus that leaps from one host to another.” (Part 2: 10:00)

This debut novel is more than a remarkably intelligent contribution to the genre of time travel; it is also a eloquent and moving love letter to those lost through the pandemic.

May 2025; 213 pages

My pre-publication edition was issued by Renard Press in 2025

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

"James" by Percival Everett

 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain retold from the point of view of runaway slave Jim. Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

It seems that retelling classic stories is in vogue. I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys which took the character of Bertha Rochester nee Mason from Jane Eyre and used the change of perspective as a feminist critique. I adored Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead which relocated David Copperfield to Appalachia. She developed a much stronger voice for her protagonist than Dickens had for his and the theme of drug addiction gave her novel urgency. 

Similarly, Everett's theme is the despicable crime against humanity that is slavery and the associated denial of human dignity to people of African ancestry. His strategy for highlighting this is to make James and his fellow slaves far more articulate than their stereotypes as found, for example, in Twain's novel. They use the slave patois as a disguise so the white folks don't realise that the slaves are intelligent; this would scare the whites, endangering the slaves. As James says: “Safe movement through the world dependent on mastery of language, fluency.” (1.2) 

It's a clever trick. But it seems to be Everett's only trick, apart from the change in perspective from Huck to James. After a while, he seemed to be repeating the same joke in case the reader hadn't cottoned on earlier. Otherwise this is a straightforward novel. Inevitably, given that Twain's original was a picaresque, this one has to be loosely structured which made it feel disorganised. This made some of the resolutions feel coincidental and contrived. 

The most interesting part, for me, revolved around Huck's changing relationship with James and how his experiences matured him, leading him to the statement “‘I don't like white folks,’ he said. ‘And I is one.’” (1.5) while still leaving his behaviour warped by the deep-seated subconscious attitudes he had developed through his childhood.

It was an easy read and an entertaining one but somehow it always stayed, for me, as a shadow of Huckleberry Finn rather then blossoming into a work of literature in its own right. 

I suspect that the reason I was underwhelmed by a book that others rate so highly is that this is a book that relies for its power on what it says (a perceptive condemnation of slavery and racism) but was less innovative than I had been led to expect in how it said it.

Selected quotes:

• “Those boys couldn't sneak up on a blind and deaf man while a band was playing.” (1.1)
• “Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.” (1.2)
• “If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ‘splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinds God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.” (1.12)
• “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.” (1.21)
• “Even in hell, were there such a place, one would know where the fires were just a little cooler, where the rocks were just a little less jagged.” (3.5)

May 2025; 303 pages

First published in 2024 in the USA by Doubleday

My paperback edition issued in the UK in 2025 by Picador

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

"Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons

 This is a funny book with a big reputation. I vaguely remember reading it many years ago and enjoying it but I had blotted out most of the details.

The style of writing is heavily satirical, designed to parody a hugely popular (at the rime) genre of novels with earthy rural settings. The most outrageous paragraphs are marked with stars "in the manner of Herr Baedeker" so the reader "can be sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle" (Foreword) such as these (2 stars and 3 stars respectively): 

• “Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.” (Ch 3)
• “The blank eyes burrowed through the foetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung.” (Ch 19)

Fundamentally, it is a glorious send-up, over the top in every possible way, from the names of the cows (Feckless, Pointless, Graceless and Aimless, one of whom loses a leg but seems to manage without it) to the one-dimensionality of the characters (love god Seth, old Adam who is said to be 90 and yet sings a "smutty wedding song he had learnt for the marriage of George I" who died in 1727, the eternally depressed Judith, Aunt Ada Doom hiding in her bedroom for twenty years having seen "something narsty in the woodshed" when she was two, ethereal Elphine, hell-fire preacher Amos, and modern novelist Mr Mybug to mention but a few). The language is a delight, from words that are completely made up such as 'sukebind' (a plant) or 'mollocking' (having sex) to words that she has dragged bag from the 'obsolete'; section of the dictionary such as 'bartery', 'thought-whelmed', and 'beasten-housen'.

The plot involves modern girl Flora travelling to deepest darkest Sussex (as someone who lives in East Sussex I was amused to find my bright metropolitan county depicted thus) to live with her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. They are all trapped in the most depressing and muddy of rural lives. Flora is a practical and positive young lady and battles to improve their lives. Will she succeed or will she be dragged down with them into the endless mire?

