Granskningar och kommentarer

Espèces d'espaces (1974) (which has the trying-too-hard English title Species of Spaces and Other Pieces) isn't a novel, rather it's more of a freeform essay on the subject of space. Not in the "outer space" astronomical sense, but rather in the sense of how we take up space - how we inhabit it, how we imbue it.

Several times, I've tried to imagine a flat in which there'd be a completely unnecessary room, absolutely and deliberately unnecessary. It wouldn't be a storage room, or an extra bedroom, or a corridor, or a broom closet, or a corner. It would be a room without function. It would surve no purpose, it would serve nothing. It was impossible for me, however hard I tried, to complete this thought, this image. Language itself seemed incapable of describing this nothing, this void, as if you could only speak of what is full, usable and functional.
A room without function. Not "without exact function", but exactly without function; not multi-functional (anyone can do that) but afunctional.

The first thing you notice about Perec's writing is always the limitations he puts on himself; write a novel without one letter, write a novel taking place in one moment in an entire house, write an autobiography made up of singular memories, etc. So Spaces becomes an essay about that very phenomenon; that the world is entirely made up of limits. All space, whether inner or outer, from the smallest microscopical pore in our skin to the entire galaxy, can only be defined by the philosophical, physical, corporeal or conceptual limits we put on it.

If nothing obstructs our view, we can see very far. But if it's not obstructed it doesn't see anything; our gaze only sees what it hits; space is what obstructs our view, what our gaze hits, resistance...

So he starts from the space he knows best; an empty paper, a blank space he can fill, then gradually expands from his bed to his bedroom, flat, house, street, block, city, country, continent, world, universe - expands his understanding of the space he and others take up, memories that he connects to the different layers, .

I can't help noting (which Perec couldn't have predicted) that I read this as an ebook - an object which literally takes up no space at all, and yet undeniably exists because of what a dead writer has imprinted on it. I wonder what Perec would have made of the Megabyte.
** He points out that every country, these days, has an airspace covering its precise surface, and I'm struck by the idea that "airspace" didn't exist until about 1903 or so. (1909? 1915?)

Hey, guys, we've been discovered! (Indian catching sight of Christopher Columbus)

Spaces is hardly one of Perec's greatest works - quite a few times, it reads more like a scrapbook of ideas, thinking aloud to himself, trying out concepts (at one point he mentions that he's trying to write Life: A User's Manual and outlines some of his ideas for it). There are lengthy quotes from other writers, sometimes intentionally misquoted. If Perec were a film maker rather than a writer, this would probably be an extra feature on the Criterion edition of Life: A User's Manual (or W Or The Memory Of Childhood, which was written at the same time and isn't entirely unrelated, especially when he tests his theories on Auschwitz and his hypothetical childhood at the end). That said, it's well worth a read; Perec may ramble a bit in the 100-odd pages that make up this essay collection, but he does so in a charming, clever way, and I come away from it with a few new ideas to keep in mind the next time I read one of his other books.

One of the most fascinating comments on 9/11 that I've come across is Laurie Anderson’s album Live In New York. It’s recorded in September 2001, just over a week after the event, and she’s on stage performing a set of songs – written years or even decades earlier – dealing with paranoia, dogmatism, survival. And of course the centrepiece is an unusually emotional and cathartic version of her 1981 single "O Superman":

This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They're American planes. Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds.
'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.

9/11 is obviously a huge trauma which needs to be addressed in fiction, but so far just about every one of my favourite authors who has tried to tackle it has ended up writing around it; Auster’s Brooklyn Follies, Rushdie’s Shalimar The Clown, Gibson’s Spook Country, McEwan’s Saturday, Pynchon’s Against The Day... surely it can’t be too big a subject? Surely the absence of two towers can’t only be tackled by leaving them out of the story? While some writers have done great work in a post-9/11 world, I think the only completely successful and meaningful novel I’ve read about the event itself and its fallout has been youngster Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close.

