On Heavy Rotation: March 2022

Books

I’ve decided to start compiling all of my various book and record reviews, and general musings about these things on a monthly basis, collecting them all in one place, rather than just leaving them only in desperate corners of the internet.

By way of introduction I am a bookseller and DJ, both of which I have been doing as a a job for the whole of my professional life. Unsurprisingly I’m an avid collector of music, I play drums, and I am also a big reader.

I am lucky enough to work in my fields of interest, a fact that I am eternally grateful for.

So I’m going to start off with what I read during the month of March 2022, I’ll do another post later on this week about the music i’ve been listening to.

Extinction - Thomas Bernhard (Faber. 1986)

Its hard to describe Bernhard in a positive way because his whole literary thrust is one of utter abjection. Toweringly torrential and completely negative in its un-putdownability, what would usually be a minus he somehow transforms into the whole point of what he does.

His form is worth mentioning too. “Extinction” is a 326 page novel consisting of two paragraphs. This uninterrupted, smothering style is essential to his dark energy, as is near hysterical repetition and eyeball rattling rage. His pure commitment to negativity is where the great humour of his work lies, there is no regard for himself or for us as readers, a thing I find admirable in the extreme.

Thrillingly original. Terrifying and wildly compelling.

One of the finest novels I have ever read. Which is what I thought about the last of his novels I read. BIG GENIUS.

True Stories - Sophie Calle. (Actes Sud. 2021)

Sophie Calle is a photographer, writer, installation and conceptual artist who does some amazing work concerning time, space, people, sleep, sex, connectedness and death who I’ve only just recently got hip to.

Existing in the blurry areas that exist in all communication “True Stories” is a great introduction to her work and view of the world.

Odd, searing, witty and entertaining she has a very singular view of things that is both impish and deadly serious.

A very rare combination but one perfect for an artist.

An Autobiography - Angela Y. Davis. (Hamish Hamilton. 2022)

Angela Davis has made her commitment to the emancipation of repressed people and specifically prison reform her life’s work, and in her astonishing autobiography she shows us how these things came to pass and what it really takes to make lasting social change.

Detailing her childhood, education, political awakening and the extraordinary events around her trial for murder and eventual acquittal, we see an unwavering, deeply inspiring vision for a better world.

Her views on the hideous wrongs perpetrated on oppressed people worldwide in the name of capitalism and the need for organised resistance against it are deeply moving, totally uncompromising and incredibly powerful, and her inability not stop looking at the bigger picture, against mind boggling odds, clearly shows why she was and still is viewed as such a threat to the established way of things.

Reissued for the first time since 1988 it contains a new preface that includes her ever evolving vision for achieving this revolution, the events surrounding BLM and the murder of George Floyd.

This book filled me with hope, anger and admiration; essential reading for all humans.

The Trouble With Happiness - Tove Ditlevson. (Penguin Modern Classics. 2022)

Tove Ditlevson occupies a very specific literary mood and place.

Her concerns are of hidden things, the obscurity of feeling, a certain unsureness of what most make a show of being completely sure and a fearless admittance of untidy emotion always very near the surface of everything.

Poet, memorist, Danish icon and short story writer; her work can only be compared to others who are in themselves on their own, like Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles and Diana Athill.

All the stories here are unnerving and wrong footing in their apparent banality, full of casual cruelties, very familiar but often unspoken of anxieties and subtle tortures, but also wilfully beautiful and creatively breathtaking.

Her trilogy of autobiographies are three of the finest of such things that I’ve ever read so seeing that more of her work has finally been translated was for me cause for much celebration.

A magnificent collection from an overlooked genius of European literature.

Mona - Pola Oloixarac. (Serpents Tail. 2022)

Raucous, depraved, psychedelic, untidy, erudite, vicious and very, very funny “Mona” is that real car-crash heroine that Spanish speaking writers seem so adept at creating.

Wilfully sordid but also weirdly tender, this novel is sensational, gruesome, darkly psychedelic fun that brought to mind the work of Ottessa Moshfegh, Brett Easton Ellis and Mariana Enriquez.

Oloixarac also takes unrestrained aim at the literary establishment and the privilege industry very effectively which has already annoyed many in the business…never a bad thing in my opinion, especially now when every publisher and literary prize is so keen to trumpet their so called “diversity.”

Certainly one of best and most startling new translated novels I’ve read this year that left me in need of a shower due to its playful and casual depravity and excesses.

My Father’s Diet - Adrian Nathan West. (And Other Stories. 2022)

Advertised, somewhat misleadingly, as a satire on strip malls, trailer parks and American kitch, I went into this expecting something else than what I ended up getting.

