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Someday this war's going to end...

Of course, that quote is not from The Speed of Light; if you know your movie history you’ll hear Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. It’s one of many darkly ironic lines in one of the best movies ever made; he’s just wiped out a Vietnamese village to give his soldiers somewhere to surf, and since he has no clue that the movie he’s in (and the book it’s based on) is about the darkness within man, he can’t comprehend that the war is just going to continue.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that Cercas’ novel has a title that sounds like the opposite of The Heart of Darkness. Just like Coppola built on Conrad, Cercas seems to borrow both from Coppola’s and others’ versions of a war when he writes his own Vietnam war novel. After all, as 40-something Europeans, neither Cercas nor his narrator can claim first-hand experiences of the war; much of it is inevitably going to be based on the way the war has since been portrayed. So when the young Spanish exchange student befriends a war veteran 20 years his senior and tries to understand what happened to him, it makes perfect sense that the veteran in question comes across a bit like Christopher Walken’s character in Deer Hunter, if he’d made it back home and started studying literature – both the writer, the reader and the fictional narrator are seeing reality through a fictional lens.

But this is also where Cercas takes a sharp turn. Because as interesting as the traumatised old soldier might be, it’s obviously a story we’ve seen told before – but it’s only half the story in The Speed of Light. The other half concerns the narrator himself, many years later; he’s grown up as a modern European, and after his time in the US he returns home to Spain, far from wars, starvation and pointless massacres... and yet full of things that can go wrong, things you lie awake at night in horror of. Because just like Heart of Darkness isn’t only about colonial Africa, this isn’t about any specific war, but what happens to people who lose the war with themselves – who end up in a situation where they discover how easy it can be to step across that line. How evil is not necessarily something that comes with flashing lights, official declarations of war, bullets or Wagner at top volume, how the same darkness can turn up in the choices and simple acts we make from day to day. Our young Spaniard grows up, becomes a successful writer, and loses his grip completely; the comfortable life with its clearly stated goals of money, family and safety turns out to open up into an abyss, and we all know the quote about what happens if you look into that abyss... and so after losing everything, he returns to the US to try and find out what happened to the old veteran he knew 20 years earlier, and how to cope with the failure of a dream.

Cercas doesn’t exactly make it easy for himself. Having the same nameless narrator tell everything in flashbacks, with very little dialogue, could be a complete disaster for a less talented writer. But Cercas’ language is so straight-forward and alive that the book never loses its way. The two main characters’ lives and their thoughts on literature, war, fame and the difference between surviving and living is rarely less than fascinating (despite the fact that the theme of the book is based on a misquote of Bob Dylan...), occasionally disturbing, and often quite touching.

They say the speed of light is 300,000 m/s. When you look out in the world, it often seems to move a lot slower than that – it certainly doesn’t seem to be able to banish darkness forever. But we keep chasing it, and while there's no guarantee of catching it, occasionally we see a glimpse. Like this book, for instance.

Before you read this review: go find a version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and put it on. (I'm sure you have it someplace. John Cale's version is recommended, but just about anyone will do.)

Back? Good. And I guess now I'll have to explain what Cohen has to do with Lispector - I suppose it's possible that Cohen's read the book, but it's not like they're all that closely related (apart from the fact that the book opens with a cry of "hallelujah"). But what they have in common is that approach, that ecstasy that's not necessarily religious but which might be the same feeling that's behind religion - not God, but that which some people fill with God. And the self-referential attempt to capture it all in words.

The Stream of Life is a letter from a her to a him, one long monologue that begins the day she wakes up with the sun and finds that life has gone on. It's an incredible feeling, an epiphany she has to try and catch: to describe LIFE in mere words, all that's beautiful and fucked up, the concrete and the abstract, the bits you can't help but paint or sing. But just like you supposedly can't dance about architecture you can't really write about feelings; the words are just words, they don't cover it. She needs time. She has to manipulate language, duck under their superficial definitions and get at the core meaning, while at the same time trying to stop time, freeze the NOW she's trying to describe before it's passed and the feeling of having understood something is lost to the pale cast of thought and everything becomes just more words.

