‘The Absent Therapist is perhaps the strangest and most beguiling fiction Will Eaves, poet and formerly arts editor at The Times Literary Supplement, has written yet. It’s an experimental novella that weaves together a host of vignettes and fragments into an elusive and often disarmingly funny whole ... Eaves writes with effortless fluency and charm, and despite the lack of an overarching narrative, this little book flows like a song. Animated by a Joycean love of words and oddments from the life of the mind, it's a chance for the reader to immerse herself in something extraordinary.’  – Sydney Morning Herald


‘The Absent Therapist is a slim book with no single plot, yet the author’s decision to call it a novel seems justified: these confluent streams of consciousness amount to a narrative in prose where every comma is vital for the flow to run as it does. The fluidity with which these miniatures merge puts you in mind of Eaves’ poetry, present in his other novels too, but never in such a distilled form … The voices you hear give the impression of having been selected with some degree of randomness — “a story worth telling”, the author says, can be found where you least expect it — but their arrangement is precise down to the last dropped aitch. There are a plumber and a prince, teachers and hustlers, angry young men and batty old women. The subjects are just as varied and include computers, learning disabilities and “the point of boxer shorts”. Computers, “too connective [and] tyrannically social”, keep cropping up in the novel as one of its themes related to emotions: real, fake, artificial and inborn. There are subtle points on the human condition and the way it is perceived. The narrators don’t pretend to have more emotional baggage than the man in the street, and the author, serving as their amanuensis, doesn’t pretend to know it all either. His recipe for understanding people is: “If you want to know what someone’s like, don’t, do not ask. Leave them be.” This is your only chance to see and hear – overhear, if you are lucky – for yourself.’ – Anna Aslanyan
    
‘One of the book’s earlier monologues refers to someone talking as if “addressing an ideal person, a sort of absent therapist”. That’s Eaves – ears pricked, mouth closed. (The book’s last words, spoken by the closest we get to an author figure, refer to the sort of understanding “which made me a writer”.) Later on in the book, another character describes their younger self in a way that recalls this ideal figure – and also the novelist as embodied by Eaves and [Rachel] Cusk; not a confessor or tour guide but a conductor, a medium, at once intuitive and impersonal, receding from the stage to let the characters and reader work things out between themselves: “I didn’t have an identity and I didn’t want one. I was neither boy nor girl, male nor female. I was just a pair of eyes, a nose, some ears. Receiving the world, the brilliant blue sky, people talking above me.”’  – Leo Robson,New Statesman

"Funny how seeing someone swallow in their sleep, lying next to you, can bring a lump to your throat. You think, 'I love this person.' You can never tell them what you've seen. You tie a wish-knot inside your head."
So runs a complete paragraph in this book by Will Eaves. I call it a book for want of a more precise term. It's not a novel, even though it's described as such on the cover, and Eaves has written novels before, most recently This Is Paradise, about the highs and lows of family life. He is also a poet, which shows from time to time: that "tie a wish-knot inside your head" has definite leanings towards poetry, and tantalisingly hovers on the borders of mawkishness.
But it's one of the few moments where The Absent Therapist does so. Here, in roughly 250 sections ranging in length from one line to a page and a half, are various mini-narratives, thoughts and compressions of stories all told by different voices about different people and places and things. Some of the voices and people recur, and for a while I thought I was going to have to keep track of them all – that there was an underlying order making this a very complex work indeed.
Well, perhaps there is, but after a while I decided, as I suspect you will, to sit back and let it all wash over me instead. Reading the book in this fashion will give you a chance to appreciate the extremely deft way Eaves gives us access to other experiences, "the thrill and anxiety of knowing the difference between plausibility and the truth", as he puts it in almost the final words of the book.
You also get to savour a particularly wry, or perhaps dry, sense of humour. In one vignette we read: "He told me a wonderful story once about some man who came round for sex and said, 'Give me a blow job, then.' And Terry said, 'That's not very romantic,' and the man sighed and said, 'All right. Give me a blow job in the rain.'"
Or, describing a voicemail message, Eaves writes: "'I'm sorry we can't take your call right now,' he said, like we were both having mad sex or covered in flour or something." Why, exactly, is "covered in flour" quite so funny? Is it because it comes straight after "mad sex", as if its madness actually involved bags of flour, or because it is the kind of random, quirky image that might occur to any of us? Both, I would say, and also it's the very fleetingness that appeals. Whoosh, it's gone. Just like these paragraphs or mini-stories, which bring to mind, in their pregnant brevity, the medieval concept of life as being like the sparrow that flies in one window from the darkness outside, through the lit hall and then out into the darkness beyond the other window. You can sense something on either side of these stories, but they make sense on their own, because they have to. And yet the connections that you can't help spotting tease you with the idea of larger significance, a story frustratingly just out of reach.
There are also recurring themes that suggest larger or deeper concerns among the stories of drunks, family feuds and bizarre vox populi monologues ("It's as if a skunk went in there, shat itself, died, and the whole lot got turned into a sandwich. And there are queues, that's what I don't understand"). One I kept noticing involved the nature of consciousness, and the possibility of artificial intelligence. If you wonder what that's doing in here, I'd reply that this is the kind of thing that James Joyce's Leopold Bloom would mull over. Eaves's take on it: "Thinking is the set of mental processes we don't understand. It is the soul in conference with itself. Turing and Plato. Sounds like an Estate Agency. Or one of those try-hard butchers. Sausages by Turing and Plato. With pork and saffron." And that's it. The whole book is like someone deeply charismatic and charming daring you not to find them insane. It's wonderful. - Nicholas Lezard
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/11/absent-therapist-will-eaves-review


I’ve never read a book like it. Like this. This is described on the cover as “a miniature but infinite novel” and I thought that was a bit naff – but no, that’s it. Although it isn’t at all a novel. But I guess calling it one, or deciding it to be some sort of novel, an anti-novel as much as anything, probably works better than suggesting it to be some extrapolation of the prose-poem ideal or just a set of very short stories. It’ll work better for sales anyway.
Will Eaves has written novels – but also poetry. And here, with The Absent Therapist, he seems to aim (and reside) somewhere between the two. These are short narratives, some just one line long, nothing over a page and a half; snapshots, overheard conversations, different voices huddling in around one another. There’s very little comfort from the huddle too. It’s a lot of chatter and clatter around alienation.
The observations are startling – brilliant. And so often very funny. Eaves is able to mock and celebrate the truly bizarre, unique existence of the human being; that weird thing called family. How we can’t ever truly know what any one other person is thinking, and that thinking we might is often the biggest insult if not a mistake.
But he also allows himself space to simply make some great jokes, cold, harsh, hilarious.
One short – short – study features “a wonderful story…about some man who came round for sex and said, Give me a blow job, then’. And Terry said, ‘That’s not very romantic’, and the man sighed and said, All right. Give me a blog job in the rain.’”
Sex is one of the preoccupations treated as merely a theme, albeit a recurring one. Eaves has a lot of fun using sex, or discussion of it, and around it, as background prop or foreground distraction. It’s sometimes the unspoken issue, his characters reveal so much about mindsets, their own, the author’s too – many of the pieces have a memoir feel to them – and yet sometimes we end up drawn to, or go back to revisit and understand the bits that were left out.
There’s also a lot of talk around why we’re here – and where, in fact, we are. And it’s here, distilling heady philosophy and both dressing up and unpacking obfuscations that we get to see Eaves’ great poetic strengths and sensibility.
This is one standalone piece:
If the vacuum were not so complete, the sound of every culture speeding by, from bacteria to late macro-sentient galactic entities, would be that of a cistern filling in the ears of the creator, the soft flare of emptiness nixed and life’s brief quelling of the silent storm, which rages on and on.
I returned to that passage more than almost any other in the book. Oh, well, that and the story about ET, about Eaves (or the character that might not be him at all – but probably is) remembering being choked up by the film, how subsequent viewings still speak to him. And how that’s ruined somewhat by the memory of his father’s dismissal of the movie and surrounding franchise; his dad barking out about some stupid puppet; “some rubbery fucking thing” and how he would never see it, refused to see it.
It’s funny. And it’s also a poignant description of the small moments of madness that keep families together. And the ones that keep them apart.
But you need to take it as part of the whole, there are several read-aloud moments, many of the pieces except well. But the accumulative power of this book – of taking it all in, seeing not a hair out of place, sensing a strange and powerful madness within and around the writing and selecting of these pieces, the placement – is when you really see the magic. The writing is technically flawless, vivid, cruel and wonderful. It’s so often as good as it gets.
Whatever this is – whether novel/anti-novel or just a twisted stop-start journey of nearly short-stories – it’s a mini-masterpiece. And it contains – or is barely able to contain and control – multitudes. - Simon Sweetman
https://offthetracks.co.nz/will-eaves-the-absent-therapist/

English writer Will Eaves has contrived to write a book that’s tricky to describe and even more troublesome to review. Eaves is a novelist poet but The Absent Therapist is neither a novel nor a poetry collection, nor a volume of short stories. It’s more of a random catalogue of 21st-century scenarios, queries, complaints and observations.

These narratives range in length from 1½ pages to one sentence and vary wildly in subject matter.

One minute, a geologist is grumbling about his creationist colleague (“He is in total denial that New Mexico has any kind of coastal environment. It’s crazy”). The next, we’re getting a lecture from an adherent of a New Age meditation craze (“Body Electronics is a holistic protocol with meditative technologies and nutritional programs”). And in the next story, we’re peering into the Rio Grande Gorge with a careers counsellor whose partner “works with the educationally disadvantaged and emotionally, uh, distorted on outward-bound projects”.

Some characters pop up more than once but the narratives are not explicitly connected, nor do they build towards anything resembling a plot, climax or resolution.

If this sounds like some clever but soulless experiment, it doesn’t read like one. These mini-narratives (it’s tempting to describe them as vignettes, though the word evokes a style too fussy for the elusive authorial spectre of Eaves) could be 150 beginnings to 150 novels.

Eaves has a novelist’s ear for the rhythms and repetitions of spoken language and a poet’s flair for imagery. One of the most charming and distinctly British aspects of this book is the way many of the narratives dart, as if embarrassed, from big philosophical questions to ­prosaic humour. Here is one example, from start to finish:

Thinking is the set of mental processes we don’t understand. It is the soul in conference with itself. Turing and Plato. Sounds like an Estate Agency. Or one of those try-hard butchers. Sausages by Turing & Plato. With pork and saffron.

Many of the voices speaking in this book begin their narratives mid-rant or mid-reflection, a technique that calls attention to how little we know, and can know, of strangers. Yet the tiniest snippets can be ripe with suggestion. One narrator describes the comings and goings of animals and people around a block of flats at dusk. It’s a tranquil scene with an evocative conclusion: “It doesn’t last long, this part of the evening. Two cigarettes at most.” How did this person come to measure their time in cigarettes? Is this a detail that suggests a lonely, wistful narrator? Or is the speaker just a contemplative creature of habit?

