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Man cannot become an animal. He just passes the animal stage on his way to the abyss.

Something Happens, and a middle-aged woman is suddenly, as far as she can tell, the last human being on Earth, waking up in a friend's hunting lodge up in the decidedly Julie Andrews-less Austrian alps, and finding an invisible wall all around the area she's in.

(Insert space here for snarky comparisons to The Simpsons Movie or that Stephen King novel, even though The Wall predates them by 50 years and is a very different beast.)

The wall has kept her safe from whatever seems to have killed all life outside it, but also traps her in a world she, as a city dweller, has no idea how to survive. She has a gun, a dog, a cat, a cow, and her hands and feet. She can grow potatoes (insert space here for snarky comparisons to The Martian etc) and shoot deer, so she won't starve, but gradually loneliness, back-breaking physical exertion and the inability of that big Homo Sapiens brain to not keep spinning begins to... I almost wrote "break her down", but that's not entirely true; evolution knows nothing about higher or lower levels. "Reshape her" is probably more apt. Two and a half years in, she starts writing down her story to hang on to whatever humanity remains, going over and writing down every detail, every emotion, every hard-earned piece of satisfaction she can remember.

The Wall is an astounding novel, which opens up to a ton of interpretations (cold war eschatology, existentialism, feminism, depression, post-nazi self-deception (it's supposedly one of Elfriede Jelinek's favourite novels), etc etc) but remains so grounded in its details of everyday hard-working life and in the Vonnegutian ways Haushofer keeps dropping hints of what will inevitably have happened that it never really feels like an allegory. Even without a name, she remains singular, just a woman with her dog and her cat and her cow trying to survive even at the end of hope.

"The end of the uni-verse" (translator's note)

I read two excellent Mexican novels in 2015; Jennifer Clement's Prayers for the Stolen; and this one. Both are similar, and yet very different; they both concern the border, the idea of different worlds, the violence of a male society ruled by guns and the knowledge that nobody dies peacefully of old age, and how women survive in it.

The difference: Clement writes (brilliantly) about a world which is, Herrera writes of one that becomes. It's a subjective, subjunctive novel.

Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It's not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects. Who knows if they'll last, who knows if these names will be adopted by all, she thinks, but there they are, doing their damnedest.

A simple story: Makina (as in deus ex?) lives in a small town in Mexico, ruled by gangs. She has to cross the border into the US to bring back her brother, who left years ago to reclaim something that was supposed to be legally theirs, and never came back. She has to make deals to get there, but what's more, she has to transform. What she is at home isn't what she is over there. Then again, is anyone?

Signs... is a novel of language; Herrera bombards the reader with worlds... sorry, words that are pregnant with concepts, that frequently fit together in new ways. There's plenty of dialogue but no speech markers; there's no wall between the narrative and the people caught within it, whatever they may think when they look at each other or try to figure out which language to use. At the centre is that neologism jarchar - to verse in Lisa Dillman's (excellent, and appropriately subversive) translation - a verb meaning to exit, to cross, to transgress, to pass, to stand out, to counterpoint, to become a story. The act of leaving, entering somewhere new, changes not just the one who leaves and enters but the story around them. Makina is one of the most memorable characters I've read all year, even though (or perhaps because) both because of who she is and who she becomes as the story mutates around her. All that bullshit about "strong female characters" that all too often means physically strong; she's one of those who can recognize the story around her and make her mark on it, who can gaze - and let the reader gaze - into all those layers of thatsjustthewayitis and slip between them.

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.

That title; much like another novel set in the Mexican borderlands, the end of the world seems a given; always in gerund, never in the present or future tense. Then again, someone with a passing knowledge in mythology knows that the calendar always starts over again after each apocalypse, and new things rise from the old. Go, then; there are other worlds than this.
/December 2015

Reread 21/11/16 in Swedish. Still great, but the Swedish translation completely ditches the "verse"/"jarchar" thing which disappoints me a bit.

"Her nipples were the same size as the three-inch rivets that held together the faithful Titanic..."

Does it count as reading a book when you've only listened to it read out loud on a podcast, complete with running incredulous commentary? Well, it better, because after all the images I've had thrust (gaaah) into my brain from listening to this, I should at least get some credit.

The podcast is brilliant, though.