Where does the music go after you've played it?

Lispector goes deep-sea fishing in her language, soul, philosphy, love, art and keeps bumping into the words we once used to represent emotions rather than the emotions themselves, "the it;" she treats language the way a saxophone player in jazz might treat notes, refusing to play the basic melody but playing around it, surrounding it from all directions, alternately divebombing it and caressing it before restating the theme at the end. The novel - if you can even call it that - is subjective taken to the extreme, the sheer experience of experiencing taken to the degree where everything becomes a subject - everything is "I," I am "it." Being as a conscious act of creation: "I am myself."

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," as a dull Austrian once put it. But Lispector isn't a philosopher, she's a fiction writer, and she refuses to be silent; she WILL force language to capture that second of clarity, jubilation, grief, extacy - like a Coltrane who's learned to paint, like Molly Bloom on E. This is prose that wants to top poetry. It takes her 127 pages and I'll be damned if she doesn't manage it. I can't sum it up - that would sort of defeat the purpose; maybe my attempt to use words to describe her attempt to use words to speak of that which cannot be spoken about, that secret chord that goes all the way to the divine, was doomed from the beginning. But on the other hand, if it could be easily summed up we wouldn't need literature, would we?

I don't want to feel the horrible limitations of living only by that which makes sense.

I just know that The Stream of Life lights up what, for lack of a better word, I call my soul. And that it's amazing, mankind's ability to watch everything go wrong and yet stand their with nothing on our tongues but "hallelujah."

Wow, this was a quick read. Partly because I already know the plot by heart (and the movie kept pretty close to the book), but also because it's one of those books that just sucks you in. Heaps of black fun. Kind of hard to say something new about it after all these years, but let's just say I love the movie to death and yet I'm not convinced that it did the book complete justice. (For instance, you know how hard it is to shake the faces of the actors when you read a book after seeing the movie? No such problem here; for some reason, I kept imagining Robert Downey Jr instead of Edward Norton. And I love Edward Norton.) Anyway, even though I did get the (perhaps unfair) feel that the book hints at the twist in the story a lot sooner and a lot more obviously than the movie did, it's still like a punch to the pit of your brain, I loathved it to bits, and I'm glad I didn't give up on Palahniuk after Haunted.

Way back before music went digital, John Prine wrote this:
We are living in the future, tell you how I know:
I read it in the paper - Fifteen years ago

When William Gibson starts using the word "cyberspace" as a plot point, you sit up and take notice. And when he starts talking about virtual reality, dont' start shaking your head. Yeah, that stuff with the plastic helmets and the boxy graphics has seemed like a very old and useless party trick since back in the 90s. But what Gibson is aiming for here is not so much a virtual reality novel as a post-VR novel - in the same sense that "post-modern" doesn't mean "non-modern" or "post-9/11" doesn't mean "we've forgotten 9/11". It's about what happens when something has become so embedded in reality that it IS reality; it's, funnily enough, a novel about borders. Or perhaps, the absence of them.

"See-bare-espace," Odile pronounced, gnomically, "it is everting."
"'Everything'? What is?"
"See-bare-espace," Odile confimed, "everts." She made a gesture with her hands that reminded Hollis, in some dimly unsettling way, of the crocheted model uterus her Family Life Education teacher had used as an instructional aid.
"Turns itself inside out," offered Alberto, by way of clarification. "'Cyberspace'."

Spook Country takes place in a world where cyberspace has indeed everted, become just another aspect of the world; just as the world has shrunk to the place where geographical borders, however well-guarded, can be easily crossed if you know how (after all, what is an illegal immigrant but a real-life hacker penetrating a system with lots of black ICE?). Any reality which involves GPS locators, WiFi networks everywhere, and entire lives being carried in little memory sticks is to some extent virtual. Reality is tagged like a wiki; street artists in Gibson's now don't use spray cans, they use laptops and 3D renderings that only make sense to those in the know to make their mark on the world. The characters, as well-drawn and as human as they are, to some extent come off as avatars – each with their own title, picture and online persona in a world that's always online.