The book does hit a few false notes, with some voices less convincing than others. At times, too, Eaves shows off his gift for reproducing conversational tics at the expense of the reader. A tedious monologue is as tedious on the page as it is overheard on the train. But high points outnumber misfires. This is a very funny little book and it contains several instances of truly startling, slap-in-the-face irony. Many of these stories veer off in unpredictable directions and some are quite moving. Eaves is at his best, and his warmest, when sketching scenes of obscure human ­triumph: salvaged pride on a small-town dance floor; childhood anxieties abated in the ecstasy of a rainstorm.

Near the end, one narrative seems to strike at the heart of the meaning implied by the book’s form. The unnamed, unknowable speaker is reflecting on the search for objective, conclusive truth: “What draws everyone on is knowing that we’re denied objectivity by the limits of our perceptions while simultaneously denying that we are denied it. It’s terrifying to think that we’re responsible for what we think about the cosmos, and what we do in it, because it’s like saying there’s no one watching.”

If there’s any kind of cumulative impact to the narratives, it’s the idea of the inescapability of our specificity and subjectivity. But in Eaves’s slippery, analysis-resistant anti-novel, this is not necessarily a source of despair. This is a strange book — sometimes boring, sometimes absurd, sometimes profound — but it is pervaded by a sense of wonder. Other people are an endless source of mystery, Eaves might be saying. Grasping the mystery might be impossible, but the important part is making the attempt. - Sophie Quick

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/the-absent-therapist-150-beginnings-to-150-novels/news-story/ecfc0fef88a99b0925d8157576a47741

...[Cusk's] Outline has more in common with a work that shows no Sebald influence, Will Eaves’s novel The Absent Therapist, than with a work, such as Shark, that proceeds from a vision of Sebald as strident. Eaves’s novel unfolds over a series of divided paragraphs, in which unnamed characters – some recurring, some not – deliver brief comic monologues on subjects including artificial intelligence, holidays and (again) Steven Spielberg.

An epigraph taken from Corinthians says that none of the world’s many voices is “without signification”, but Eaves is careful to stop the signification of individual voices from building to a whole. In Shark, whose therapist figure – the anti-psychiatrist Zack Busner – is present on almost every page, drawing parallels, joining up the dots, the cacophony of voices makes a symphonic sound; in Eaves’s novel, it stays a cacophony. (For Eaves, as for Cusk, this approach has provided a route away from the more or less conventional English social novel.)

Perhaps the only way of getting a firm hold on Outline and The Absent Therapist – both shortlisted for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize for bold and original fiction – is to view them as exercises in self-scrutiny by other means; novels that, in refusing to communicate opinions or messages, tell us about their authors’ refusal to communicate opinions or messages. Whatever its other ambiguities, Outline is clearly concerned with how a novelist interacts – and shows the novelist to be a kind of no one, defined by their style of remove, like God or Shakespeare or a shrink. Flipping the analogy, Eaves’s idea of an absent therapist points partly to his own novel’s lack of a narrator and partly to the role of gentle ushering played by a certain kind of novelist. One of the book’s earlier monologues refers to someone talking as if “addressing an ideal person, a sort of absent therapist”. That’s Eaves – ears pricked, mouth closed. (The book’s last words, spoken by the closest we get to an author figure, refer to the sort of understanding “which made me a writer”.)

Later on in the book, another character describes their younger self in a way that recalls this ideal figure – and also the novelist as embodied by Eaves and Cusk; not a confessor or tour guide but a conductor, a medium, at once intuitive and impersonal, receding from the stage to let the characters and reader work things out between themselves: “I didn’t have an identity and I didn’t want one. I was neither boy nor girl, male nor female. I was just a pair of eyes, a nose, some ears. Receiving the world, the brilliant blue sky, people talking above me.”  - Leo Robson

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/10/how-disappear-completely-novel-exercise-self-scrutiny

Because not every review can be 1,000 words long, I’m going to keep my remarks about The Absent Therapist nice and short.  Just like the novel.
Except it’s not really a novel, but a collection of disparate voices, a series of vignettes that jump from person to person.  It’s a bit like walking through a crowd of people, picking up fragments of what’s being discussed.  Sometimes you’ll circle back and pick up another snippet of the same conversation, but for the most part, all you’ll ever get is that one moment.
What’s remarkable about The Absent Therapist is how accessible it is.  While it’s obviously very experimental, and while there’s no story to take hold of, there’s a human and emotional quality to most of the vignettes that makes them immediately engaging, even if we only stay with them for a few minutes.  Take this as an example:
I don’t see the point of boxer shorts.  No support.  And the gap for your sticky wicket, why bother?  Too fiddly.  You end up groping about for the opening while your fellow man casts suspicious sideways glances.  And as my beloved put it, why poke your head out of the window when you can jump over the wall?
or this
Samuel and I heard this morning that the refugee camp in Tanzania containing our two sons, Amos and Zizwe, is to be closed.  The government is closing it and sending everyone in it back to Burundi, where we know that Amos and Zizwe will face great danger.  We think of them at this time, and we would ask that you say a silent prayer for them, too.
or this
If the vacuum were not so complete, the sound of every culture speeding by, from bacteria to late macro-sentient galactic entities, would be that of a cistern filling in the ears of the creator, the soft flare of emptiness nixed and life’s brief quelling of the silent storm, which rages on and on.
While these tonal shifts can, at times, be sudden and jarring, as Nicholas Lezard points out in his review, after awhile the prose just washes over you.  This doesn’t mean that The Absent Therapist is either disposable or just a blur of words.  Instead, as a glimpse into the human condition it’s a book best enjoyed as a meditative experience rather than picked apart. - mondyboy.com/?p=6595

Will Eaves, This is Paradise, Pan Macmillan, 2012.
extract
read it at Google Books

The Alldens live in a ramshackle house in suburban Bath. Don and Emily have four children: confident Liz, satirical Clive, shy Lotte, and Benjamin, the late arrival. Together they take the usual knocks, go to work, go abroad, go to university, go to pieces. Don and Emily stick it out, their strong marriage tested by experience and frustrated by love for Clive, the ardent boxing fan at odds with himself, their special child. But then ordinary is special, too, as the Alldens will discover thirty years later when Emily falls ill and her children come home to say goodbye. Their unforgettable story is an intimate record of survival that is clear-eyed, funny and deeply moving.

"Four children and I've got one of each, haven't I? One married, a single mother, a homosexual and a black sheep." Benjamin, youngest of four, imagines his mother rising from her bed with this statement; that won't happen, because she is far gone with dementia and on the verge of death. The analysis is his, and anyway, she would never have been so candid – a mother who believed that everything would be for the best, skilled in self-deception.
Here is a novel about the intimate and perilous territory of family. We meet the Alldens in Bath – a working-class family in the days when doctors paid home visits, a spin dryer was a novelty, girls wore shifts and someone could have a Pete and Dud routine on a record. Don is a picture framer; Emily teaches children with learning problems but is basically a mother. Of the children, Benjamin will be the homosexual, Clive the black sheep, Lotte the single mother and Liz the more stable married eldest. We leave them many years later, gathered together for the death of Emily in the nursing home to which she has eventually been consigned when Don could no longer cope. Will Eaves's skill lies in the shift from children to adults; these are the same people, subtly emphasised by the passage of time, by the ravages of life as it is lived. "No one changes: it is our fate to become more and more like ourselves," says Clive.
It is a challenge to assemble a cast of six (with further walk-on parts) and carry them across several decades; Eaves succeeds triumphantly. Economy is essential, and he does economy with great style, establishing people and situations with cameo scenes and sharp dialogue. In the first half, family life piles up with a series of vignettes, centred mainly upon Emily and her relationship with each child, and demonstrating the way in which she is both an exemplary mother and exasperating; and on how each child is starting to resist the remorseless clutch of family life. Liz, already brisk and self-sufficient as a teenager, will succeed; Clive will not. He is erratically brilliant, always inspiring unease: "I'm afraid it's still my home, I can't think of it in any other way," he will say in the end.
There is nothing that is exceptional about the Alldens – no suppressed narrative of violence, no simmering animosities. This is every family in a sense, and the strength of the novel lies in its creation of a narrative in which nothing happens, as it were, except the revelation of family politics, family manoeuvring, family accommodations. The events are those climactic moments of life that lie forever in the mind, each of them summoned up with deft precision: a disastrous visit by Emily to student daughter Liz, the tensions of a holiday in a French gîte.
And the marriage, core of any family? Don is blinkered, self-absorbed, frequently cavalier in his treatment of his children. It is Emily who is the guardian of family life, and the marriage has, eventually, achieved "the kind of docile mistrust that exists in many long unions". In the final section of the book, Don is flailing around, both aghast at Emily's imminent death and trying to camouflage his feelings. It is Clive who nails his father, calling him never very sympathetic but utterly dependable. (Though this can seem a touch indulgent, given that Don has apparently had affairs in the past, and now, with Emily dying, has a shockingly young girlfriend.)
Emily had apparently sunk into some kind of prolonged depression years before the onset of her dementia. She is the most elusive member of the family, drowned out by the more assertive presences of children and husband. She is practical and competent, but her personality never comes across. I am not sure that this is not deliberate – that she is, in fact, a kind of archetypal mother figure, at once the centre of the family and its victim. Whatever, she is a catalyst, prompting the moving and vigorous final section in which everyone is coming and going from the nursing home, which is called – of course – Sunnybrook.
The family novel is a bit like the old-fashioned detective story: a finite group of characters and an enclosed venue that is fingered occasionally by the outside world, with, like as not, clues as to who has done what to someone else. There is no emotional knifing in This Is Paradise; this is a family we can all recognise, in which things have not gone entirely right but neither are they horribly wrong. Clive, troubled and unstable, could be the most perceptive of the children, with his early summing up of family members as individually flawed by a collective good. In that sense, this subtly constructed novel can perhaps be seen as a celebration of family, tempered but ultimately in favour. - Penelope Lively
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/10/this-is-paradise-will-eaves-review

