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Between 1929 and 1953, Varlam Shalamov spent 20 years in Soviet labour camps as a dissident. 16 of those in Kolyma, a region in the most distant part of Siberia that at the time was essentially a prison the size of a large country, half a world away from... anything. When he was released, he started writing about it; short stories based on his and others' experiences. Stories of what it's like to survive for decades in an environment where everything is essentially trying to kill you, by violence or starvation or cold or exhaustion, specifically designed to be hell.

Life in the camps is horrible; nobody ever became a better person in the camps. The experience is completely negative, every single minute of it. Man deteriorates. That is what happens, nothing else.

Kolyma Tales certainly isn't easy reading; Shalamov is a brilliant writer, but obviously it's not the sort of stories that lend themselves to affirming the best of humanity. Shalamov never tries to find beauty, heroism or transcendence in suffering, quite the opposite; he just wants to document exactly how bad it was, how bad it can be, what people are capable of surviving (not that everyone does, far from it), how it happened - there's a presence in his prose that's just amazing.

It's also remarkable how political the stories are not; Stalin is never even mentioned, and neither are, for the most part, the opinions and actions that landed him and his fellow prisoners. When he raises his eye over the daily slog of trying to stay alive, the image he paints of Stalinism isn't one of deliberate malice as much as complete arbitrariness. Many were there not because of things they had done but for opinions their family members supposedly held. Your sentence could be extended or commuted to a death sentence on a whim, and even if you were technically released you were still stuck in Kolyma with no way to get all the way back to Russia. It was a crapshoot who ended up serving 20 years and who didn't, and who survived it and who didn't. And that's the mentality that spread from the camps.

The Kolyma Tales, however well-written, are ugly. Death, starvation, oppression, the almost complete loss of hope and morality... and yet there's still always something there. It's hard to point at the little gestures of humanity between people, because they're frequently offset and overwhelmed by the complete inhumanity (if anything done by humans can be termed inhuman) of the entire situation. But the simple fact that he wrote about it, that he spent 20 years reliving hell just to tell others about it, all in this razorsharp, vivid detail, says a lot. Stalin captured them, made them non-persons, to fade away and die in the middle of nowhere. In capturing them in prose, making them real again, Shalamov sets them free.

I've been trying to put together some thoughts, and it's tricky.

I mean, one could go the obvious way and say that it's a direct descendant of the proto-existential (or whatever) writers of the late 19th/early 20thc, the guys who walked around every major old world city thinking about their lives and their situations and the lack of god and the pressures of self and all that stuff, from Notes Of Underground through Hunger and Doctor Glas right up to The Trial and The Blind Owl (and on to Orbitór - I'm pretty sure Cartarescu has worn out quite a few copies of Blecher). A young boy grows up in a Romanian town, tries to figure out how the world works, how other people work, how his own body works (especially around the opposite sex), etc. We've seen that before.

Except that's not really what the novel does. There's something truly spooky about this book, and I haven't really managed to nail it down on one read. Our narrator doesn't come to any revelations, doesn't declare "And then I realised my boyhood was over and I had become... a man". Blecher's narrator observes everything, in minute detail, walking through his life like a HD camera (operated by a really good photographer) but where others would try to imbue objects with meaning he just returns to the form, the surface. It's less a novel about growing up than it is one about growing in. In a very physical sense; he's practically brainfucking everything he sees - not to impregnate it, but to catch it. (I'm sure someone's written something on the effect of tuberculosis on European literature; Torgny Lindgren, who survived TB as a child, has said that he's basically been able to call on that feel of feverish hyperclarity when writing ever since; Blecher, of course, wasn't so lucky.)

...for a moment I realised that the world could have existed in a realer reality, a positive structure of its cavities, so that everything that was hollow would bulge and reliefs would be identically shaped holes, without content, like the fragile, bizarre fossils trapped in stone that show tracks of shells or leaves that have been eroded away by time and only left fine imprints of their contours.
In a world like that humans wouldn't be multicoloured, fleshy growths full of complicated organs that could rot, but pure emptiness floating like air bubbles in water, in the entire universe's warm, soft matter.

Once you've read the author bio on the back flap - Blecher wrote this when he was 27, he was already bedridden with tuberculosis, he died shortly afterwards, and then... well, you know what happened to Romanian Jews after that, it's hard not to let that colour the novel.

Now I struggle in reality, I scream, I beg and beg to wake, to wake to another life, my real life. (...) All around, exact reality drags me further down and wants to undo me.

Or to read it through the lens of 19th century Europe dying, all the old truths dying, leaving us air bubbles to be filled with something else... Or maybe that's doing exactly the sort of thing the novel itself seems to reject.

"This is your life - nothing else", says the memory, and those words encompass this world's unfathomable nostalgia, enclosed in its hermetic lights and colours, from which no single life can extract more than a picture of an exact banality.

So, like this: Adventures In Immediate Unreality is a spooky, beautiful, haunting (and haunted) novel. I'm not sure I like it. I just know I need to read it again before long.

"I'd read so much about the fountain [of youth], and you'd have thought someone in all those books would have mentioned the really vital thing about the water, wouldn't you?”
“Which was - ?”
“Boil it first."

Yeah, Eric is still a bit of a letdown after the previous ones, very much a throwback to the style of the first few books. The Faust theme is fun but underused, many of the running bags are kind of basic... but bureaucracy hell is inspired, and while I never really laugh out loud I like Rincewind bumbling through the classics.

Lui is 19 and sick of being a good girl all dressed in pink and kawaii. She moves in with a violent boyfriend full of tattoos and piercings, and when he suggests piercing her tongue, she goes with it. It's all good and well until he introduces her to his tattoo artist, who enjoys inflicting pain a little more than most people... not that Lui minds.

Kanehara was 19 when she wrote this, a short novella of just 80 pages of three people pulling each other down into co-dependancy, alcohol and consensual violence, and it shows. Not that it's bad, absolutely not; much like Ryu Murakami's brilliant Almost Transparent Blue (Murakami wrote the foreword to this book too), it's a story of young people cut off from all accepted roles in Japanese society and responding by seeking pleasure in self-destruction, but where Murakami's story echoes on lots of different levels, Kanehara deliberately refuses to delve beneath the surface (fittingly for a book about people who change their skin to reflect how empty they feel on the inside). Lui is a frighteningly blank narrator; everything that happens to her, including her lover asking her if he can kill her, is dismissed with "that's OK." By limiting the story to what the emotionally dead Lui can be bothered to tell us, we end up with a story where almost every single thing that happens is related in the same bored monotone with no justification of why anybody does anything, forcing the reader to ask - if they care - just why these people act the way they do. If you find it genuinely affecting and thought-provoking, or just gratuitous shock value, will probably be different for each reader. I find myself somewhere in the middle.

This is YA Pratchett in a lot of ways, but it's the first book in the Discworld that seems to be what I remember it being. The A plot is strong, the side characters are fun, the main characters get a lot of room to grow, and it builds to a finale that actually means more than just "how do I beat up this demon". The dialogue is on point too - "I hate ---ing wizards." "You shouldn't --- them, then." Pratchett drops the cosmology almost completely and starts to realise that lives of all the people of the Discworld are the story here. Well, and their deaths, obviously.