The phrase "trusted networks" briefly made her feel like crying. She wasn't feeling as though she had any.

Now, this obviously addresses some timely issues - and surprisingly enough, by the last 100 pages as the plot becomes clearer, I'm reminded very strongly of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. I'm not in any way suggesting that Gibson ripped Pynchon off, just that they do seem to have tapped into some of the same concerns. The informal secret-by-default societies and underground movements, the fractured narrative, the promise of a brave new world around the corner, the "resistance"... it's all vintage Pynchon themes, but Gibson being Gibson, he takes it to different (and considerably less opinionated) places. I'm also reminded of something Umberto Eco wrote in Turning Back the Clock, which I've unfortunately lent to a friend, but which goes something along the lines of how the "Big Brother is watching you" theme is hopelessly antiquated; it can be much scarier to live in a world with 6 billion big brothers all watching each other with no way of knowing who is working for whom.

"The pop star, as we knew her" – and here he bowed slightly, in her direction – "was actually an artefact of preubiquitous media."
"Of -?"
"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."
"As opposed to?"
"Comprising it."

Spook Country is a very multifaceted novel, touching upon technology, religion, politics, art, war, capitalism... One of those facets is a thriller, and much like with Pattern Recognition, I find myself intrigued more by the setup than with the actual plot resolution. Not so much because some of it's been done before (been watching Goldfinger, William?) but because it feels like there's something disjointed here; as if he hasn't quite thought the plot through all the way, and drops some of the interesting observations on the world in favour of a more plot-driven approach and a somewhat unsatisfactory ending about 2/3 in. It's still very intriguing – hell, I read the last 130 pages or so in one sitting – but some part of me still feels like it's a great exhibition followed by a slightly flawed dismount. His repeating some of the plot devices from Pattern Recognition probably adds to that. That's probably the reason I find myself thinking it could have been better, and I'm only going to give it a strong . But on a whole, it's a fascinating and more than slightly spooky novel. It feels like Gibson has come full circle, catching up to his younger self as the world has caught up to what, back then, sounded like science fiction, only now with much more meat on his bones. We are living in the future,
We're all driving rocket ships and talkin' with our minds
Wearin' turquoise jewelry and standing in soup lines.

There are, basically, two kinds of people in the world: those to whom Bruce Campbell is Jesus, Schwarzenegger and the Three Stooges rolled into one, and then the rest. (Most of the rest, amazingly, have never even heard of him.) As he observes at one point in the book, the difference between a mainstream movie and a cult movie is that the former might be seen by 100,000 people 10 times whereas the latter is seen by 10 people 100,000 times.

His autobiography is one of the most fun - and funny - books on the movie industry I've read in some time, which makes sense considering his career. (There really isn't much to tell by way of drugs, debauchery and swimming-in-champagne when your biggest movie ever gave you a net annual salary of under $50,000.) Instead, this is the movie business as seen from the lower rungs; Campbell goes just as fanboy as everyone else when he finds himself sitting opposite Chuck Heston, and later on he spends an entire chapter on the career of one of his assistants on the set of Brisco County Jr. It's the little guys that keep the business turning, as a b-movie actor from Detroit would know. He got into the business almost by accident – he acted in a movie (Evil Dead, of coursewith a couple of childhood friends and suddenly he was apparently an actor (his account of his first interview with an actor's agency is a hoot). Where his characters on screen are often loud, obnoxious and funny, Campbell himself comes across as a genuinely Nice Guy trying to make a living simply by honest hard work in an industry that doesn't exactly encourage niceness or honesty. But still funny.