DeLillo should be the ideal writer to deal with it. As someone put it, he’s been writing 9/11 novels for decades; Mao II, Underworld, White Noise... if anyone can take a huge event and the underlying tendencies in society surrounding it and turn it into a novel, it should be him. Yet I’m not completely sure he manages as well as I had hoped - and all of this review should be read with the knowledge that I consider Underworld and White Noise to be absolute masterpieces and I expect nothing less.

Falling Man gets off to a great start, a dazed, shell-shocked account of the minutes and days immediately following the attack itself, focused on estranged spouses Keith and Lianne as they both try to piece their life back together (and their life together back together). The disjointed scenes, the out-of-focus dialogue, the sketchy and quickly-abandoned scenes from ground zero all serve to highlight the way the attack not only destroyed lives and buildings, but shocked people to their very core – nicely tied in to Lianne’s work with Alzheimer’s patients trying to hold on to a Self that’s being eroded away.

But at some point, it feels like the shell shock wears out its welcome and we’re going to have to get to know the characters – and to me, at least, that’s where the novel stumbles. There are bits that have me fearing that someone’s going to try to film this with Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon as Lianne and Keith. He, especially, largely remains a mystery, and not even a very interesting one. While his development later in the novel makes sense from a symbolic perspective (the illusion of being in control of your fate; “Call or raise, call or fold, the little binary pulse located behind the eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are. It belonged to him, this yes or no, not to a horse running in the mud somewhere in New Jersey”) I don't think it does from a narrative point of view. The rather abrupt skip forward in time, the plot lines that show up here and there but never really have time to develop... it feels a bit like a fragment of a longer novel rather than a complete work in its own right, and as chillingly poignant as he can be at times, the novel remains curiously (for DeLillo) locked inside itself, if you catch my drift; it rarely makes those huge vertical leaps (sorry, sorry) through the layers of society, from religion to politics to popular music etc, that he usually does so well. (Remember the Elvis=Hitler discussion in White Noise?) The details are often great, there’s tons of great observations – the aforementioned paranoia that has people Lianne hitting a woman for playing Arabic music and little kids looking for this Bill Lawton character, for instance – but I’m not sure it quite ties together into a whole. It’s as if the terrorist’s quote

They felt things together, he and his brothers. They felt the claim of danger and isolation. They felt the magnetic effect of plot. Plot drew them together more tightly than ever. Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point. There was the claim of fate, that they were born to do this.

is somehow a theme for the whole novel; everyone is tied together in a plot, but we don’t need to see the whole plot in linear fashion, we don’t get a fixed script telling us how to live and die - in a world of wars and dogmatism, thinking we've seen through it all and that we’re the heroes of the whole piece is the last thing we need. And while that’s an admirable point, using it as a literary technique doesn't work entirely in this case.

Which sort of brings us to the (slightly underused) falling man himself, the performance artist turning up here and there to hang in the air like a never answered question mark, always arrested but never explaining his motivations, just suspended somewhere between take-off and landing, available for whatever interpretations you want to hang on him... like a gravity’s angel, if you will. (Yes, I’m all about the obscure Laurie Anderson references today.) Lianne refers to him as a fallen angel – here’s a bit of religious symbolism turned upside-down, methinks: it’s all very easy to shoot the messenger, blame the fallen angel/Satan/The Great Satan, yet the world is made of people and we’re the ones actually doing anything. Again; Falling Man is great at symbolism, great at metaphor, perhaps not so great at actually drawing characters and telling their story. As if DeLillo got just a little too caught up in Saying Something about his big subject (which can also lead to rather hokey lines such as the one about children not needing white crayons since they have white paper).

The ending is stunning, though, even more so than the beginning. He takes the B plot that’s been popping up here and there and fuses it with the main one in one of the most incredible scene shifts I’ve read – I went back and read the last few pages at least three times. Let X = X. He almost – almost – brings it all together, the symbolism of the attack and the reality of the people affected by it.

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there’s always... Mom. Hi, Mom!