Mid-80s, subversive androgynous pop everywhere, AIDS scare, Marie finds herself sixteen years old in Zürich, well-off child of well-off parents with well-off friends, hormones surging all over the place, parents barely present if they're even in the same country. Parties, make-outs, music, VHS, alcohol, ski trips, discos, make-outs, alcohol...

Should be fun. The happy life of the title.

Except her young aunt is dying of cancer (hence her mother's absence), which is horrible, and while everyone else is pairing up Marie is helplessly in love with Diane, which is wonderful, but impossible. Diane, who the boys all say "oozes sex", who is happy to play with the idea and lead Marie on, but is either too straight or too chickenshit to not keep running back to her boyfriend, and can't understand why it's such a big deal for Marie who has everything to lose.

Man, how Bouraoui writes; obsessively sketches every conflicting emotion of grief and love and infatuation and desire and fear and hatred in a hailstorm of minute brushstrokes, short chapters, her narrator yanked back and forth in the storms of adolescence, love and self-discovery. And somehow, despite all the heartache, it still earns the title without necessarily going for the obvious happy ending.

Alan Moore's new novel - only his second "real" novel, if you discount things like Watchmen, V For Vendetta, From Hell and all those things that are Just Comic Books - is 1266 pages long, in three volumes, and took him ten years to write. It spans from the ice age to the end of the world. It has dozens, maybe hundreds, of POV characters, fictional or real, living or dead. It switches styles with almost every chapter and jumps from highbrow literary games to furious politics, from kitchen-sink realism to pure fantasy, and more than once all of those at the same time.

Alan Moore's new novel takes place over two days - 26 and 27 May 2006 - in what remains of Northampton's old working-class quarters after the demolitions in the sixties, a community reduced to hopelessness, where a man is going to an exhibit of paintings his sisters based on something he may have dreamed as a kid, while a young crack whore in one of the other houses is about to finally lose her grip on life once and for all. They're the POV characters.

Yes, in some of its many, many dimensions, Jerusalem is a simple story, a love letter to Moore's home town and a raised middle finger to everything it's put up with since the Romans, but he takes the scenic route there. James Joyce once said that if Dublin were destroyed, you could recreate it based on the detail in Ulysses. Moore took that to heart, except he's not happy with just capturing Northampton on that one day; cities are living creatures, and people, buildings and ideas that disappeared ages ago still leave traces. So he has to tell the story in four dimensions, time and space, reality and dreams. He has to pull in angels (sorry, angles - four dimensions, remember?) and devils, fires and invasions, New Labour and theodicy, creativity and madness, moral responsibility in a world without free will ("Did you miss it?"), death and immortality until he's included EVERYTHING. And all these stories that he weaves together, like a giant snooker game where every ricochet changes the whole game and every ball is worth just as many points. This long line of characters from all ages and situations, who at first have nothing in common but the fact that they happen to live (or not, as the case may be) in The Boroughs, the oldest part of the old Saxon capital, which nobody (at least according to Moore) gives two shits about as long as they don't bother the people outside.

Her point is that despite the very real continuing abuses born of anti-Semitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be. Every decade since society’s inception has been witness to a holocaust of paupers, so enormous and perpetual that it has become wallpaper, unnoticed, unreported.

And man, he does it so well. He pulls in real people from Oliver Cromwell to Charlie Chaplin to his own friends and family and mix them up with his own ideas. He writes in paraphrases, palimpsests, tesseracts. He spins on his heels from slapstick to essays. He commandeers other books and surfs on the backs of Milton, Blake, Clare, Carroll, Joyce, Beckett and forces them to go where he wants them to. He switches POV and time period in almost every chapter, and yet every chapter somehow builds on the previous one, takes up its ideas and gives them another twist. He challenges his readers with half-chapter infodumps and trilingual puns, but he never forgets to reward them for it. The most extreme case being "Round the Bend", the chapter told from the POV of James Joyce's schizophrenic daughter Lucia, living out her life trapped both in a mental hospital and in her beloved father's genius, communicating in Finnegasque:

Mighnd knot awer canseeusness hedself, uniffable ter sceeintestic scrupiny, beau a fairnuminon o’ far timersions datas foundedself contrained wittin a merdel blody end um werlt doutwit a’peer ta hove baret’ree?
Lucia penders willshe skirps alonge. Perhopes fearsum afuss, owr foursomality is consciantly outtempting to expierce itsolve inalys farfoold glarey, esperever luccinfer thort beond, thort quarner iff ourrizen dattiset wrytangles wideehighther fhree. Theos ophus howcan nevagaet disctern succinctfully wellbe estymdust bairds ound purwits, waile daiz aveers huer nit sloadroept undare taclin un meanoeuthert’ing illbe consigndered luciatics ar slimpery faals. A’curse, dorados eywool bay parcived as buth pohetic an dewrenched.