So what's wrong with it? 

• As with so many novels of the time, it is disfigured by some casual racism, such as the mention of a "Jew-shop" in Chapter 2. 
• I was surprised to find that it was set in the future. In chapter two a bra designed in 1938 is mentioned. When she decides to travel down to Sussex she goes by train rather than fly because "there is no landing-stage nearer than Brighton". In chapter 12, telephones are fitted with television (yes, she uses the word in 1932) screens. "The Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46" are mentioned in chapter 15. This science fiction seemed totally unnecessary.
• I also thought that it took surprisingly long to get going. We don't get to the farm until the third chapter and we have already read a huge 7% of the book before the inciting incident, a classic letter from Judith Starkadder: “So you are after your rights at last. Well, I have expected to hear from Robert Poste's child these last twenty years. Child, my man once did your father a great wrong. If you will come to us I will do my best to atone, but you must never ask me what for. ... We are not like other folk, maybe, but there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort, and we will do our best to welcome Robert Poste’s child.” (Ch 2)

But once it gets going, the reader is repeatedly delighted by the endless inventiveness and the glory of the language. So what if the plot is silly and a tad predictable. This novel is meant to entertain and it does that in mattocks.

Selected quotes:

• “His voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man.” (Ch 3) Seth is wonderfully one-dimensional as the love-god who finds the pressure of his female admirers rather too much and really just wants to spend an enjoyable afternoon at the talkies.
• “Then animation fell from him, a sucked straw. His body sunk into the immemorial posture of a man thought-whelmed. He was a tree-trunk; a toad on a stone; a pie-thatched owl on a bough.” (Ch 4) Wonderful description! Pie-thatched!
• “Mrs Starkadder was the Dominant Grandmother Theme, which was found in all typical novels on agricultural life.” (Ch 5)
• “Do you think I could have the curtains washed? I believe they are red; and I should so like to make sure.” (Ch 5)
• “She had a lively acquaintance with confinements through the work of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones. their descriptions of what was coming to their less fortunate married sisters usually ran to ... eight or nine pages of staccato lines containing seven words, and a great many dots arranged in threes.” (Ch 6)
• “It was too true that life as she is lived had a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.” (Ch 8)
• “Elfine: a light, rangy shape which had the plastic contours of a choir-boy etched by Botticelli, drawn against the thin cold sky of spring.” (Ch 10)
• “Old tides lapped his loins.” (Ch 10)
• “Those Bloomsbury-cum- Charlotte-Street lions which exchanged their husbands and wives every other weekend in the most broadminded fashion.” (Ch 10)
• “She felt like stout Cortez or Sir James Jeans on spotting yet another white dwarf.” (Ch 11)
• “It was impossible to sit down for five minutes in Hyde Park after seven o'clock in the evening without being either accosted or arrested.” (Ch 11)
• “Choir-boys are seldom sexless, as many a harassed vicaress knows to her cost.” (Ch 11)
• “Her hands, burnt and bone-modelled as a boys, were clenched.” (Ch 11) Bone-modeled!!!
• “The lights in the windows had a leering, waiting look, like that on the faces of old pimps who sit in the cafes of Holborn Viaduct, plying their casual bartery.” (Ch 16)
• “Flora ... felt as though she were at one of Eugene O’Neill’s plays; the kind that goes on for hours and hours and hours, until the RSPC Audiences batters the doors of the theatre in and insists on a tea interval.” (Ch 16)
• “They ... made their supper off beef, beer and pickled onions, pleasantly spiced by anxiety and speculation.” (Ch 20)

A joy to read.

April 2025; 224 pages

First published in 1932

My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 2006

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

"Guy Debord" by Andy Merrifield

 A surprisingly readable biography of political thinker and activist, writer and film-maker, Guy Debord who was influential in the 1968 Paris riots. 

I became interested in Debord when reading M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again which is influenced by the idea of the dérive which this book defines as "drift" and originated as "a dreamy trek through varied Parisian passageways, forever on foot, wandering for hours, usually at night, identifying subtle moods and nuances of neighborhoods.” (Ch 2) Then I was impelled to read this biography after encountering Guy Debord in Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake: I think she bases her character of Bruno Lacombe on Debord. 