He's no great writer, but he can spin a yarn. I'd say reading his anecdotes from movie sets, fan convents and his personal life (man, Sam Raimi comes across as the most lovable utter asshole ever) feels almost like spending an evening just shooting the breeze with Bruce Campbell, but... well, it's such a quick read, it basically IS an evening shooting the breeze with Bruce Campbell. Lots of fun.

Now that's good Calvino. Funny, detailed, multi-layered, beautifully written and ever so clever without losing track of the story it tells.

On one level, this is a story about a... let's call him a man, because he's definitely male even if he isn't really human, an eternal being named Qfwfq. It's his life, from childhood to maturity. Only his life takes place over the entire age of the universe, from Big Bang to the 1960s on Earth. Each story builds on some scientific factoid, and then creates a very human-although-not-human story from it with Qfwfq as the narrator. Sometimes he's a dinosaur, sometimes he's a bodiless cosmic being watching as the universe creates itself... or if HE creates it?

Because on another level, this is a story about what IS. And HOW it is. How we create the world by seeing it, experiencing it, how others create images of us and how others' images of us help us create ourselves. How telling stories can bring things into being. We all create our own universe, we all evolve, and the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whiz.

There are quite a few legends in this world. One of the oldest tells of how the people of Babylon decided to build a tower all the way up to Heaven. But to no one’s great surprise, The Lord disapproved, and not only did he tear the tower down but by making everyone speak different languages he also made sure that nothing like it would ever happen again.

Bah humbug, says the dictator of the compleeetely fictional African country of Aburiria (really, it has absolutely nothing to do with wa Thiong'o's native Kenya. Really.) He’s ruled the country with an iron fist almost since the day the English left, he’s both the ruler and the lord of everyone, and nobody’s going to tell him that there are limits to his power. No, he’s going to build a modern Tower of Babel and march all the way to the stars to show the world that Africa can do things the West can’t even imagine. All he needs to get it going is to a) use both whips and carrots to convince the people that this is much more important than nonsense such as democracy, jobs and food, and b) convince the World Bank to finance it since Aburiria doesn’t actually have much money of its own. How difficult can it be? Thanks to the English language there’s a common lingua franca again, just like back in the day, and in these neo-colonialist days borrowing money shouldn’t be a problem as long as you’re prepared to pay interest. As one character notes, it's funny how "independence" came to mean "dependence."

But of course, the Ruler hasn’t taken the wizard of the book’s title into account. Which is one of the few things he can be excused for, since the wizard hasn’t taken himself into account either; he’s just an out-of-work academic who, while running from the police together with a woman from the resistance, makes up a story based on an old folk tale to make himself scarier than he really is. But before he knows it, the legend of the magic of the crow has spread and everyone – politicians, businessmen and the huddled masses – want his help to get ahead in the world. And somewhere around that time the magic, which began as a hoax, starts to gather real power.

wa Thiong’o’s huge novel has enough dashes of magical realism and modern-day fairytale to be compared to both Márquez and Rushdie (as indeed it has), but for my part, I keep thinking that this is more like an African take on Bulgakov’s The Master And Margarita. It’s got the same wildly disrespectful and bawdy sense of humour, coupled with a pissed-off, clear-sighted social critique that seems to want to kick over the whole damn tower of power hunger, nepotism, sexism, racism and faceless structures, all set to notes of both ancient myths and modern thinking that sometimes collides wildly and sometimes fuses into something completely new.

For a parallel, consider this. A somewhat younger legend than the Tower of Babel concerns Great Zimbabwe, the very real and ancient stone city in Southern Africa, which the newly colonized Africans back in the day claimed to be have been built by their ancestors. Their new rulers, of course, laughed at this idea (even when their own archaelogists confirmed it); since the white race was superior, something this big must have been built by white people, ergo they were simply reclaiming their rights to rule Africa. The logic of the victorious can often seem a bit weird in hindsight, when all the evidence has been twisted to serve the purpose of the one with the power to enforce his interpretation on others.