That whole chapter is an incredible feat, with a language that tells at least two or three stories at the same time while still developing and furthering the story at large, even if those 50 pages take me a whole week to get through. And he compensates by turning all of book 2 into basically one long YA fantasy story about a gang of kids (albeit undead kids with centuries of experience) travelling through time hunting a secret, and if he'd published those chapters on their own he'd have made Neil Gaiman weep blood.

And yet no part of this stands stronger on its own than together, because it's all parts of a whole. It all matters, which turns the book into its own metaphor. Sure, I'm not going to deny that there are the occasional longeurs in all those pages, and sure, his use of sexual violence for character development is a bit... comic book-y, and sure, it's hard to shake the feeling that more than one or two characters here are basically Moore himself. But fuck all that, because Jerusalem is such a magnificently total novel. There's ridiculous amounts of detail, but he uses it all - if someone sees a dog turd on page 300 you can be sure someone will have dogshit on their shoes 800 pages later, and that it'll matter. There many styles, but he can handle them. There are many characters, but they all get their space. It's a book borne by holy wrath but is so playful, so imaginative, so full of ideas and humanity that even after almost 1,300 pages I'm still pretty sure it still has stories to tell.

Ultimately, not only are we all the same, but what happens is out of our control. (...) All there is is the entertainments, pastimes, of love and work, the hope of keeping interested.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll. In roughly that order (and a bit of poetry). Richard Hell's autobiography of his early life and brief punk stardom before deciding to quit the whole circus before the inevitable overdose has all the usual trappings of a rocker memoir, with two exceptions: One, that Hell never really seems into the music as such as much as what it offers in terms of expression and lifestyle (well, he IS a bass player), and two, that Hell actually knows how to sling a pen even if his writing, much like his musical output, tends to come in brief outbursts of genius surrounded by stretches of rather workmanlike time-passing.

It was like having magic powers. The ability to create action at a distance. The sounds that came from the amplifiers were absurdly moving and strange, the variety of them so wide in view of the fact that they came from flicks of our fingers and from our vocal noises, and the way that it was a single thing, an entity, that was produced by the simultaneous reactive interplay of the four band members combining various of their faculties. We were turned into a sound a flow of sound. I remember having a weird moment of weird revelation once, that each moment of a phonograph record being played, each millimeter of information conveyed via the needle to the amplifier to the speaker to the ear, is one sound. A whole orchestra is one sound, altering moment by moment, no matter how many instruments go into producing it. And, as our band rehearsed, on each moment we made the sound spray out in arrays we could instantly alter, emanating from inside us and out interplay and our inner beings combined, playing. And the sound included words.

While the book largely overlaps Patti Smith's Just Kids it's also quite different, largely of course because Hell himself is a very different person; with more distance to in his own myth for good and bad, capable of describing his younger self and the people he knew back then with an honesty that borders on cruelty, but also as befits the writer of "Blank Generation", that distance seems to have been there already; rather than submerge himself in the music and lifestyle he comes across as the kid (not that he was that young) who stands over in the corner making sarcastic comments, always with a girl of five nearby (he is literally unable to mention a woman without reviewing her breasts) and some good dope, but never really liking it much except in small doses. There's an intellectual detachment to I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp that is understandable and often quite entertaining, but a little too often fails to take it above the level of a good life story into something greater. But I should probably take a look at his novels.

Rock and roll is the only art form at which teenagers are not only capable of excelling but that actually requires that one be a teenager, more or less, to practice it at all. This is the way that “punk” uniquely embodies rock and roll. It explicitly asserts and demonstrates that the music is not about virtuosity. Rock and roll is about natural grace, about style and instinct. Also the inherent physical beauty of youth. You don't have to play guitar well or, by any conventional standard, sing well to make great rock and roll; you just have to have it, have be able to recognize it, have to get it. And half of that is about simply being young, meaning full of crazed sex drive and sensitivity to the object of romantic and sexual desire, and full of anger about being condescended to by adults, and disgust and anger about all the lies you're being fed, and all the control you've been subjected to, by those complacent adults. And a deep desire for some fun. And though rock and roll is about being cool, you don’t have to be cool to make real rock and roll—sometimes the most innocuous and pathetic fumblers only become graced by the way they shine in songs. And this is half of what makes the music the art of adolescence—that it doesn’t require any verifiable skill. It’s all essence, and it’s available to those who, to all appearances, have nothing.