I was expecting the biography to be rather dry and not a little hard to understand. How wrong I was. Despite a penchant for lists, Merrifield is a fluent writer so his prose is easy to read, he never delves to deeply into the philosophy and what he does explain is reasonably comprehensible. Add in the fact that Debord had an interesting life, and that the fringe politics of the era was filled with swashbuckling (if brutal) factions such as the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Faction,  and that there is an actual real-life murder mystery in chapter four, and this academic text became a page turner. 

The young Debord was a student at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s but this seems more a rationale for living in Paris, drinking heavily, frequenting the cafes, talking philosophy and becoming involved with Leftist students. He never finished his degree. Instead, he became a leading member of the Lettrists before breaking away to found the Situationist International (which at its founding included a leading member of the London Psychogeographical Association). The Situationists used the technique of détournement to satirise the establishment. 

He began making films and writing books. Presumably somebody sponsored him because he never seems to have had any conventional employment: “Nobody knew how Debord got by. He had no job, didn't want a job, opting instead to reside in a rich and happy poverty.” (Ch 2). He came to prominence with "The Society of the Spectacle" which became a suces d'estime on its publication in 1967 and is thought to have been the catalyst for the 1968 student riots in Paris, in which Debord participated although he was nearly twice the age of many of the other leaders. 

By now he was a celebrity of the left-wing and he continued writing (and making films) while living mostly abroad. Later he returned to France spending summers in rural seclusion and winters in Paris. He died by suicide after suffering from alcohol-induced peripheral neuritis.

He was a fan of the proto-surrealist poems of Lautreamont and a friend of Alexander Trocchi who wrote Cain's Book and invited him to New York where he lived in a barge on the Hudson river. He identified with the romantic bad boy characters from French literature and history, such as the mediaeval poet Francois Villon, the novelists Louis-Ferdinand Celine (author of Journey to the End of Night) and Pierre Mac Orlan and Cardinal Gondi, the 17th century cardinal whose street protests against Louis XIV led to the rebellion called the Fronde. Cardinal Gondi was a colourful character. “The cardinal was an odd mix of Catholic holy man - who never actually believed - and libertine. He was a priest and a duellist,  a courtier and a conspirator. He womanized while he spread the gospel ... he simultaneously incited mob violence and earnestly preached peace. He was duplicitous and conniving, both worshipped and reviled, as he indulged in a life of intrigue and bewildering adventure.” (Ch 3) Debord liked to be called Gondi.

Has he a legacy? Merrifield clearly thinks that capitalism has triumphed since Debord's time and that this make Debord's critique even more important: “History has never seemed so open, so unstable ... wars and terrorism, financial meltdown, ethnic cleansing, religious conflicts, class exploitations, epidemic diseases, irresponsible American imperial might. More than 1 billion people now scramble to make ends meet on less than a dollar a day. Meanwhile, the net worth of the world's 358 richest individuals equals the combined income of the world's poorest 45 per cent - some 2.3 billion people.” (Ch 6)

Selected quotes:

• “As they shifted in and out of public spaces, they were intent on accumulating rich qualitative data, grist to their ‘psychogeographical’ mill, documenting odors and tonalities of the cityscape, its unconscious rhythms and conscious melodies: ruined facades, foggy vistas of narrow, sepia-soaked streets, nettle-ridden paving stones, empty alleyways at 3am, menace and mayhem, separation and continuity.” (Ch 1)
• “If the Sacre-Coeur trampled over the legacy of the Communards, Pompidou [centre built in 1969] did likewise over the soixante-huitards.” (Ch 2)
• "The unitary city would be disruptive and playful ... it would emphasize forgotten and beleaguered nooks and crannies, mysterious corners, quiet squares, teaming neighborhoods, pavements brimming with strollers and old timers with berets sitting on park benches.” (Ch 2)
• “Humans are protean beings, desiring differentiated practice, needing meaningful and fulfilling activity.” (Ch 2)
• “Society has always rewarded mediocrity, always rewarded those who kowtow to its unfortunate laws.” (Ch 2)
• “In leisure time, workers became consumers ... private life became the domain of the advertisement ... of movie and pop stars and glamorous soap operas, of dreaming for what you already know is available, at a cost.” (Ch 3)
• “Mass consumption and commodities fill the frame and pollute the mind ... The diffuse spectacle thrives off the gadget, the gimmick, the fad. ... in accumulation for accumulation’s sake.” (Ch 3)
• “Dramatic weather patterns aren't too dissimilar to storms that break out across the economic and political landscape. Each, after all, takes place when the temperature is hottest, when the pressure dial approaches danger level. Often nobody pays attention to the inclement forecast. In such heat, wealth accumulates, business booms and stock prices grow, until, suddenly, the bubble bursts and the heavens open.” (Ch 4)
• “Truth ... becomes like storytelling; each tale is difficult to adjudicate, because everything has relative plausibility.” (Ch 5)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth, a novel by Patrick Modiano, takes its title from a line in Debord's masterpiece film ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ (We Wander in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire)April 2025; 153 pages