Will Eaves's third novel describes itself, via its blurb, as a book about an "ordinary" family. However, Eaves evidently does not see himself as an "ordinary" author. Instead of adopting a conventional narrative arc, he bombards the reader with intricately rendered snapshots of family life through the years.
The family in question consists of Emily and Don Allden and their four children: Liz (coolly confident), Clive (borderline autistic), Lotte (sensible and shy) and Benjamin (an Aretha Franklin fan, who turns out to be gay).
The Alldens live in an unfashionable area of Bath in a ramshackle house through the 1970s and 80s; Emily spends her time making patchwork quilts and irritating her daughters, while Don earns a living as a picture framer and has a series of extramarital affairs.
But it takes a long time to establish even these basic facts, because Eaves's technique is – like Emily's interminable quilting – to sew together random patches of information until a broader picture emerges.
It's an approach I wanted to like, especially because Eaves has a real gift for nuanced observation. The tension between Emily and her growing teenage daughters – never expressed but left to slither out in acts of passive aggression – is conveyed brilliantly. When Lotte spends time on the phone to her boyfriend, Emily, who is "scared by the prospect of bills", takes to interrupting conversations "as soon as possible. She did this by wandering into the kitchen, saying, 'Now, where did I put my…?'"
Eaves is good, too, at getting inside a child's mind – the best passages are reminiscent of that other unflinching chronicler of family dynamics, Edward St Aubyn. When the young Benjamin sees a shooting star on holiday in France, "He wished: for the top bunk, and maybe a small volcano, nothing too threatening."
And yet the relentless accumulation of detail left me feeling bogged down rather than properly engaged. It takes several chapters simply to understand who is who amid the barrage of names, and Eaves's overtly lyrical prose style can obfuscate rather than clarify (in the opening chapter, the grandmother Irene is described as "the elfin stoic").
By the time all the children have grown up, however, the reader's persistence begins to pay off. When Emily shows signs of dementia, the family reconvenes, each member trailing their own unfulfilled ambitions and failed relationships. Emily's infirmity is convincingly charted and Eaves is particularly good at conveying the poignant daily routine involved in caring for the elderly. "[…] the carers were still turning the wisp of a body that had cooked and sewn and laughed and walked everywhere… Off came the old gown and the knickers, and for no more than ten seconds they saw Emily as she was, the skin drawn over the rack of her ribs, the whole body a membranous sac."
But even by this stage, I didn't care enough about the characters to be truly moved. Unlike with Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Jane Howard, both masters of the minutely observed family saga, there seems to be no heart at this book's core. Crucial plot developments, such as Don's affairs, Clive's fits of aggression or Benjamin's struggle with his sexuality, are played out offstage without resolution.
Of course, this is partly the point. Real families are messy and difficult and untidy, just like this one. There are no neat narrative arcs or uncomplicatedly likeable protagonists in our own lives, so why should the Alldens be any different? It is an engaging idea, and yet while there are flashes of the novel becoming something great, it never quite lifts off. In the end, This Is Paradise was a book I admired rather than loved. - Elizabeth Day
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/19/this-paradise-will-eaves-review


This is a novel about ordinary lives that, at times, dips – or perhaps rises – into the extraordinary. It is about an averagely muddled middle-class family, the Alldens, who live in a ramshackle three-storey house in Bath: parents Emily and Don, and children Liz, Clive, Lotte and Benjamin. The book starts in the late Sixties, with Emily pregnant with Benjamin, and ends sometime in the recent past, with the children coping, more and less well, with the deterioration and death of the older generation.
Nothing of any note happens in the novel, that hasn't happened (or will) in your life or mine, and to spend any part of this review summarising either the plot, or the characters, would be beside the point.
There is nothing special about any of them. What makes the book worth reading is the ease with which Will Eaves soaks the page in their personalities, dipping almost at random in and out of their thoughts, and aiming those thoughts – as thoughts in families so often are – at those around them.
It's true that this way of proceeding, like slow-turning kaleidoscope, takes some getting used to. The paragraphs jump between characters, the chapters skip years, leaving the reader to play catch-up. Once-central characters can die without Eaves feeling the need to inform us, or reappear momentarily, as if glimpsed from the corner of the eye. The novel works as much by absences and oblique reference as by direct statement. That's how families work, after all.
All of which might not be quite enough to keep you turning the pages, if it weren't for the sheer joy of some of Eaves's writing, whether an individual metaphor – the sun, as squinted at by Ben, floating in a swimming pool on holiday, is "a jittery coin"– or a precise, economical description – "There was a soft thunk as Emily knocked over her juice, followed by a roll and a leisurely smash"– or an insight into the human mind: "The sound of the Hoover knocking against the banisters was Emily's way of informing Liz that she'd now been in her room too long, and that it was time to show her face... Soon the usefulness of the ruse would be spent, with no more surfaces to be vacuumed, and Emily would be forced to knock on the door or just barge in and say, 'Oh! Liz! I didn't think you were in. I thought I heard you go out."
Be charmed for long enough by this delicacy of operation, and you'll end up rewarded with all kinds of depths to the relationships, making connections that you didn't know you were capable of. Anyone put off the family drama of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Freedom by the oppressive shadow of the author, so didactic and manipulative, might well find this an excellent replacement.
- Jonathan Gibbs
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/this-is-paradise-by-will-eaves-7545592.html


Fiction lets us peer at other people’s families more closely than we’d dare in real life: novelists are practically obliged to infringe on domestic privacy when they prise open its guarded interiors for our inspection.
These scenes are packed with shrewdly observed domestic detail, from the perplexing advent of new gadgets in the house (a clothes-dryer) to the extra chores generated by impending holidays. They accumulate without resolving into a coherent pattern, making for an honest vision of daily life: as a series of disconnected events rather than a carefully plotted progression.
The second half of the novel slips forward to the nursing home where Emily is slowly weakening with Parkinson’s. Her middle-aged children gather around her death bed. Our partial view of their characters is poignantly reflected in their limited knowledge of each other. Does Clive’s unkempt adulthood derive from a boating tragedy half-glimpsed in an earlier chapter? How far can we assemble character from what the novel opts to leave aside?
Eaves writes with great honesty about the inconvenience of death, which has no schedule of its own. He’s careful about the brittle comedy of an institution so full of forgetfulness, and to its discomforting lapses of register (one carer tells Benjamin she's a fan of Ronan Keating).
In a work of such intelligent understatement, Eaves’s partiality for the grand aphorism strikes the occasional dud note: we hardly need be told that “a family needs witnesses to its adventures to make them real” or that “bereavement shows us who we are and demands a response”. The prose here is strongest at its most metaphorically suggestive. As a boy, Clive is “thin as a seed”, while a joke has an edge “like razors among toothbrushes”. Such language reminds us that family life, for all its mundane chaos, remains dense with potential surprises. - Thomas Marks
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9101426/This-Is-Paradise-by-Will-Eaves-review.html

After two novels much lauded for their acuity and quiet wit (Oversight, a gay coming of age debut, and Nothing to be Afraid Of, about actors working on the theatrical fringe), Will Eaves brings to the surface a subject lurking in these earlier books: the exploration of Englishness and “the Eden of normality” built after the war out of the sacrifice, stoicism and solidarity of preceding generations.
The particular England in question is middle – dead centre one might say, because as with his previous works, This is Paradise takes the long view, ingraining now with earlier thens, lending even his most up to date England a quality of overhang or afterlife. The sense of belatedness is reflected in the narrative structure – a story of two halves concerning the suggestively-named Allden family, a minor-middle class bunch who start out in Bath in the Seventies and then regroup in the present day a few miles down the road in a nursing home where Emily, the family’s now amnesiac mother, has been taken to be looked after by the professionals, and to die.
In the interim, time has worked its reverse magic and the four children in adulthood seem less vivid and more aimless than their younger selves, though three lead averagely successful lives (Benjamin, the youngest son, imagines his mother rising from her deathbed and exclaiming: “I’ve got one of each, haven’t I? One married, a single parent, a homosexual and a black sheep”). The location of the nursing home in which they come together again, in a wasted mining village, an infernally “bleak outpost”, reinforces the idea of drift, as if Eaves is registering the once steadfastly middle class now sliding to the periphery. It’s a falling off, however, accompanied by persistence, a mundanely heroic muddling through by which the family cope with their mother’s deterioration, and continue, as they have always done, to tread gingerly around Clive – the difficult, brilliant son whose adult life has turned out to be one of “catastrophic independence”.
Clive’s predicament is at the heart of the story – the trap in which he exists and the way, in turn, it entraps the entire family: this is the novel’s quarry and plot. Born with a heart defect and crippled in leg “clamps” as a child, Clive is his mother’s most beloved, and the family’s most adversarial member – the Allden’s very own rebel angel. His difference and ferocity cow his siblings, provoke petty one-upmanship in his father, Don, and leave unchecked the taunting “endearments” he aims at Emily (“beastie”, “witch”, “hideous crone”). The family “conceal themselves from him”, fearful of his brutal honesty, repulsed by his pedantry, pride and self-neglect (all “coming at you in waves”, too overwhelming and disproportionate for dailiness or rubbing along); and so, lied to, Clive’s “need to establish the truth”, his radar for hypocrisy, becomes ever keener.
Outside the family he also arouses mistrust – “The gap between his abilities and his deficiencies made people suspicious…How could he read Milton and stumble over four times four?” – further undermining him. Wondering at his abnormality, he seeks models of power (Wagner, von Clausewitz). But Benjamin, who is obscurely aligned with Clive through the subtle ostracism of his own homosexuality, guesses that his brother believes himself emotionally crippled not because of the way he is spurned, but as the result of some inherent flaw, “Some evil, welling up inside” – which is how conformism works its discipline.
Around this hellishness ordinary family life proceeds. As in his earlier novels Eaves writes with great insight about human interaction: the countless ways in which we read and try to come to terms with one another’s meanings and performances (the “charades” Clive is so quick to identify); the abiding sense that the more familiar we are, the more life becomes a comedy of cross-purposes. There is too the rough justice of families: Don’s paternal solipsism, which makes him incapable of entertaining other people’s difference (a very God-like quality), is admired for its truthfulness, while Emily’s perceptiveness is resented, her attempts to engage with her children often seen as intrusive and manipulative. He is excellent too on those things common to all family life – the effort to forge collective well-being and the exasperation caused by dissent or non-cooperation: on holiday in France, infuriated by Clive’s violent outburst over a category dispute (whether their holiday home is infested with hornets, bees or wasps) Don shouts at his squabbling offspring, “We didn’t have…this when we were growing up…You’ve no conception. This is paradise.”
In the novel’s second half, there is a shift in tone: the Alldens in facing Emily’s disintegration are exposed to their own mortality; Clive returns to his miserable Hastings flat and then walks out into the night sea. But the outcome is not what we expect. The novel retracts and an ending is contrived, one circumventing the question George Orwell put to writers, and which Eaves discussed in a recent TLS Freelance column: “What am I trying to say?” In the final pages there are several nudges about not trying to pin meaning down: an elaborate doodle by Clive, an “extraordinary envisioning” adorned with lines from (an unattributed) Paradise Lost, displays great intricacy but bears “no single sense”; Benjamin tries, unsuccessfully, “to make a pattern of unrelated things…And the lesson was that you shouldn’t go looking for significance”; while in the novel’s final paragraph Don, thinks “He would be sorry…Or not sorry. What did it matter?”
The question lingers of quite what Eaves intends by his Miltonic frame. He reads Satan as a psychological not political figure, and Clive’s perversity, given no outlet or ambition beyond his family, finally succumbs to domestication, the bonfire in his mind “relaid in a swept-clean hearth”. When Don holds Clive’s newly framed drawing up to the window, the world and the picture meld together and “the Devil” seems to disappear into the light. A coda reprises a moment from the opening pages concerning Miss Voy, a clairvoyant. It all makes an oddly consoling finale – about the power of art to recast, elucidate and dispel fear – for a work so indebted to Milton’s satanic adversary.
This review appeared as ‘One of Each’ in the TLS on 17.02.2011.- Kate Webb
https://katewebb.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/will-eaves-this-is-paradise-tls/


Will Eaves, Nothing To Be Afraid Of, Pan Macmillan, 2006.
excerpt
read it at Google Books

An earthquake strikes at the heart of London, its epicenter a theatre where a lavish production of The Tempest has just opened. Thus the scene is set for Will Eaves’s gloriously deft tragicomedy of our time. Nothing To Be Afraid Of is both a lament for hope abandoned and innocence betrayed, and an exquisite comic pageant of Shakespearian vitality and compassion: an incidental theatrical history, across the twentieth century, of the art of pretence; of patience, trust and loyalty; of folly in youth and unforgivable old age.