Warning: core dump of brain in progress.

"Now single up all lines!"

That first line sounds like a call to battle, or like the last instruction of a band leader before he kicks into the intro of his newest composition. What it actually is is the command to launch the dirigible airship Inconvenience, manned by the boys' adventure book heroes The Chums Of Chance, forever young and Biggles-ishly intent on making the late-19th century world a better place from their vantage point on high.

The problem for them is that the band leader in question is Thomas Pynchon, who is to literature what a free jazz player with ADD (Anarchist Deconstruction Disorder) is to music. Just as we've gotten to know the Chums and their playful, Star Trek-like view of the world, the plot moves to someone else, the lines fray and the music starts getting chaotic. The boys' adventure book turns into a Steinbeck-on-acid-like novel about poor miners. The Steinbeck turns into a Wild West revenge tale. The Wild West revenge tale veers briefly into Lovecraft before turning into an HG Wells-ian time travel story and then a European spy thriller. The spy thriller becomes a love story, the love story becomes bisexual porn, the porn becomes a code cracker mystery, the code cracker mystery becomes a math textbook, the math textbook turns into vicious satire on the current state of the world which at the same time is a story of the search for a shangri la... etc etc. And obviously, all of these stories aren't so much sequential as they are simultaneous; they all interweave.

Pynchon is the ultimate post-modern madman; more enamoured with chance than Auster, more encyclopedic than Eco, more absurd than Vonnegut and with more bizarre guest spots (from Bela Lugosi to Elmer Fudd) and song numbers than a whole season of The Simpsons. (Yes, of course he drops a Simpsons joke or two in there.) But where Auster uses chance as the exception to the rule, the thing that jolts his character out of their lives, in Pynchon chance and chaos IS the rule. Where Eco lectures, Pynchon often seems to take for granted that his readers know as much as he does about Balkan history, advanced maths, dimensional theory or famous anarchists; if we don't, hell, look it up; every single reference he drops seems to suggest a story that could take off in another direction - like Bob Dylan once said that every line in "Hard Rain" could be turned into a song unto itself.

Which isn't necessarily in a direction we know. Against The Day is a tesseract; just like the pages of a novel are a two-dimensional representation of (hopefully) three-dimensional characters (note the overlaying fonts on the jacket of ATD), the characters of ATD are three-dimensional characters living in a four-dimensional world. Things happen which they cannot understand, just like a stick figure on a piece of paper cannot understand the three-dimensional pencil drawing him. As mankind learns to fly and conquers the third dimension and its possibilities for good and evil (Russian airships dropping bricks remarkably similar to Tetris blocks on their enemies - come to think of it, reading Pynchon is a lot like playing Tetris, you better keep up or the screen will fill up and you lose) people start to wonder what discoveries and weapons may lie in the next dimension.

And in a four-dimensional world, time is negotiable in the same sense that height is in a 3D world. When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Everything can exist at least twice; indeed, so much of the novel is about dualities, bilocations, doubles, mirror images that come to life, the way a good novel is a mirror of real life. Light refracts in a mirror, splits in two directions. Light as in progress. Light as in electricity. Light as in enlightenment. Light as in daylight. It can go either way. On the one side, we can build a better world. On the other, we're great at building machine guns, too. Prepare yourself against the day.

Five random thoughts:

1. Yes, of course Pynchon is still obsessed with secret societies, secret ways of communications, invisible train lines and stamps from post offices that never existed. You're telling me that's somehow not relevant in the Internet age? Why the hell is one of the main characters named Webb Traverse, d'ya think?

2. Ornette Coleman had a double quartet (!) when he recorded "Free Jazz".

3. There's something under Asia's deserts which is, apparently, worth going to war over. No one seems to know quite why we need it, but...