Aburiria is clearly based on Kenya and the Ruler on Daniel Arap Moi, but Wizard of the Crow is bigger than that; it’s a furious satire on all sorts of oppression, whether based on political, economical or physical power, and the Ruler echoes both Pinochet, Honecker and Putin. The West uses Africa, whose dictators use the military and police to use the people, where the men turn to the only outlet that remains and use the women. Lick up, kick down, shit flows downhill. wa Thiong’o constantly plays around with language; hardly a surprise, since he was one of the first African writers to refuse to write in English and instead write in his native tongue – something which cost him a year in jail and eventually exile when the regime didn’t like what he wrote. The value of language seeps through everything here; all old sayings, Bible verses, and English platitudes are twisted by those in power until the language itself becomes a trap the powerless must find their way out of. (In one scene, our hero remembers an old girlfriend who told him the story of how Jesus asked his disciples to become fishers of men – only to spot her on a street corner in a miniskirt, wasting away from HIV, still fishing for men. On a lighter note, there’s a misquote of Descartes that eventually turns into a linguistic virus that almost overthrows the government by itself.) And the way out turns out to be through storytelling; the legend of the people’s wizard, who can hold up a mirror and change the world, causing those in power to panic and become ever more paranoid. Just like in Bulgakov everything turns upside down, roles reverse and re-reverse, laughter goes from the bitter to the uproarious and back. wa Thiong’o’s language is a fantastic mix of colourful folk tale and modern novel, complex without being too complicated, hilarious without dropping its serious undertone, and it’s one of the most rewarding novels I’ve read all year. At 768 pages it might be a bit longer than it needs to be, but even the bits that aren't strictly necessary are simply too much fun to want gone.

The world keeps creating new legends, and they don’t necessarily need to be true to be strong enough to tear down towers. One of the newest is about an African grass roots movement where men and women work as equals, unite old truths with education and new ideas and only demand to control their own future. I don’t know how true that one is or can be, but it makes a cracking good read.

Bunch of people, aspiring writers, answer an ad: spend three months locked away together, no contact at all with the outside world, completely top secret, just write. Of course, Palahniuk seems to think, no "normal" people would agree to such an idea, and as it turns out all of them have something to hide. And as they introduce themselves, one by one, and tell their stories, everything inside the house starts to go wrong...

Haunted is a satire on modern society (of course); the culture of victimization, the glorification of suffering, every bad thing human beings can do to each other and themselves for a place in the spotlight, a confirmation that they exist and that they matter. The need to create a villain to blame for everything we do ourselves. The house is equal parts Frankenstein, Masque of the Red Death and Big Brother, and soon turns into one of the grisliest stories this side of... well, I kept coming back to Bret Easton Ellis and Ryu Murakami. Both of whom, I'd have to say, do a better job, even if Palahniuk does his best to outsplatter anyone out there.

It's not that the stories themselves are lacking, but the framework gets boring. Our anti-heroes are a bunch of pathetic idiots, more than willing to mutilte themselves and be able to say "Hey, look, I'm the victim here!" when the TV cameras come. I couldn't care less about them as individuals, and while the gore is interesting, it also gets incredibly repetitive; we GET it, Chuck, they're all symbols of today's mentality, yada yada yada. Just not very convincing symbols. And there's always the danger of the double-edged irony; to make fun of our thirst for scandal, blood, pain and suffering, Palahniuk has to play to those exact desires. It's a bit like (though better than) Hostel in that way; any attempt to make gore fans choke on their precious gore is bound to fail more often than it succeeds.

No, the saving grace is mostly in the short stories they tell each other. Some of which are truly great - visceral, emotional, funny as hell - and are the reason I will investigate Palahniuk further. Haunted is less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts are pretty damn choice.