‘Tender, playful and full of beautifully observed descriptions of growing up and growing old . . . with some terrific comic set-pieces the equal of anything in Waugh and Wodehouse. Now that’s good writing’ Daily Telegraph

‘In the case of his novel, Eaves has nothing to be afraid of. This deft, absorbing book more than confirms the promise of The Oversight. Eaves is a master of the dark arts of city fiction. He is to be read, relished and watched very closely’ Independent

‘Nothing To Be Afraid Of provides several coups de théâtre . . . [it] is a tragicomic tale of secrets, a drowned daughter, infidelity and mistaken identity . . . It is so clever, so apt, so right that you have no option but to read the novel with its built-in encore all over again. It seems even better the second time round’ Sunday Telegraph

Will Eaves's debut, The Oversight, was a new kind of gay novel, in that it was a novel first and foremost and only incidentally gay. There was no proselytising, no coming-out trauma and no over-indulgence in repetitive rough sex. Instead, it simply told the story of a shy boy growing up in the 1980s and adoring the school cross-country champion's pimply back without really knowing why.
Written from the perspective of someone born towards the end of the 60s, Eaves's novel caught the cusp of a sea change in social attitudes. His protagonist admits to a certain lingering anxiety about his sexuality, yet speculates that "mine may be the last generation to feel this way. There's talk about lowering the age of consent again, and queer visibility in soap operas means that 'gay' school kids are now healthy individualists rather than loners."
In narrative terms The Oversight was a fairly low-wattage affair, but it made a promising start and prompted the question where would Eaves go next? The answer turns out to be, as for many talented young gay men, the theatre.
Eaves's new novel leads you to wonder why there aren't more decent novels written about life on the boards. The reason could be that the theatre remains a closed shop, and actors are unwilling to blow their backstage secrets in public. I don't know who Eaves's green-room mole might be, but he seems to hit it bang on the head with this maudlin dressing-room confession: "We're a shifty lot, us pros, let's be honest ... We want it lifelike, but not too much, see. We don't like the idea that just anybody can do it without weeks of rehearsal, because that'd make us less special ... It's a contradiction, like. You say you want everyone involved, but do you? Really? 'Cus we can't all be putting on the slap, or who'd be left out front to say hello afterwards?"
Nothing to Be Afraid Of tells the tale of two theatrical sisters: sylph-like Martha, who breezes through drama school and into plum parts at the National; and her heftier elder sister Alice, who struggles to earn a crust as a London tour guide between unsuccessful auditions for TV parts as cave-women. As the novel opens, Martha is preparing to appear in a new production of The Tempest and Alice is out front, ready to review her under a pseudonym, for a no-account listings magazine which pays a few quid for submissions.
Coincidentally, as the lights dim, the centre of London is shaken by a moderate earth tremor ("Alack! We split!") though the real catastrophe is that Caliban, a corpulent former female impersonator, is drunk. Alice is urgently summoned backstage to replace him on the recommendation of her sister, who points out that she's the right size for the costume.
Once this unlikely star-is-born scenario has been established, the plot veers off in several directions, some of which are steered towards a more plausible conclusion than others. Yet Eaves succeeds in maintaining a perfectly credible tension between the two sisters, as well as between Leslie, the camp, red-nosed Caliban, and his nemesis, on-and-off stage, Prospero Bob Ladd.
Yet the book is far from an all-out-attack on slightly overweening theatrical types - its satire is too gentle and its tone too affectionate for that. You are left with the impression of someone who loves the magic of the stage, yet is equally fascinated by the mundanity of its creation.
The paradox is captured perfectly when Alice steps out to save the day, and is suddenly reminded "how unlike anything resembling art the whole business was of standing up and shouting things out. How sweaty and makeshift the illusion seemed from the inside. Porphyry and jasper? The pillars were MDF wrapped in sheets of marbled vinyl. The fountain's granitic casing was Styrofoam. Glue, sawdust and fabric conditioner flavoured the air."
Nothing to Be Afraid Of is ultimately twisted to a rather tortuous conclusion, but remains full of incidental pleasures: a flustered meteorologist being bullied by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight; or the wry observation that the bronze plaques on the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Walk had slid off on to the grass "where they more than ever resembled landmines". And it's to Eaves's credit that he follows an unassuming gay novel with a story about heterosexual relationships in an unassumingly gay environment. Nothing to Be Afraid Of confirms Eaves's discovery that there's no reason to be ashamed. - Alfred Hickling
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jun/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview21

Rudolf Nureyev is one of the celebrated performers with a cameo in this novel. It's not the young god we see, but the ageing dancer, clinging to the limelight, and running across the stage 'like a skater with the ice breaking beneath him'. Will Eaves's absorbing second novel is set in the theatre, but it's the everyday performance of desperation that interests him, rather than the dazzle of seamless illusion.
Its focus is two sisters, both actors: clever, chubby Alice and pretty Martha. When The Tempest opens at London's Young Vic, it is Martha who marvels at the brave new world as Miranda while Alice sits in the darkened auditorium, anonymously reviewing the play. Until, that is, the ageing variety artiste playing Caliban is hauled off in a drunken spume of incoherent vituperation and Alice replaces him. This opportunity is as much insult as accolade: 'it's one scene and she's the same size.' Alice gains a lover (Nick, who likes to experiment with affection), and an agent (Nick's father, who is complicatedly enmeshed in her own family history). She also starts working with Caliban, Leslie Barrington, on his unreliable memoirs.
Late Shakespeare shadows the plot, with its gradual estrangements and reversals. Eaves responds to the trauma that belies dewy reconciliation, and as in his debut novel, The Oversight, overlays a patina of the uncanny. Popular entertainment trots alongside Shakespearean romance - Angela Carter's Wise Children, moved by similar myths, lies in the background.
Eaves tours halting 20th-century theatre: tatty rep, tawdry Riverdance and the desperate fag end of variety. Music hall is reinvented as queer entertainment, where Leslie hones a genteelly sozzled drag act based on stolen confidences. Showbiz is never glamorous here: the first theatre we glimpse is by 'a squalid alley' sluiced by scummy water. Life out of the limelight is more enigmatic.
Alice scoffs at the idea that actors hide behind their personae: 'You only had to spot an actor shoplifting to see how constitutionally useless they were at hiding things.' Unlike other theatrical novels, such as Trilby, the only people who melt into an act are those caught in a strange state of insider-outsiderhood.
Even if the plot can't quite commit to a melodramatic beefiness to complement its absorbing design, Nothing To Be Afraid Of is still a fantastic pageant of layered identities. When Leslie finds the father who absconded in his childhood, he turns out to be, in a Wildean echo, an Ernest who claims to be Frank. Identities split in ways that seem increasingly pathological as the narrative thickens: particularly Alice's cruel pseudonymous review of her sister. An even more monstrous bifurcation emerges for the finale, but leaves more mysteries than it resolves. 'In stories you know more at the end than you do at the start,' Leslie reflects, 'whereas in life it's the other way round.' - David Jays
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may/22/fiction.features1

Here is a tale of two sisters, bound by professional envy and sexual jealousy; a father and son who are not quite what they seem; of a brilliant, drunken cabaret artist and his tortured muse; of a mother with two daughters who hate her and one who died young. It goes without saying that everything is presented with a side order of secrets.
Here is a tale of two sisters, bound by professional envy and sexual jealousy; a father and son who are not quite what they seem; of a brilliant, drunken cabaret artist and his tortured muse; of a mother with two daughters who hate her and one who died young. It goes without saying that everything is presented with a side order of secrets.
Alice, plump and over-aware, should have been an actress. Instead, it is her sharp, knowing younger sister Martha who first attains success on the stage. One evening, while Martha is playing Miranda on the South Bank, an earthquake, the most powerful the capital has known in almost a century, strikes London. As a symbol for what is to come the earthquake is a fair enough image, though its actual significance is never quite explained. However that may be, events do seem to take a surreal turn.
Leslie, the actor playing Caliban, has a fit of fatigue and emotion and Alice takes his part for the second act. And this is a play she was actually meant to review. Notwithstanding her new professional involvement, she gives a particularly nasty notice to her sister, with deleterious results. Her private life takes a fillip when Nick, playing Ferdinand, takes a shine to her. When it is revealed that he is the son of a theatrical agent who also happens to be the bosom friend of her father, you know you're in for a deal of skeleton rattling. Absurd as all this might seem, Will Eaves steers his gaudy galleon with assurance and flair. Only at the end does it hit the rocks.
There's no denying that the various relationships are hard for anyone unbitten by the murder-mystery bug to follow, but for much of the time you are content to be swept along. The reason for this lies in the author's prose. Eaves boasts a style of extraordinary delicacy and acuity: the sentences are perfectly cadenced, the various narrative voices eerily convincing. He has a seductive way of using one image to amplify another. Thus, a trainer at an acting school is "ill with fitness, sun-dried almost". Characters that could so easily have become mannequins from an old property drawer are wholly realised. Leslie, the ageing theatrical queen, reveals in his memoir a tenderness absent from his speaking voice. Alice, similarly, could have been merely an embittered paranoiac; instead, she is alive with childlike, though misguided, benignity.
For all its implausibilities, however, the novel seems to stand until the last 50 pages, at which point it totters. At a purely forensic level, the ending does indeed tie up the loose threads; in narrative terms, however, it fails. The least colourful of his many threads has been picked out as the central one. And the trouble with bad endings is that the disappointment they engender spreads retrospectively. I suddenly realised that the various tragedies, however powerfully evoked, were just too many for the reader to be moved by, that there were jarring notes when Eaves moves into dialect, that the psychological exposition was sometimes ponderous and unnecessary, and that this very knowing narrator was frustratingly reluctant to share his knowledge.
Tales of familial terrors are best told in a style that does justice to the enormously complicated strata involved; murder mysteries, similarly, must be narrated as simply as possible, while magical realism depends on its ellipsis and suggestion. But the combination here makes a ménage à trois, and such arrangements have a way of imploding sooner or later. - Murrough O'Brien
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/nothing-to-be-afraid-of-by-will-eaves-752418.html

Will Eaves's polished new novel has a fault line running through it. Nothing To Be Afraid Of starts as a wry and compressed account of sibling rivalry: Alice and Martha are young actresses in south London trying to make their names on the stage. The surface of their lives is rendered with scrupulous verisimilitude as the hidden story of their differences and ambitions snakes through the early pages. But a third of the way in, the book changes course.


Will Eaves, The Oversight, Pan Macmillan, 2002.
excerpt

In 1983, an ordinary teenager called Daniel Rathbone fell in love, spurned a friend, and stumbled on the ability to see in the dark. On his twenty-fifth birthday, Daniel is bequeathed a second no less unusual gift - a Victorian writing box, the legacy of his father and the repository of his youthful secrets, and of his current feelings of guilt.When a visit from the once-spurned friend, Carey Schumacher, coincides with the death of a contemporary, Daniel's peculiar endowments are enlisted to make lasting sense of lost time and place.
From Bath to Brixton, from the 1960s to the 90s, The Oversight follows a trail of thwarted and victorious affections. It is an intently comic tale of vision and delusion; of family, friendship and desertion; and of the divisively cruel need to belong. A multi-layered debut of distinction.