4. If everything exists in two versions, can there be a singularity? Can there be a third way?

5. "The sun would not have risen. A mere ball of flaming gas would have illuminated the world." (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)

Reading ATD is hard work. It needs to be. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of fun, it's exhilarating, and it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, but it's so goddamn busy that it demands your undivided attention for 1085 pages straight. There were days when I was hard-pressed to manage five pages. I'm not sure if this is Pynchon's best novel. It's kinda hard to tell; it's frequently all over the place and while I'm pretty sure there's a point to all of it, I don't always see that point. Yet. If it's his last novel, it's a worthy farewell; there's enough reading here to rediscover and reinterpret more times than most readers are able to, and the logical conclusion to an authorship that has alwasy wanted to do MORE with fiction. It's chaotic, but there's method in it. Just like the difference between pure noise and really wild jazz; the swing, the humour, the flow, the way the theme suddenly pops up somewhere for a few seconds before leading into something new, the way you can almost dance to it without breaking a leg. The way one player will occasionally break away into something completely different and the others either follow him into this new and exciting tune or do everything in their power to stop him and force him back in line. And all the while, the balloon boys on board Inconvenience pop in and out of reality and the storyline like a naive jingle-jangle guitar pop song.

Mash it up, burn it down, start all over again.

And that's the only way I know how to explain it. Thus far.

At first, this sounds what in fanfic circles is apparently known as "crack": an idea, a pairing, a crossover so absolutely ludicrous it's too weird and too much fun NOT to read. Like Winnie the Pooh fighting vampires in Sunnydale, or Mohammad on The Cosby Show.

But actually, it makes sense, in a somewhat twisted sort of way. The story is narrated by Jack Kerouac in something that... well, it's been a while since I read On The Road (in Swedish), so I really can't say whether Mamatas apes Kerouac or parodies him, but the prose flows in a jazzy, half-crazy manner that's often a delight to read. And somehow Mamatas manages to marry the beatnik counter-culture thing via Burroughs' bugmen and mugwumps to the huge, impersonal monsters of Lovecraft - or rather, not the monsters themselves but the underlying theme of an ancient, evil world looming just below the surface, the futility of mankind in a world where evil gods can snuff us out without hardly noticing us.

Had I seen the Beast in the sky - the tentacles, snaky scales, the deep burning eyes? Oh yes, under the full moon and everything, "All the hipsters can see him," he said. "Squares can't, and that's the trouble. That's why we have to move under ground now."

Once you're exposed to Lovecraft's monsters, you go mad; somehow this ties in nicely with Kerouac's buddhist leanings and a general anti-consumerist non-conformist spin.

Everyone dies. The soul is immortal. This isn't even real; it's an illusion. The world, it's a mad dream of a blind god.

Mamatas acknowledges two of the 20th century's greatest myth-makers - both Lovecraft and Kerouac created (or were credited with creating) genres, worlds of their own, and as such he lets them create yet a new (or possibly) old world here. He does let his fanboy tendencies get the better of him once or twice, and at times he seems more interested in just putting a somewhat more Burroughsian spin on On The Road than telling a story of his own. But in the end, he does manage to weld it all together - if not seamlessly - and creates a really fun read.

Can I use "harrowing" as a verb rather than an adjective? "This book harrowed me"?

tr.v. har·rowed, har·row·ing, har·rows 1. To break up and level (soil or land) with a harrow.
2. To inflict great distress or torment on.

I'm asking for two reasons. One, because, well, it did. The Road is the kind of book that really rips you up, not just on the surface. It doesn't actually plant seeds, but it makes it easier for them to take root - post-apocalyptic barrenness and a few small gripes I had with the book notwithstanding.

The other reason is one of the things that strike me about it: the near-extinction not only of mankind, but of humanity. Of language, which dies along with our need for it. The prose is spare - beautiful, but spare - because it needs to be. So many of the words, the concepts, the man remembers make no sense anymore. He can't explain phrases like "in the neighbourhood" or "as the crow flies" to the boy; those very simple concepts are as dead as the more abstract ones - you know, compassion, selflessness, justice, that lot - seem to be. (Though one thing that really chilled me was not just the cruelty of men to each other, but how they keep finding unlooted stores, spilled money, high-tech wrecks. As if all of mankind has realized that the world isn't coming back. No one bothers looting for anything except food and clothing to postpone the inevitable.