A beautifully readable book about a surprisingly romantic philosophe.

Published in 2005 as part of their series of Critical Lives by Reaktion Books.

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

"Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner

A fascinating mixture of thriller and novel of ideas that was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

‘Sadie Smith’, the narrator protagonist, is an agent provocateur for hire. Originally working for the American authorities, she was sacked after a court case in which the jury believed the defence of entrapment; now she is freelance in Europe. Her latest assignment is to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in a remote and rural valley in France; she is to persuade them to do something illegal. To prepare for this, she has married the childhood friend of Pascal, the commune leader; she also hacks into the rambling emails of Bruno, a cave-dwelling, raw-food eating hermit and philosophe who acts as guru to the commune.

The tension is considerable. Will the communards trust Sadie or will they penetrate her lies? Will her past catch up with her? Will she locate Bruno or will his ideas seduce her so that she betrays her employers rather than her new friends? It all builds up to a nail-biting climax when ... Unfortunately, I found the denouement a bit of a damp squib.

My problems started early. Bruno’s emails. There are a lot of these peppered through the narrative, frequently interrupting the action. This is where the novel becomes a novel of ideas. I think that we’re supposed to see Bruno’s poorly evidenced assertions as profound; to me they seemed naive. There’s all the pseudoscientific nonsense about the Neanderthals, for example, and aphoristic posturings such as “Here on earth is another earth ... A different reality, no less real. It has different rules.” I failed to understand why anyone should be persuaded by this sort of stuff. The communards, perhaps, because they are a bit other-worldly. But Sadie? Cynicism is her middle name. Does the author think this pseudo-science is convincing? Or is this a satire?

Another point at which my belief refused to be suspended was in Sadie’s choice of assassin. She had spent such a long time preparing to infiltrate the commune, from dog-walking in Paris, but when organising an assassination she is careless. She expects the paranoid and suspicious communards to swallow her explanation of how she knows the subminister will be attending the fair. Her grooming of the assassin is perfunctory. When he asks her “Do you think I left my brain in a trash can someplace?” I wasn’t in the least surprised. But she is and I think the author thought the readers would be too.

Yes, I was disappointed by the ending. This was at least in part because the first three-quarters of the book was so good (I thought, then, Bruno’s shallow emails were designed to be exposed). The prose that Kushner writes is exquisite:

• “We’re like the children of a divorce ... It is on account of these two figures that we came here, and in the ashes of their split, we sift to find our own direction.” (Ch 4)
• “The gauzed sensations of toddlerhood” (Ch 5)

Kushner frequently mentions real-life French critical theorist Guy Debord, one of the eminence grises of the 1968 riots in Paris. I presume the character of Bruno is based upon him: Debord too wrote aphoristic theses and spent his final years holed up in the French countryside. My review of a biography of him can be found here.

She also mentions a persecuted minority, the Cagots, whom Bruno suggests are descended from the Neanderthals (given the number of generations this would have taken it seems incredibly unlikely that a pure genetic strain would still exist) and other historians suggest, with more credibility, are descended from the Cathars, or the Visigoths, or Arian Christians.

She also references Celine whose Journey to the End of Night is reviewed in this blog.