'Deeply impressive... Eaves simply does not put a foot wrong'Evening Standard

'Remarkable... I was so absorbed in the novel, so admiring of its cleverness and poise... a moving , frequently funny and impressive debut'Sunday Times

'Eaves hasn't created a hero who can leap tall buildings, he's created something rarer still: a vivid portrait of a man getting to grips with adulthood'The Face

'Subtle wondrous...intelligence and taste...gems of dry humour...a varied and accomplished first novel'Scotland on Sunday

Despite the narrator's supernatural powers and a plot that hinges upon the secret compartment of an antique writing box, the achievement of Will Eaves's first novel lies in its recognisable coming-of-age detail and delicate attunement to domestic compromise. The narrative shuttles between 1980s Bath and present-day south London with an almost soapily realist texture, catching Daniel Rathbone as gawky, isolated teenager coming to terms with his sexuality and as reserved, seen-it-all twentysomething facing up to family secrets.
Eaves touches the constituent parts of Daniel's schooldays - those ubiquitous "boluses of masticated paper and crisp-scented saliva" known as flob-bombs, the "perfect displacement activity" of Rubik's Cubes and the teacherly cries of "find a partner and get out your rough books" - with a confident, exact hand. Isolated from the ranks of the effortlessly cool by his cleverness, gangly physique and unspoken feelings for Gregory Bray, on a field trip to a disused railway tunnel Daniel discovers another point of difference: he can see in the dark. However, having bestowed his diffident subject with superhero powers, Eaves seems unsure what to do with them: though Daniel's glimpses of what is usually veiled make for nice stylistic effect and fertile metaphorical contrast with his emotional blindness, the overall impression is haltingly novelistic. The only optician who would shrug off a visual freak of nature with the words "if it ain't broke . . ." is a compliantly fictional one.
The box of secrets presented to Daniel on his 25th birthday - once a favourite possession of his dead father, who has slipped into it a clue to the family mystery from which everyone averts their eyes - also sticks out like a sore plot device. Daniel's attempts to jettison this symbol of the past are thwarted by insistent coincidence: when he leaves the box at a municipal dump it is instantly reclaimed by his passing neighbour, who brings it straight back up the garden path.
By contrast, Eaves orders the structural intrusions of the past with understated ease, intersplicing a memoir of Daniel's parents' youth with moving letters from his dying father (counterpointed by his mother's anxious spin on events and loaded response to his coming-out visit: a model of maternal subtext grasping at words like "adult", "sensible", "level-headed"). Eaves traces Daniel's own teenage progression with wit and warmth, from the desperate early need to belong - his night vision switches on when he cruelly rebuffs Carey, the nerdy tagalong friend who is closer to him than he could want or guess - to the later secrets and ties of forbearance and attraction. The novel catches perfectly the cusp of maturity at which self-consciousness becomes self-awareness, spurned geek morphs into dignified individualist and Daniel can at last tell Gregory he wants him and receive the easy riposte, "Not with the zits on my back, you don't". Why, Daniel wonders to the cheerily bisexual Craig, now that the embargo has been lifted on such subjects, did he never get to join in the group masturbation sessions? "Probably because we thought you was a poof."
These sections shine with such convincing immediacy that the constant jumpcutting to the 1960s or the present forces our attention from the book's emotional heart. Adulthood becomes an arena for Eaves to tie up his themes, so that the reappearance of Carey, beautiful, rich, but with a white stick, forms a frozen contrast with Daniel's bedraggled second sight. Craig, now a pilot, meets his end testing virtual-navigation technology while Carey shows off his Gibsonesque goggles ("half VR, half AI") developed to orient the blind within a preprogrammed landscape.
Eaves relates his tableaux in an intensely visual, at times surreal slow-motion close-up, so that a lunch with Daniel's mother takes in the "comma of elastic saliva flexing away in the corner of [her] mouth" and the "squeezed-out sports car" reflected on the underside of her spoon, the style mimicking both Daniel's visual acuity and his reluctance to focus on the messy relationships played out before him. "Anxious to get to the point, I missed it," he admits of his teenage years; although Eaves tries too hard at times to hammer his material into a stilted elegance, his warm appraisal of fallibility, motive and mishap makes for a promising debut. - Justine Jordan
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/31/fiction.reviews

Will Eaves' debut, The Oversight (2001), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. It risked being overlooked, however, by virtue of having a plot that is extremely hard to précis. Eaves' treatment of a teenage boy grappling with his family's past and the emerging desires that will mould his future was sophisticated and subtle. While frequently very funny, The Oversight was also strikingly dark - fittingly so, as much hinged on narrator Daniel's discovery that he can see without light. The novel was a brave and remarkable first offering.
Will Eaves' debut, The Oversight (2001), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. It risked being overlooked, however, by virtue of having a plot that is extremely hard to précis. Eaves' treatment of a teenage boy grappling with his family's past and the emerging desires that will mould his future was sophisticated and subtle. While frequently very funny, The Oversight was also strikingly dark - fittingly so, as much hinged on narrator Daniel's discovery that he can see without light. The novel was a brave and remarkable first offering.
Nothing To Be Afraid Of matches its ambitions, while signalling a move on from its author's immediate world. Suitably for a book with a staging of The Tempest at its centre, it has a strongly fantastical feel. The twinning of Shakespearian performance and contemporary London might suggest affinities with Angela Carter's Wise Children; Eaves' protagonists, Alice and Martha, are also sisters.
But Carter's vaudeville turn had something of the stage ham's showiness. Wise Children deliberately invoked the energetic felicity of the comedies. As her title suggested, Carter followed the Bard in offering a generous verdict on its subjects. By contrast, Nothing To Be Afraid Of shares with Shakespeare's last play a stubborn cloudiness; a keenness not to simplify or neutralise extremes in human behaviour: ungoverned desire, betrayal, revenge. Its characters are capable of either brutal or mendacious conduct, or the harsh, if apt, observation of their own and others' shortcomings.
This last quality is a necessary presence in any theatre career. It also illustrates something about the capital that Eaves brilliantly documents: its merciless capacity for, and tolerance of, toughness in all events. "A total liability? Rude and alcoholic? Some people only have the constitution for failure," as one character summarises a friend. There are echoes of the mordant truthfulness of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, or of Balzac's fine study of literary ambition and failure, Lost Illusions.
A fond reconstruction of British popular culture offers an adept comic counterpoint; this is frequently a very funny book. Meanwhile, a key plot development concerns the unimagined consequences of a mockingly dismissive review of the Tempest production - in The Independent. In the case of his novel, Eaves has nothing to be afraid of. This deft, absorbing book more than confirms the promise of The Oversight. Eaves is a master of the dark arts of city fiction. He is to be read, relished - and watched very closely. - Richard Canning
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/nothing-to-be-afraid-of-by-will-eaves-752440.html

Will Eaves, Sound Houses, Carcanet Press, 2011.

Well-loved authors and books appear suddenly; hair-raising anecdotes and football matches become occasions for elegiac comedy; and music and domestic ritual raise ghosts. This emotionally intense poetry collection explores several continents, moods, and stages of life—including the common experiences of growing up, growing older, losing a parent, being in love, and enjoying the natural world. Both formal and informal, funny and sad, these lyrical poems seek out a strangeness in the everyday.

Will Eaves' first book of poems explores several continents, moods and stages of life. Common experience - of growing up, growing older, losing a parent, being in love, enjoying the natural world in all its nearness and remoteness - provides his themes. Wherever they are set, in the Australian bush or in a West Country sickroom, the poems keep faith with the consolations that come from close observation and stillness. Well-loved authors and books appear suddenly; hair-raising anecdotes and football matches become occasions for elegiac comedy; and, music and domestic ritual raise ghosts. Both formal and informal, funny and sad, these lyrical poems seek out a strangeness in the everyday: in the transformational territory of childhood and the equally uncertain adult world of grief and loss.

Silverflash

Not since I was four or five at most
and in the first of many striped tee-shirts
have I been this close to the flavour of safety.
I'm walking into town again, the child of hills.
You bought me fish and chips for lunch, my own
adult portion because I asked for it, in Evans's
tiled restaurant, the Alhambra of takeaways.
Fine living robs the faculties of right judgement;
I turned, lost sight of you that afternoon in M&S.
Gone, and the unworn self at once puts on habits
of wandering. ("Have you seen my ... ?")
They stood me on a counter. You appeared
and recognition bore away the riderless hoofbeats
of fear. Pride claimed me, later, when you praised
my instinct to be visible, which soon became
the need to be noticed – a confused stage,
a knowingness that wasn't what you'd meant
at all! You were relieved to see I'd asked for help,
could be that lost and, knowing it, be found.
My deep-sea stripes helped you spot me,
their colours sliding past, today, in town,
the blue and brown and silverflash of cars
like keys to some fastness. High ground

The TLS Interview: Twenty Questions with Will Eaves

Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy,Trans. by Sidney Alexander, Princeton University Press, 1984.


read it at Google Books
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In 1537 Francesco Guicciardini, adviser and confidant to three popes, governor of several central Italian states, ambassador, administrator, military captain--and persona non grata with the ruling Medici after the siege of Florence--retired to his villa to write a history of his times. His Storia d'Italia became the classic history of Italy--both a brilliant portrayal of the Renaissance and a penetrating vision into the tragedy and comedy of human history in general. Sidney Alexander's readable translation and abridgment of Guicciardini's four-volume work earned the prestigious 1970 P.E.N. Club translation award. His perceptive introduction and notes add much to the understanding of Guicciardini's masterpiece.










“I do not fight with religion, nor with those things that seem to depend on God, because this object has too much force in the mind of fools,” wrote Francesco Guicciardini, the great historian of the Italian Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars), who the Italian literary critic Francesco De Sanctis deemed the true cynical writer of his time, not the noble-hearted pragmatist (as De Sanctis portrays him) Niccolo Machiavelli.
De Sanctis paints Guicciardini, born 6 March 1483, as an opportunistic quisling, calling his Memoirs “the corruption of Italy codified and raised to the rule of life,” and points out that while both Machiavelli and Guiccardini believed in a united Italy and freedom for the Italian people, Machiavelli was willing to put his life on the line in the service of making that happen, while Guiccardini argued that only an idiot would risk his skin trying to fight against what can’t be changed. Instead, Guicciardini put himself in the service of one corrupt master after another, and (much like Thucydides) retired from public life to write history after his employers threw him to the curb.
However, even de Sanctis acknowledges the greatness of Guicciardini’s landmark work, The History of Italy (written 1537 -1540), writing that, “If we look at intellectual power, it is the most important work that has come out of an Italian mind.” Guicciardini pioneered the use of government documents, and analyzed the motives of the various historical actors of his time with unprecedented psychological depth. (Something he was able to do partly because he had had personal encounters with many of them.) “Marvellous above all,” says De Sanctis, is how Guicciardini doesn’t judge events by predefined rules, but rather “case by case, looking at each fact in its individuality, its own complex set of circumstances, which make it that and not another.”
Guicciardini’s sentences are a maze of what the modern day translator of his Hist of Italy, Sidney Alexander, calls “his Ciceronian periods, his Proustian longueurs.” Anyone who wants the challenge of reading an English translation that attempts to go toe-to-toe with Guicciardini’s winding sentences should sample the early modern translation of Geoffrey Fenton. Everyone else (mere mortals) should try the Alexander or the 18th century translation of Austin Parke Goddard, which is also a bit easier than Fenton. (This copy comes from John Adams’s personal library.)
- www.oldbookappreciator.com/tbrd-the-history-of-italy-by-francesco-guicciardini/