And in a sense, that's part of the problem I have with the book. I'm not going to complain specifically about the religious or socioeconomic references, but the fact that the book is so obviously set up to be a parable and nothing falls outside that. It's sort of what John Self said above: that every line seems designed to tug at your heart strings, everything is tied into the symbolism of the piece. Not ONE person does anything unexpected once their character has been set up, everyone goes out of their way to be a part in the bleak picture McCarthy wants to paint. Which is not really a big problem when he does it this well, it's just... I dunno, I'd think the last thing that dies with humanity would be our irrationality. It only takes ONE person to loot a store. It only takes ONE cut on a poorly shod foot to give a kid blood poisoning. etc. None of that happens here, because that's not what McCarthy wants to happen.

That's a small gripe, though. The book moves, groans, shudders and shakes like few other post-apocalyptic tales I've read. It's biblical, not in the sense of "I know Jesus loves me" but in the way it feels like it's a story that's engrained, that everyone knows at 3 AM when they can't sleep, that everyone goes through in some way. I'm reminded of Mary Shelley's masterful The Last Man, though obviously McCarthy has done away with her early 19th-century romanticism. And I'm thinking of a Bob Dylan song:

Ain't talkin'
Just walkin'
Up the road, around the bend
Heart burnin'
Still yearnin'
In the last outback at the world's end

Except that song is 8 1/2 minutes of nothing but talking. The words just keep coming, even if they don't matter anymore, one foot in front of the other, on and on. Just like the man and the boy keep walking long after it's obvious that there is no unspoiled paradise at the end of the road. As if we don't lose until we admit defeat.

The man remakes God in his own image, that of his son, and gives his life to protect it.

Dylan's song kills everything worth hoping for, then ends on a major chord after chugging along in a minor key all the way. The last thing that dies is not hope.

It would be nice to be able to say that with A Man Without A Country, Vonnegut went out on a high note.

It wouldn't be true, though.

I'm not even exactly sure what to call this; it's certainly not a novel, it's not really non-fiction... "pamphlet" just about covers it, I guess. Either that or "rant." Because that's what he does; he rants. At 82 years old, Vonnegut was pissed off and it's heartbreaking to hear a man who's always described himself as a humanist and tried to find some good in people even in the most sinister, dark moments, declare openly that he has irrevocably lost faith in mankind. It's not surprising that he is unhappy with the way things are, but his trademark humour and wit tends to take a backseat to crushing pessimism. Is he right to be this pessimistic about us? Quite possibly, and it's not like he hasn't earned the right when you read this in the light of everything else he's written (and that's how the book should be read; I shudder to think what people will make of Vonnegut if this is their first exposure to him). But still.

A Man Without A Country veers back and forth between subjects, which he gets away with since he has things to say on most of them (on how to tell a story, on his outlook on life, on politics etc) even though it gives a slightly scattershot impression. Sometimes he's incredibly poignant, sometimes he's as funny as ever, sometimes he's just brash. (Though I confess that I can't help but crack up when he writes that he's going to sue the tobacco manufacturers for not giving him cancer like they promised, since he never wanted to live long enough to see the world run by "Bush, Dick and Colon".)

I suppose the worst and best part about it is the consistency. Having re-read a few Vonnegut novels since his death, there's really not much new stuff to find here (in fact, large portions of it seem cribbed from the foreword to Jailbird). There's a new president, Kurt is older and crankier, there's some fancy new thing called the Internet which he really doesn't like much (he proudly proclaims himself a luddite), but otherwise he's still pushing the same buttons that he has been for decades only with more bitterness. "Here's what we could have been," he seems to say (namechecking both Marx, Lincoln and Jesus), "and we wasted it all." A Man Without A Country doesn't add anything new, and as much irreverent fun as it is at times, it seems more like petering out than going out with a bang.