I wonder whether her chosen pseudonym 'Sadie' is inspired by the Beatles song 'Sexy Sadie' since it was written as a satire on the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru with whom the Beatles spent some time. In this novel, Sadie is in a rural location reading emails from Lacombe who could be regarded as a guru.

Selected quotes:

• “While the Neanderthal bravely risked his life with a short-range thrusting spear, the Homo sapiens opted for a long-range throwing javelin. To kill from a distance was less valiant. It was killing without engaging in an intimate commitment to mortal danger.” (Ch 1)
• “Look up ... The roof of the world is open. Let us count stars and live in their luminous gaze.” (Ch 1) Foreshadowing.
• “Charisma does not originate inside the person called ‘charismatic’. It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.” (Ch 1)
• “The more education person has, the more scare quotes they seem to use.” (Ch 1)
• “To misunderstand the adult world, and to misuse it, are the precursors to innovation.” (Ch 2)
• “The trick of riding backward is to understand that this orientation of travel is time honoured and classical. It is like rowing a boat: you enter the future backward, while watching scenes of the past recede.” (Ch 2)
• “For all its fame, rosy-finger dawn leaves no prints.” (Ch 3)
• “He looked as if he had been puzzling over some question at the moment of his death, trying to solve an unsolvable math problem, and he would travel into eternity that way, with a thicket of half-tabulated numbers lodged in his mind.” (Ch 5)
• “Hashing out some intrigue or annoyance among the piles of annoyances that would crop up for people attempting to live communally.” (Ch 5)
• “I'd rather be driven by immutable truths then the winds of some opinion.” (Ch 5)
• “Flapping laundry - the international flag for anonymous women's work.” (Ch 5)
• “Rotterdammerung.” (Ch 6)

April 2025; 404 pages

First published in the USA by Scribner in 2024

My edition issued in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 2024

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

"The Time-Travelling Estate Agent" by Dale Bradford

This book is an entertaining blend of time travel, historical fiction and whodunnit.

In December 2019, Eric Meek is a meek estate agent who discovers a portal in the space-time continuum which can transport him back in time. The catch is that the portal is tethered to just before 1PM on Saturday 3rd July 1976, the hottest day of a heat wave (I was working in a cold store at the time!), the day that Bjorn Borg defeated Ilie Nastase to win his first Wimbledon championship, and the worst day of Eric’s life when he lost his girlfriend, Verity, to bully Len Butcher, a trauma which has blighted his life ever since. It’s also the day his father’s shop is burgled and Verity and Len disappear. So we have a mix of time travel with Groundhog Day. Eric repeatedly goes back to try to change things (fortunately the ‘tethered’ portal stays open until he chooses to return) but is frustrated by the rules of time travel which mean that whatever he does will not affect the future and won’t even be remembered by the participants. To start with he gets into quite a lot of fights, often triggered by the atrociously sexist male chauvinism regarded as normal in 1976, and occasionally he enjoys romantic relations but gradually he endeavours to right wrongs (the portal is increasingly like the telephone box in which mild-mannered Clark Kent turns into Superman). This mission comes into sharper focus when a body is discovered in 2019 and Eric tries to discover whodunnit in 1976.

Meanwhile in 2019, business is bad, the bank wants to review his overdraft, and he is being stalked for takeover by an online estate agency. He starts realising that he has wasted his (mostly loveless) life and so has Carol, his receptionist, who was involved in whatever happened in 1976. He wants to make amends.

If the portal put me in mind of Superman, there was also a hint of James Bond in the way that the narrator gives the details of the cars (mostly posh) and the wines and the brands of smartphones and specific record tracks. This felt like garnish. Far more impressive were the descriptions of the clothes, the groceries, the beers and all the furnishings of everyday life in 1976; this overwhelming level of specifics added an impressive depth of verisimilitude. And the fact that Eric couldn't walk by a house without mentally exploring it and valuing it added credence to the idea that he was an estate agent. But surely even estate agents occasionally eat at home.

Eric's character and those of Carol and Simon/Seb were nicely drawn and given nuance and depth. This made the portrayal of the villains disappointing. It was difficult to suspend disbelief when Alwyn repeatedly flouted direct orders. Eric's dad was two-dimensionally stupid. PC Tanner, Big Ben Butcher, Little Len and Elvis were all too bad to ring true. 