Herbert Pföstl,
Schrift-Landschaften, Epidote Press, 2015.
http://herbertpfostl.com
https://twitter.com/herbert_pfostl?lang=en
http://papergraveyard.blogspot.hr/
http://blindpony.blogspot.hr


This artist's edition includes prints of Herbert Pföstl’s nine original Schrift-Landschaften drawings, along with a foreword written by filmmaker David Gatten, titled “Navigation Charts, Compass Points & Ledger Lines: Herbert Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften as Philosophical Instruments.” The drawings are composed of a single text-fragment, written in Pföstl’s distinctly small script, and inscribed upon a page from a nautical traverse table. One is reminded of the particularities of calligraphic expression and the meditative processes required to create needlework samplers, chronological tables, weather diaries, or even telegraphic code. Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften, however, come from a deep reading of and reliance upon literature; these lines are fragments from books gathered over many years and transformed into a landscape of incantations for the artist. What at first appears a wilderness of words on paper soon resolves into a garland of vows concealed within the text. Gatten’s foreword is both a response to Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften as well as a meditation on his abiding interest in the liminal space which often exists between drawing and writing — a place masterfully explored and surveyed in his astonishing films. Pföstl writes of the Schrift-Landschaften: “As incantation in repetition, these landscapes of script are walks in writing on fields of paper. Resurrected fragments, summoned as vows: exercises to gain time.”



Our first Artist’s Edition includes prints of Herbert Pföstl’s nine original Schrift-Landschaften drawings, along with a foreword written by filmmaker David Gatten, titled “Navigation Charts, Compass Points & Ledger Lines: Herbert Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften as Philosophical Instruments.” The drawings are composed of a single text-fragment, written in Pföstl’s distinctly small script, and inscribed upon a page from a nautical traverse table. One is reminded of the particularities of calligraphic expression and the meditative processes required to create needlework samplers, chronological tables, weather diaries, or even telegraphic code. Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften, however, come from a deep reading of and reliance upon literature; these lines are fragments from books gathered over many years and transformed into a landscape of incantations for the artist. What at first appears a wilderness of words on paper soon resolves into a garland of vows concealed within the text. Gatten’s foreword is both a response to Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften as well as a meditation on his abiding interest in the liminal space which often exists between drawing and writing — a place masterfully explored and surveyed in his astonishing films. Pföstl writes of the Schrift-Landschaften: “As incantation in repetition, these landscapes of script are walks in writing on fields of paper. Resurrected fragments, summoned as vows: exercises to gain time.” 
The Standard Edition of two hundred copies will include color offset prints of the nine Schrift-Landschaften drawings created by Herbert Pföstl in 2015, as well as a letterpress printed leaflet of David Gatten’s foreword. Everything will be housed in a handmade enclosure with letterpress printing. All printing by Jon Beacham at The Brother in Elysium. 
The Special Edition of nine signed and numbered copies will include everything in the Standard Edition plus one original Schrift-Landschaften drawing created by Pföstl in 2016 especially for this publication. 
Each drawing in the Special Edition is composed of one of the following nine lines: 
we can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind
a consolation even to plants and animalsbirds and stars and bells and snowflakes
all we wish for is to be forgotten
and whatever is destroyed is regrettedto do everything possible for that which does not exist
the invisible things will give me strength
and the skies passed on as over nature
to the ships that are no more









Herbert Pföstl, Light Issued Against Ruin, The Brother in Elysium, 2014.


A book of works on paper made after my departure from NY in 2012-2013. Includes a foreword by Jon Beacham, and an artist statement.


Herbert Pfostl’s work is ripe with a distinct stoicism that, in the words of his friend (and author of the publication’s Forward) Jon Beacham, represents a sensation beyond nostalgia: “There is no nostalgia here, only an appreciation for antiquity.” Bound dutifully in a heather-gray jacket with embossed type features, Light Issued Against Ruin gestures at the weathered objects, those tinted with time, that produce gestures to compete with lighter and more immediate visuals that exist contemporaneously.
Pfostl’s rich visualizations are paired with single lines or words of poetic prose; together, these elements represent a body of work that revels in a deep quietude, far from (but still connected to) the image-saturation and textual associations that dominate visual culture on a larger scale.





To Die No More, Ed. by Herbert Pföstl and Kristofor Minta,

Blind Pony Books, 2012. 


An artist's book on the marvelous embroideries of death, collected and edited in 170 text fragments - from Aries to Wittgenstein - by Herbert Pföstl and Kristofor Minta.


Alcoholism, decay, demons, disappearance, disease, crows, ghosts, loss, maggots, nothingness, orphans, silence, the void and worms are some of the topics offered in this singular artist's book. Designed to pay homage to the fairytale forest of death with parables and fragments from sources both known and long-forgotten, this riveting compendium of dark quotations, illustrated by Herbert Pfostl and James Walsh, borrows from such illustrious figures as Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, Mozart, James Joyce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Shakespeare, Adolf Loos, Jorge Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson, Gustav Mahler, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Butler Yeats, Goethe, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Homer, Francis Bacon, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joseph Conrad, W.G. Sebald, August Strindberg, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Blake, Rudyard Kipling and Walter Benjamin.








Herbert Pfostl is an artist we’d like to know more about.

His work combines found images and text with figural notions of animals and herbs, half-finished rubbings, and archetypal blots and smudges.
Pfostl’s drawings and mixed-media works invoke a library dear to hilobrow–Blake and Dickinson, Benjamin and Bataille. But Pfostl reads them with stained fingers. Like the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, Pfostl makes highbrow art with dirty fingers.

Images like these may be found at Pfostl’s blog, where they are accompanied with the quotations that inspire and animate them. Pfostl’s book To Die No More is a compendium of quotations and images in the same vein.
Matthew Battles
http://hilobrow.com/2009/03/20/the-art-of-abject-dreaming-herbert-pfostl-and-roberto-kusterle/



Herbert Pfostl was born in Graz, Austria in 1968. He worked at the New Museum in New York City, where he was a curator and book buyer for the New Museum Book Store.
He has described himself as an artist of a “paper graveyard” in which the viewer may discover:
“drawings and paintings of animals and saints and black robbers in their forests with white stags and drowned sailors in their ships at the bottom of the oceans and many of the beautiful dead. I made them for you – so come back – spend time.”
As an artist enamored of old books and antiquated paper, Pfostl’s work immediately resonated with my own sensibilities. His art combines found images and text with figural notions of animals and herbs, half-finished rubbings, and archetypal blots and smudges. These drawings and mixed-media works invoke a library dear to hilobrow–Blake and Dickinson, Benjamin and Bataille. But Pfostl reads them with stained fingers. Like the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, Pfostl makes highbrow art with dirty fingers.
Small paintings as parables of plants and animals and old stories of black robbers and white stags. Fragments on death like mirrors from a black sleep in the forests of fairy tales. All stories from the dust of the dead in fragments and footnotes like melodies of heartbreak and north and night and exploration – breakdowns. About saints with no promise of heaven and lost sailors forgotten and the terribly lonely bears. The unknown, the ugly – and the odd. Collected grand mistakes, noble errors from many sources. Sinking signals – conscious or not – sonatas and last letters and great insults. The impossible tears in landscapes of ocean or stranded whales. A going far back to coals and cruelties and sobbing like songs in whiskey and blood. Of soldiers’ last letters and all seven seas. With pirates and wars and prayers in holes in the ground. Of fallen women and orphaned children and drowned slaves and burned saints.
Alcoholism, decay, demons, disappearance, disease, crows, ghosts, loss, maggots, nothingness, orphans, silence, the void and worms are some of the topics offered in this singular artist’s work. Designed to pay homage to the fairytale forest of death with parables and fragments from sources both known and long-forgotten Pfostl builds upon such illustrious figures as Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, Mozart, James Joyce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Shakespeare, Adolf Loos, Jorge Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson, Gustav Mahler, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Butler Yeats, Goethe, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Homer, Francis Bacon, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joseph Conrad, W.G. Sebald, August Strindberg, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Blake, Rudyard Kipling and Walter Benjamin.
“He became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldn’t tell what they planned to do.”
These wine-leaf-brown prose fragments need no page numbering, these chance discoveries connect one’s own feelings to those of kindred spirits and now fill the room, a place of chamotte-golden daylight, they vibrate and swing, are highly vivacious attractors of thought, grains of salt to garland the sting of death, nourishing light set against the dark premonition of a final end to the godless Western world and its consuming despair.
They can be found in a sensuous treasure chest of similar dimensions, weight, and texture as a smallish cigar-case, one that might hold five Havanas. A deliberate piece of art, a vignette of death, sways in relief at the cover’s middle: the stylized figure of a doomed little ship on calm seas, emblem and symbol of the human soul equipped for certain death.
Its cross is proud and questioning simultaneously- though ever dependent on a deeper center, from which its perpendicularity is derived and its echo resounds.
From its pale blue frame, it partakes in the triumph of the already-dead: ’ Nevermore will we die.
Pfostl’s work… stained as with spilled coffee and tea and smudged with sooty, bituminous black ink… speaks of dark forebodings, shadows, violence and tenderness… and death.
And always beauty.
A dark beauty.
And poetry.
Pfostl’s works speaks to me of the magical theaters of Joseph Cornell, the alchemical musings of Anselm Kiefer, the medieval scriptorium, the dark music of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Charles Simic; Goya's Los Caprichos, the “doodles” of Dubuffet and Paul Klee, crude carvings of Romanesque sculptors and rude paintings of Bill Traylor, the illegible scrawls of small children, pornographic graffiti in ancient tombs, and the prehistoric paintings of Lascaux.
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/post/79102621960/contemporary-artist-herbert-pfostl

On My Sanctuary Space by Herbert Pfostl

https://www.maharam.com/stories/pfostl_on-my-sanctuary-space


I have written elsewhereabout my studio as sanctuary space. It is my place about all places and all times—a sort of garden arranged with totems. Outside is nature (the leaves, animals (mostly birds), the light from the sky). Inside are slow sounds—often from the beginnings of recording history—mono spells and cadences. They set the tone and give the soul structure while I am working. It is here that I sit with my drawings and small paintings, at an old green table, which is strewn with excavated things—simple stones, some twigs, and black dust. Many little pieces of sandpaper and burnt matches. A rickety chair and scrapbooks beside it—for mining. Piles and walls of books—from old dover editions on the histories of sailors, soldiers, and fanatics, to volumes about occult experiments, exploration breakdowns, stories of vanished things and dreams. One can find books on Russian and Byzantine icons, primitive arts (both European and non-European), the old masters, the insane, the anonymous, and the forgotten. Tomes on myth and meanings, on patterns and archetypes. Entire landscapes of sacred things in monographs on the isolated and inimitable works of Hercules Segers, M. K. Čurlionis, and C. F. Hill. On the walls: a paradise chart from Dante’s Divine Comedy, a friend’s image of a ruin, a broken daguerreotype. A continuous coming and going of new works—mostly landscape fragments these days. Silver lakes, white plants, inscriptions, traces. Slowly crafted sinking signs. The eclipse. I have moved my studio many times: from Vienna to New York, within the boroughs of New York, and away from there after more than twenty years to a more silent place with fewer people and more sky.
https://mailchi.mp/ea9f9dd72acb/herbert-pfstl-is-in-wild-air




All Sorts of Remedies

Contemporary French Poetics, Ed. by Brill Rodopi, 2002.




read it at Google Books


Contemporary French Poetics finds its origin in part in the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990's held at Dalhousie University in September 1998. A certain number of the papers given at that time, and since reworked in some fair measure, take their place here alongside other studies subsequently invited. In all they form a broad and varyingly focused set of cogent and pertinent appraisals of very recent French, and to some degree francophone, poetic practice and its shifting, becoming conceptual underpinnings. Studies offered range from those devoted to the work of established contemporary figures such as Bonnefoy and Du Bouchet, Stetie and Deguy, Noel and Chedid to discussions of younger generation writing by poets as diverse as Pinson and Leclair, Bancquart and Emaz, Maulpoix and Despres, Morency and Zins. All center, however, upon work essentially produced over the last ten years.