To those who are unfamiliar with the plot, it can be summed up in three little words: "But I digress." The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman has precious little of Tristram's life or opinions, and makes it doubtful whether he's much of a gentleman - in fact, it often strikes me how much more bawdy, dirty and, well, uninhibitedly fun 18th century literature is than it would be during Victorian times. Not that I'm an expert, but between Swift, Rabelais, Bellman, Voltaire and Sterne I think I can form some sort of opinion and Tristram Shandy gets away with a lot of stuff - sex talk, various bodily functions, etc - that would have made his pruder grandchildren blush.

But I digress. Tristram Shandy tries to tell us about his life and opinions, starting with his conception and continuing with his birth, education and career - and he fails miserably; the fictional narrator himself isn't even born until about halfway in and even after that appears in his autobiography only sporadically, whenever the plot is in danger of - gasp! - advancing and he needs to derail it with an amusing anecdote or a learnéd discourse on warfare, childbirth, religion, noses, or whatever he feels like lecturing us on. Someone said that this book was post-modern before there was a modern to be post, and I can see where they get that - as much as he leans on Rabelais and Cervantes, to my modern eyes it keeps bringing up people like Pynchon and Eco. Like those, he is less concerned with telling a story or giving straight answers than with painting an entire society's thoughts, and he'll lean on any reference no matter how wise or un- to get there. In a sense, the lives and opinions he chooses to reference tell more about him (the narrator, not the author) than he perhaps intends.

However, that's also part of the problem. Ironically, it seems at least to me, time has run away from Tristram Shandy. It's supposed to satirize a lot of popular thoughts, beliefs and conventions, but while some of those are universal, others have simply faded into obscurity. I can read and appreciate Pynchon's Mason & Dixon - which, much like this, takes place in the latter half of the 18th century - because Pynchon still writes for a modern audience's preconceptions. With Sterne, I'm out of my depths; too many of the HOBBY-HORSES (always in upper-case), social memes and authorities he makes fun of are completely unknown to me - not to mention that the style he parodies is almost unreadable at times. It's like... imagine someone 200 years from now trying to make sense of Hot Shots! while Top Gun has long since been (rightfully) forgotten.

But I digress - this, of course, isn't Sterne's fault, he was writing for his time. But what remains of Tristram Shandy does tend to seem like one single joke stretched out over 615 pages - the joke being that he smugly keeps derailing his own story, mocking the reader's (and critics') expectations of it and gleefully even his own ability to tell it. Stuff like that is fun once, twice or even half a dozen times, but eventually you just want to smack him and tell him that all of that stopped being cute about 83 chapters ago.

Yes, it's occasionally very funny. Yes, it's occasionally still quite relevant, both on the nature of literature and the human condition - especially in the many hilarious exchanges between Tristram's father (rational, experienced man of science) and uncle (naive theoretical believer in love - and soldier). There are some nice turns of phrase that I need to write down for posterity:

On literature:

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;--so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

On... renewable energy sources, I shit you not, this is 1760 and it reads like a Greenpeace manifesto:

if the wind only served,--but would be excellent good husbandry to make use of the winds, which cost nothing, and which eat nothing, rather than horses, which (the devil take 'em) both cost and eat a great deal.

For that very reason, replied my father, 'Because they cost nothing, and because they eat nothing,'--the scheme is bad;--it is the consumption of our products, as well as the manufactures of them, which gives bread to the hungry, circulates trade,--brings in money, and supports the value of our lands;--and tho', I own, if I was a Prince, I would generously recompense the scientifick head which brought forth such contrivances;--yet I would as peremptorily suppress the use of them.

On his own inability to tell a straight story:

I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man.

&c &c &c &c.

But I digress. I'm glad I read Tristram Shandy; I'm glad I won't have to read it again. It's not bad, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in around page 200 and after then it's all uphill. This cock and bull story ends on a rather groanworthy pun regarding the male reproductive organs and male cows; I call bullshit - but at least Sterne's a good bullshitter.

Damn, I'd forgotten how funny and snarky this is. And the way she spins that all into that feverish ending.

(Though the less said about the Roma chapter, the better.)