This great, touching, very funny novel about fractures in families; fathers and their failures, mothers and their certainties, sons and their uncertainties, was more than occasionally brilliant.

West has really dynamite command over character, prose and dialogue which had me laughing out loud at its audacious technical brilliance as well as its actual content. He is a translator of some note in the other side of his career and this I think helps with his interesting, nuanced view on communication.

A wonderfully gimlet eyed but very human look at our every day eccentricities, that in less skilled, less empathic hands would not have been nearly as moving or as close to the emotional bone.

Very, very good indeed

Short Life in a Strange World : Birth to Death in 42 Panels - Toby Ferris. (4th Estate. 2020)

Enigmatic master painter of richly populated worlds; winter landscapes, the macabre, the social, the hideous, the pastoral, the cosmic, the prosaic, the celebratory, the industrious and of the madness and proliferation of crowds, Pieter Bruegel The Elder has always somewhat fascinated and scared me.

Also, like many of us I’ve also confused much of his work with that of fellow renderer of incredibly detailed hellscapes, Hieronymus Bosch, but I now believe that Bruegel is the more interesting of the two by quite some distance.

This great book is everything I look for in art history. Its a tale of personal obsession, not too laden with technical concerns, its also an excellent examination of the art of seeing, a thing essential of viewing the work of Bruegel.

Also the picture Ferris creates of the tumult that was 16th century Europe is fascinatingly vivid and in some ways not that unfamiliar to how life is now in its casually constant barbarity, endless ribaldry and knee jerk superstitions.

A very fine book indeed that has the purpose of great art at its centre; a clearer understanding of this chaotic world through another perspective.

Essential reading.

The Moustache - Emmanuel Carrère. (Vintage. 1986)

A bitesize but no less impactful slice of French existential body horror that expertly shows up the gaping maw of chaos that our flimsy epidermis, scraped over our skulls, vainly tries to keep in check.

It all starts simply enough but really forces it’s central concerns, expertly stretching our belief in them to breaking point and beyond, into acceptance.

This is a huge achievement I think, given the plot and where in less capable hands it would have collapsed in on itself.

Tense, misleading, weirdly convincing, this managed to whisk me along irresistibly to the masterful final page. I have nothing but admiration for authors who have the guts to turn a novels trajectory at the last hurdle…Carrère does this and then some.

A must for fans of the blackest noirs of Cain, Thompson and Highsmith.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance - Irene Solà. (Granta. 2022)

Any book written from a kaleidoscopic array of perspectives that all come together in the most satisfying and unexpected manner is for me literary manna, and here thats achieved in wholly unexpected ways.

Narrated by dogs, bears, mountain ranges, 16th century witches, storms and also a very tightly realised cast of more conventional characters, Solà makes a story out of seemingly nothing that seems to be about almost everything.

Taking generations of personal histories and weaving them through the mountains of Spain, its wars, its rural and urban people is only a part of whats going here; she navigates a huge span of time and place with a violent love and luminous energy that at certain points is blinding in its familiar dream-logic, and at other times startlingly pungent in its earthiness. This ability to so skilfully and readably tie the living, the dead, the very real with the very unreal together is a rare gift that Irene Solà definitely has.

Elemental, poetic, political, violent, carnal, pastoral, cosmic, sad and elegiac; the narrative is surging and precise, utterly unpredictable and often desperately moving.

You’ll read this in a day, but its visions and satisfyingly visceral language will stay with you long after you finish it.

BIG stuff from another Spanish speaking writer of breathtaking talent.

1983 : Red Riding 4 - David Peace. (Serpents Tail. 2002)

Unwaveringly bleak, corrupt and brutal but in turn the towering prowess and literary showmanship of these books and the real time detail is so overpowering that it’s actually quite breathtaking at times.

Its also impossible not to be in awe of Peace’s seething, maniacal talent.

Relentlessly compelling, even at the peak of their hideousness, I found myself utterly in that cold, wet, shit smelling, foul mouthed world.

Peace’s abilities with plot are one thing, his power over dialogue is another which anyone who has read “The Damned UTD” will attest to.

Extraordinary stuff comes out of these tortured mouths, you relish their gallows humour and their eye watering, relentless use of the strongest, most offensive words in the English language.

Definitely not for the easily offended or easily scared, these books are a ghastly northern noir nightmare that most significantly, could only be English.

Ingenious, utterly convincing, phantasmagoric, regularly stunning.

Thats it for now. Thanks for reading!