Contents:
John T. NAUGHTON: Louis-René des Forêts’ Ostinato. Jean-Claude PINSON: James Sacré, lyrique “grammairien” . Pierre NEPVEU: Figures du paysage dans la poésie québécoise actuelle. : Stétié, Bonnefoy, Deguy “Verbalité” et “Promesse de Terre Promise”. Daniel LEUWERS: Pinson story. Philippe MET: La Part (Orale) de Soi et de l’Autre dans la Poésie Récente d’André Du Bouchet. Steven WINSPUR: L’écriture-flash: Ernaux, Brossard, Noël. Hans R. RUNTE: L’Acadie poétique du dedans. John STOUT : Michelle Grangaud’s Oulipian Aesthetics : Anagrams, Inventories, and Poèmes fondues. Yves CHARNET: “Poème à hauteur d’homme”: Notes sur le “parler ras” d’Antoine Émaz. BROPHY : Jacques Dupin et l’enjeu d’un “rebondissement illimité”. Martin SORRELL : Variable Geometries : Space in the Poetry of Louise Herlin. Irène OORE: Célébration du quotidien de Colette Nys-Mazure: une esthétique, und spiritualité, une éthique. Sarah DRUET : Jean-Michel Maulpoix dans le domaine public de la poésie: une nouvelle quête d’impersonnalité. Christopher ELSON : Sidérer : Deguy, Quignard, Lévi-Strauss et l’écriture du désastre. Peter SCHULMAN : Soleil noir, encre noire: les contemplations “zen” de Céline Zins. Anja PEARRE: Le voile d’Isis chez Yves Bonnefoy. Patrick COLEMAN: Toucher le fond: L’exigence américaine de René Lapierre. Adelaide M. RUSSO: Le Propre du temps: Le retour de Marcelin Pleynet à la question du langage. Karen BOUWER: Sans lieu sinon l’attente de Marie-Claire Bancquart: Une poésie digestive. Peter DORRINGTON: Solidarité et sourire: Yves Leclair. Glenn FETZER: Pierre Alferi, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Yves di Manno : traversées de la parole poétique. Sergio VILLANI: Andrée Chedid et Le Radeau de la Méduse.

Marcus Slease, The Spirit of the Bathtub, Apocalypse Party, 2018.marcusslease.blogspot.com/
https://plus.google.com/+marcusslease

The Spirit of the Bathtub is somewhere between the absurdism of Richard Brautigan and the low-fi pop reality of Ariel Pink. 
Experience surreal tales from the bathtubs of South Korea, Utah, Turkey, Italy, Poland, and London. Vibration therapy with Spirit monkeys. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. The emotional weights are shifting. Dancing and acrobatics in the multi-verse. It is an expansive big bath person. It is the miracle that dissolves in the bathtub like a lump of sugar. Welcome to the lesser lights of the bardo. In the milky clouds of the bathtub you will never be sober. Hello my old friend. Tune in to signals from another universe. It looks just like this one.
You can hear the opening of The Spirit of the Bathtub over here:https://soundcloud.com/jjmars/the-body-is-a-thinking-place-1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GIANTS

- http://www.pastsimple.org/ps13.MarcusSlease.html


Marcus Slease is a life performer & writer of everyday magical travel from Northern Ireland and Utah. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, featured in the Best British Poetry series, and translated into Polish and Danish. He has been published inTin House,Poetry, Empty Mirror, and many other great ones. His album, Never Mind the Beasts, in collaboration with UK musician Stephen Emmerson, is available on Bandcamp. He has lived all over the world, such as South Korea, Poland, U.S., U.K., Turkey, and Spain. Currently, he lives in Madrid, Spain and is working on his first novel: The Autobiography of Don Whiskers. Find out more at: https://marcusslease.weebly.com/

Melville’s Philosophies, Ed. by Branka Arsic and K. L. Evans, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.


read it at Google Books


Melville's Philosophies departs from a long tradition of critical assessments of Melville that dismissed his philosophical capacities as ingenious but muddled. Its contributors do not apply philosophy to Melville in order to detect just how much of it he knew or understood. To the contrary, they try to hear the philosophical arguments themselves-often very strange and quite radical-that Melville never stopped articulating and reformulating. What emerges is a Melville who is materialistically oriented in a radical way, a Melville who thinks about life forms not just in the context of contemporary sciences but also ontologically. Melville's Philosophies recovers a Melville who is a thinker of great caliber, which means obliquely but dramatically reversing the way the critical tradition has characterized his ideas. Finally, as a result of the readings collected here, Melville emerges as a very relevant thinker for contemporary philosophical concerns, such as the materialist turn, climate change, and post-humanism.




“This collection does not stress Melville as philosopher or Melville’s relation to philosophers (although Paul Downes does consider Melville and Hobbes); rather it looks at the philosophy latent in Melville's creative vision. Though the contributors range from veterans (Kenneth Dauber, Colin Dayan) to more recent voices (Elisa Tamarkin, Samuel Otter) to the well-known, consummately idiosyncratic Arsic, the essays share a common dimension: the synchronic. In so many cases in which development appeared possible, a wise reflectiveness reveals repetition. In his essay, Michael Jonik says The Confidence-Man should make one “remain ever wary of the advance of geniality.” James Lilley argues that Amasa Delano’s dancing in Benito Cereno is “fragmented gestures” necessarily “fateful and failed.” Rhian Williams reads the late Holy Land epic Clarel as figuring “religiosity through repetition"; in their essays on Clarel, Arsic and Paul Hurh have different religious stances but agree that existence is naught but a “continuous, processional concept" (as Arsic writes). Overall the book gives a heartening sense of movement into a world where, as Evans puts it in the opening essay, one is “fully at home” but “never in control.” Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.” – CHOICE


“By engaging Melville's singular ways of thinking, the contributors to Arsic and Evans''untimely' collection show how Melville's writings anticipate and clarify the philosophical stakes of intellectual preoccupations-speculative materialism, new formalism, relational aesthetics, object-oriented ontology, inoperative communities, ecocriticism-we recognize as our own. In so doing they render Melville's Philosophies indispensable to thinking contemporaneity.” –  Donald E. Pease


“It's easy to imagine that Melville would have delighted in the creative, thoughtful, and daring essays collected in Melville's Philosophies. With a striking originality, erudition, and insight, these essays, in the spirit of their subject, deftly unmap conceptual certainties and open unanticipated wonders in Melville's philosophical visions. With topics diverse as signs and subjectivity, empiricism and the unobservable world, doubt and impersonality, unreciprocatable love and community ethics, the immateriality of pain and feeling faith, prosthetic sovereignty and the politics of new beginnings, Melville's Philosophies gives us an exhilaratingly re-imagined Melville and, in the process, gives us much-needed insight into contemporary questions of belief and attachment, materiality and ethics, aesthetics and sensation, and the limits of justice.” –  Christopher Castiglia


Introduction: Reconstructing Melville
Branka Arsic (Columbia University, USA) and K. L. Evans (Cornell University, USA)

PART ONE: WORLD-MAKING
1. Gospel Cetology
K. L. Evans (Cornell University, USA)
2. Billy Budd, Billy Budd
Stuart Burrows (Brown University, USA)
3. Science, Philosophy, and Aesthetics in “The Apple-Tree Table”
Maurice S. Lee (Boston University, USA)
4. Clarel, Doubt, Delay
Paul Hurh (University of Arizona, USA)

PART TWO: LOVE STORIES
5. The Lawyer's Tale: Preference, Responsibility, and Personhood in Melville's "Story of Wall-street"
Rachel Cole (Lewis & Clark College, USA)
6. Pierre in Love
Kenneth Dauber (SUNY-Buffalo, USA)
7. Phenomenology Beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration & Chronic Pain
Michael Snediker (University of Houston, USA)
8. "Learning, unlearning, word by word": Feeling Faith in Melville's Clarel
Rhian Williams (University of Glasgow, UK)

PART THREE: ARTS
9. Fateful Gestures: On Movement and the Maneuvers of Style in “Benito Cereno”
James D. Lilley (SUNY-Albany, USA)
10. Melville, Poetry, Prints
Samuel Otter (University of California, USA)
11. A Final Appearance with Elihu Vedder: Melville's Visions
Elisa Tamarkin (University of California, USA)
12. La téméraire littéraire: Reckless Adaptation in Pierre and Pola X
Paul Grimstad (New York University, USA)

PART FOUR: COMMUNITIES
12. Melville's Leviathan
Paul Downes (University of Toronto, Canada)
13. Bartleby's Screen
Colin Dayan (Vanderbilt University, USA)
14. Melville's Misanthropology
Michael Jonik (University of Sussex, UK)
15. Desertscapes: Geological Politics in Clarel
Branka Arsic (Columbia University, USA)

Richard Skelton,The Look Away, Corbel Stone Press, 2018.
http://richardskelton.tumblr.com/


‘I am north of where I was. Go north. That was
    the imperative. Always north. Although the why
    of it is no longer clear.’

A wounded man in a fugue state hides out in a deserted north-country shieling, convinced that he is pursued. Over the days and weeks that follow, as no one comes to claim him, his mind turns from his pursuers to the hills themselves, and their other-than-human inhabitants. Gradually he is caught up in a drama that can have only one conclusion.


‘As if Samuel Beckett had written The Goshawk’ - Mark Valentine



After nearly a decade of writing poetry and non-fiction, Richard Skelton has arrived at a form that is most like the music for which he is well-known: the slow accumulation of mood and atmosphere, the repetition of stark phrases, the bleak beauty, the loam and grit. In The Look Away, Skelton has written a powerful, intensely bleak, yet redemptive, novella that redraws mythic lines and repositions humanity in a more complex and ambiguous relationship with the natural world.

Tyann Prentice, To See Your Love Suffer, We Heard You Like Books, 2017.


To See Your Love Suffer is a reimagining of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, a recounting of the explicit visions of Christ crucified as Norwich lay dying of an undisclosed illness. But she survived. In this reimagining, the internal territories and machinations of the failing body are distorted into various acts the ‘narrator’ uses to enter into further visionary states—dendritic realities, the divergent selves that inhabit them, and the desire that communicates between… or creates them in relation to each other. 