There were one or two loose ends. More could have been made of Jason Mason, that plot line seemed to be incomplete. Was the killer brought to justice? If Carol disappeared from the hotel just after the end of the Borg-Nastase match how could she still be there in the evening? 

Nevertheless this was a well-written and entertaining read.

Selected quotes: 

• “Maybe there really was a danger of death in that garage,” Eric said, “and I’m reliving parts of my life as I die.” If that was the case, he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. If his highlights reel had been a movie genre, it certainly wouldn’t have been ‘action’." (Ch 3)
• “I’m so charming I’m like charmageddon,” (Ch 4)
• “I don’t see the point of holidays,” Freeman said. “Why pay to sleep in someone else’s bed when it will inevitably be inferior to your own?” (Ch 4)
• "Are you familiar with the concept of the multiverse or the many-worlds interpretation?” “Are you familiar with the fact that I’m an estate agent?" (Ch 5)
• “Why do you look back so much?” Seb asked. “That’s not the direction you’re going in.” (Ch 17)
• "Eric could have picked a worse day to drive to Bath but only if he had really, really tried." (Ch 23)
• “When a door is firmly closed, it might just need a good bang to get it open again.” (Ch 24)

April 2023

I read the independently published e-book on kindle.

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

"Saltburn" by Drew Gummerson

In terms of sheer invention, this might be one of the most creative books I have ever read. Saltburn is a set of six overlapping stories in which the weird and wonderful is everyday. Except for Stick of Rock, each story is a surreal bildungsroman of a young boy (at least to start with) involving poverty, parental loss and sexual awakening amid a series of ever more extraordinary adventures.

There are some links between the stories, such as that the medical services in Saltburn are short of money so that the doctors and nurses have musical instruments attached to their clothing which they are always trying to sell to raise cash. The fishermen are a randy and promiscuous lot. There is a nuclear power station - or is it? - across the bay, a card sharp school based in a former prison, aquaria, a monopolistically-minded local businessman called Evans, a gift shop that sells an almost endless selection of tat, mermaids and amusement arcades and a terrific amount of anal sex.

There are a lot of lists, such as when the owner of Delicious Gifts remembers what he has to sell, with prices. That list extends for nearly two pages. Others are shorter. The lists lend the narrative a breathless quality as well as anchoring what would otherwise be a bizarre set of fantasies in some sort of verisimilitude.

A Piece of Ass has a clever frame in which the narrator intrudes, starting with: “Back then, this time I’m thinking of, Corey’s mum ...”

I struggled to think of other narratives I have read with which to compare Saltburn. The blurb suggests the books of Charles Bukowski but I haven’t explored his work. Seagulls and Seances by Robin Drown paints a picture of a similar seaside world with oddball elements but it doesn’t have the sustained jet-flights of fantasy of Saltburn. Don Quixote? But there the madness is firmly within the mind of the protagonist and here it resides in the external world. The books of William Burroughs (eg The Wild Boys) with their science fiction elements and the recurring themes of gay sex? But Saltburn is far more extravagantly surreal. It’s much more bonkers than Voltaire’s Candide. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M John Harrison is another weird landscape but more controlled. Road Kill - The Duchess of Frisian Tun by Pete Adams relies more on word-play. The maniacal The Unlimited Dream Company by J G Ballard is tame by comparison with this. Hints of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark? But that has real world components. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien? Angela Carter’s works such as The Magic Toyshop and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann? Alice in Wonderland on speed?

Saltburn is endlessly entertaining, sometimes exhaustingly so. I look forward to a period of recuperation but I hope I will soon be ready for another encounter with Drew Gummerson’s feverish imagination.

Selected quotes:

• “In the distance, out at sea, the seals churned, joyous for the spring tide, tossing their heads both in and out of the waves. And it was beautiful, but sad, because, as with all beautiful things, they hold within their hearts a notion of their own transience.” (Meltdown - The Spectacular Death of a Bearded Socialist)
• “The hotel seemed to let bedbugs stay for free.” (The Aquarium - Trouble)
• “Corey’s feet took him inside, whatever his mind may have wanted.” (A Piece of Ass - All the French Singers Have Bum Postcards)

April 2025; 249 pages

Published by Haywood Books, a Renard Press imprint, in 2025

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