It's a short novel - I burn through it in less than three hours - but there's hardly a wasted word. I find myself thinking the word "proto-Ferrantian" at some points while the language more evokes a less verbose GGM, which probably says more about my reading habits than about Kincaid's writing, but there you have it. A young girl's coming-of-age story that doesn't dip into clichés or gets sidetracked, but sticks to the shifting bonds between mother and daughter, between childhood friends, between what you thought you understood at 10 and what you cannot voice at 18, building to a quiet finale that's all the more heartbreaking because it doesn't offer any simple resolutions. My first Kincaid, probably not my last.

Ils sont fous, ces adultes.

This ain't the planet of sound
This ain't the planet of sound

Omläsning 241109: Efter den senaste veckan, och inför de kommande åren, behövde jag verkligen läsa om den här.

Mumintrollet betraktade det dystra landskapet och tänkte på hur rädd jorden måste vara när den såg det lysande eldklotet närma sig. Han tänkte på hur förfärligt mycket han älskade allting, skogen och havet, regnet och vinden, solskenet och gräset och mossan och hur omöjligt det vore att leva utan alltsammans.

Everytime I re-read (or re-listen, in this case, listening to Jansson's own recording of the book) the Moomins as an adult I fall more in love with them.

For all that the Simpsons ripped this novel off for "Bart's Comet", I find myself thinking more of a better version of Miracle Mile. Yes, it's unmistakably a children's story, but it never pussies out; originally conceived shortly after WWII, the disaster is unmistakably REAL. The various reactions of the scientists who view it from afar, the safe peope who only see it as a minor annoyance, the pessimists who smugly point out how they knew the end of the world was coming, the masses of panicking refugees, the horrifying descriptions of how the world itself dies as the comet zooms down upon it ... and (spoiler, as if you needed it) the way the disaster just passes them by, scarring them but not destroying them. And yet between Moomin, Sniff, Snufkin and the Snorkmaiden, it's all an adventure. The race against time, the musings on what is important to save whatever may happen in life.

"Garnets? Real ones?"
"I don't know if they're real. But they're beautiful."

Of course everyone is sick of dystopias. And almost as sick of postapocalypses. And yet somehow this really works.

She takes us quickly through the boring bit; from an actor having a heart attack on stage during King Lear in Toronto, to an audience member being told there's a new superflu in town, to the end of the world as we know it, all in the first 35 pages, without any scenes of mass hysteria. Then it's 20 years later, 99.9% of the world's population has died, but the worst death throes of society have passed and things are starting to resemble some form of order again. We join up with a small theatre troupe travelling from settlement to settlement, performing Beethoven and Shakespeare. Because nobody wants to remember too much of the modern world when the height of available technology is the odd gun.

Except:
1. It's not that straightforward. St John Mandel keeps flashing back, following up on that actor, on his friends and lovers, on what happened in those days and months and years in between, because people are still connected through blood, through memories, through shared experiences, and just because some of them have been dead for 20 (or 400) years doesn't mean they're out of the picture.
2. While she doesn't shy away from the horror, the whole book is shot through with other emotions. Grief, both for the people lost and the world lost, that haunts everyone. Wonder at what they once had, and what they still do. Curiosity at what the world was like, for the younger ones.

The Shakespeare company carries a Star Trek quote on their wagons. SURVIVAL IS INSUFFICIENT.

There are bits here that read like a pitying pat on the head to The Road; people are better than that, well, most people are, and the ones obsessed with carrying the fire aren't necessarily the best ones. We cannot bear savagery, we default to cooperation. It's a Canadian novel.

When you kill someone, as you almost inevitably have to in this situation, you get yourself a tattoo. Not on your face to scare others, but on your hand to remind yourself of what it has done.

Yes, some of the connections are far too coincidental. But the dreamy, sorrowful, hopeful tone of the book lets me accept it. As if disaster demands providence too - not necessarily that of a god, but that of a narrator.