Prentice on PLINTH Read
Prentice in LIES/ISLE Read


Tyann Prentice is a mid-life crisis giving up and throwing herself back into punk, though her rage is much more willful these days―days spent caring for addicts and the mentally ill, and screaming litanies into her post-industrial noise project Ox Hunger. She studies medieval heretical sects, designs things for paper and only sometimes writes in Seattle, WA.

Tomaz de Figueiredo, Dom Tanas de Barbatanas




Dom Tanas de Barbatanas is a weird novel even by the standards of the Portuguese fiction of its time. When it arrived in bookstores in 1962, Portugal was already awash in the literary experimentalism that electrified a big chunk of the world in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Looking back, this period nowadays seems to boil down to a simplistic war between proponents of the realistic novel and innovators. It all looks now a bit theoretical and too serious; why couldn’t each novelist do his own thing and let others do their own thing without getting so aggressive about their respective positions?
In Portugal there was nothing simplistic and theoretical about this; writers took this matter very, very seriously. Portugal by then had been a right-wing dictatorship for decades. The official press and official cultural institutions promoted an official literature of doubtful quality that fulfilled a role within the larger state propaganda machine. A parallel left-wing press existed in spite of several restrictions that pooled a network of publishers, newspaper editors, journalists, critics, translators, and writers united in political opposition against the regime. For this left-wing enclave, organized and animated to a considerable extent by the underground Communist Party, the 19^th century realistic novel was the only permissible model of literary expression.
This resistance literature, born at the same time as Franco was emerging victorious in Spain and Hitler was about to conquer Europe, was called neo-realismo, new realism. Since the late 1930s narrative fiction had adhered to the naturalistic principles of studying society, registering its ills critically and exposing them on the page. Novels were populated with peasants (Portugal was still deeply rural) and proletarians. Hunger, misery, class struggle, capitalist exploitation were obligatory subjects. This left-wing press essentially set the course of literature and used its resources to stifle dissenting voices that, although not aligned with the regime, were not interested in writing Marxist novels. And so the novel in Portugal in the decades after 1940 remained predominantly realistic, old-fashioned, repetitive, dull.
However, by the early 1960s a younger generation of Portuguese writers started showing dissatisfaction with the neo-realist hegemony. It did not have to be the only way, they said. Neo-realism, which had enjoyed the allegiance of most poets, novelists and intellectuals for a long time and only from time to time had to deal with a contrarian, went on the defensive. The press was a battlefield throughout the decade on which each side launched invectives against the other. I get sometimes the impression that the experimentalist craze in Portugal was carried out more to piss off the ageing neo-realists than to spite the regime. Young writers craved freedom to create as they pleased and to express reality in their own way. For them, neo-realism wasn’t realistic enough to represent the modern world. Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and the nouveaux romanciers were immensely popular because they gave them a readymade model to use in rejection of their predecessors. Their rebellion had a mostly French accent.
Dom Tanas de Barbatanas didn’t fit anywhere. It wasn’t a realistic novel, but it wasn’t the nouveau roman either. The critics who bothered to write about it didn’t point out anything innovative about it; it was hastily read and hastily put away as if it had no place in this battle between old and new. It couldn’t be neo-realist because the author, Tomaz de Figueiredo, hated the neo-realists not just for aesthetic reasons but because he was a conservative monarchist; it couldn’t be nouveau roman because Tomaz saw it as a fad, another school like neo-realism, and he hated following fads and joining schools because that killed the writer’s individuality, the source of creativity, what made art eternal instead of circumscribed to a circumstance.
Tomaz was born in 1902 in a family of rural aristocrats that lost its status when the monarchy was overthrown by a republican coup in 1910. Although the republic itself fell in 1926 to a military coup which installed a military dictatorship still leaning somewhat on republican ideals, by 1933 it had evolved into a regime more in the likeness of the fascist regimes popping up in Europe, under the leadership of António Salazar. Contrary to what many monarchists like Tomaz hoped, Salazar did not restore the monarchy. Although Tomaz hated the republic, the new regime wasn’t agreeable to his values either. Politically and literarily, Tomaz fit nowhere: he repudiated the Left and had few friends in literary circles; but the Right in power wasn’t the right one.
Even so, life for a monarchist was relatively easier since the monarchist movement had been one of the lynchpins of the 1926 coup; they were trustworthy, especially after so many had been pacified by Salazar with major positions in government. Tomaz was also programmed by temperament not to care about politics; making art was his sole passion and he despised writers who wasted their time serving parties and Power. Tomaz led a peaceful, acquiescent life in the countryside, with occasional trips to Lisbon; he worked as a notary, complaining in letters and prefaces that in his double status as aristocrat and writer it was unworthy of him to have to earn a living. A real writer can’t produce in the coffe breaks between his responsibilities at the office! Because of this, he vociferated in letters, Portugal had lost countless masterpieces that he had never had the time to write. But he couldn’t earn a living from writing anyway because his novels were too dense and demanding for most readers. Tomaz’ novels have a vast vocabulary, mixing regionalisms with the most erudite terms; he wrote in long, sinuous sentences that seemed to be mocking the short telegraphic sentences employed by the neo-realists. His novels were also mostly autobiographical, which gave them a sensation of hermetism and of writing for himself, a sensation heightened by their plotlessness. He frequently used first-person narrators whose recollections amble to their own rhythm. He was also daring in other ways, like avoiding dialogue. When his first novel came out in 1947 (he was aged 45), he was compared to Proust and Faulkner, comparisons he rejected in behalf of his sacred individuality.
Tomaz lived between 1941 and 1960 in a small provincial town called Estarreja. He wrote his novels and his remarkable poetry at cafés and at his hotel room. He had little to do with the literary milieu in Lisbon; from time to time he published a short-story or article in a newspaper. He translated Colette’s The Vagabond. For years, before moving from Lisbon to Estarreja, he was an art critic. Politics didn’t interest him and it wasn’t a crime anyway to long for the king in exile. He lived in a world of his own, made up of his recollections of an idyllic Portugal prior to being “ruined” by the republicans, disdaining the vulgar, bourgeois present. And yet troubles went looking for him. His letters show a noticeable growth in his hatred of Salazar from the ‘50s onwards. Besides not having restored the monarchy, a more personal matter had put an end to his indifference to the regime: his oldest son, also Tomaz, had joined the Communist Party and was wanted by the political police, the PIDE, for revolutionary activities. When he was caught, Tomaz senior had to use all his connections and grovel as he hated to do in order to help him. But what drove him literally crazy was being accused of embezzling funds at the civil registry.
Tomaz, with his aristocratic contempt for a life in the civil service, joyfully shirked his responsibilities at the civil registry and absented himself whenever he could to write, leaving two subordinates in charge. Unsupervised, they used the opportunity to steal money. When the authorities got wind of this, Tomaz was charged with the crime. He defended himself, was cleared of the charges, got his job back, then retired soon after because of health issues. I’m simplifying here; this was a martyrdom that dragged on through 4 or 5 years, with occasional losses of faith in God (he was Catholic, obviously), and suicidal thoughts.
The accusation had been so severe an attack on his sense of honor that he was afflicted by depression. Honor was all that he had left in this sordid world of exiled kings, a plebeian rising to dictator, and writers prostituting themselves to Parties. The whole world was corrupt, vile, fascists no better than republicans; even the other monarchists had sold out by joining the regime out of interest, reneging their principles. He was purer than others; that’s what set him above others since nobility titles were meaningless now. And then he had that last consolation taken away from him. Tomaz’ depression led him to be committed to an institution; he was subjected to shock therapy. This was a golden period for his poetry because he wrote hundreds of poems just to cope with madness; he’s one of the few genuine cases I know of someone retaining his sanity through the power of poetry. His letters from this period are as bleak as the poems: they’re all about him saying farewell to his few friends one by one, thinking that he’d never write again, that the part of his brain had been amputated that contained his talent, that his ability to feel had been damaged, diminished.
Thus despondent, defeated, he got into a fight in 1960 with a local monarchist for reasons never fully understood. In Tomaz’ case, fights involved actual fists; he boasted that he had left his family’s coat of arms, in a ring he wore, impressed on his enemy’s flesh. He loved to brag about his physique. Dom Tanas de Barbatanas started as a short-story after this incident and was intended to parody his enemy. This event and his need to get even – getting even is the engine propelling many of his books – led to a big novel with 700 pages split in two volumes, making it still one of the longest Portuguese novels ever written. Part of its development is chronicled in his letters; his circle of close friends awaited it with glee, even if some later complained about its abstruseness and excesses. Tomaz also spoke of it with enthusiasm, and it’s clear that its humor helped him overcome his depression. However, the press in general overlooked it. Nowadays it’s a cliché to say that Tomaz has been shunned because of his politics, but that’s inaccurate; he’s ignored because he’s a challenging writer. Although his oeuvre was reprinted a few years ago, he’s still unknown to the public at large.
Dom Tanas didn’t find an audience because it’s a novel that requires attention, patience and commitment from the reader. Its sesquipedalian syntax requires one reading just to identify its subject, and a second reading to get the gist of the information. His vocabulary was gigantic, so after looking up the six or seven words that stop the reading in its tracks, a third reading is in order to finally make sense of the sentence. The fourth reading, optional but essential, is to soak up the sheer gorgeousness of the language. José Saramago’s long sentences seem like school compositions compared to them. António Lobo Antunes’ Fado Alexandrino is its rightful successor, but even that one is rather tame and straightforward by comparison. Dom Tanas’ artistry is a baroque brocade of alliteration, rhymes, trains of subordinate clauses, thick paragraphs, Latin expressions, archaic words and spelling, and even regionalisms that no dictionary will explain. Tomaz had no sympathy for the people excepting the loyal servants of his childhood; there is no social concern for the people even though the people lived in abject poverty during the regime; he only loved in them their colorful language, which he recorded in notebooks when he went hunting with his remaining rich friends. Surrounded by peasants, hunters, house maids, woodsmen, shepherds, he listened to them and recorded their words, sometimes updating dictionaries by hand. Hell, he even published a dictionary. With this word-hoard he created a unique language that seems like a pastiche of how people spoke in 18th century Portugal, although it was his own invention. He knew that living people assume that people spoke in the past always with an excess of orotundity, so he made it orotund as hell. Trying to even translate a paragraph is folly; the ideal translator would need to have Paul West’s or Alexander Theroux’s domain of the English language.
The novel is kind of plotless. A nameless panegyrist pens the protracted praise of a dead aristocrat, Dom Tanas de Barbatanas, the world’s most fearless swordsman, the strongest puncher in a brawl, the smartest thinker ever to grace a University, the most gallant seducer and lover, the most lyrical poet, the most skilled counselor in political matters, a strategic genius, the most everything at everything. It’s so ridiculous, so exaggerated, it undermines the veracity of the portrayal, and Dom Tanas disappears submerged by the colossal style employed by the panegyrist, who becomes the real protagonist in an inimitable performance of linguistic virtuosity.
When the first volume came out in 1962 (the second one is from 1964), the few critics who wrote about it incorrectly described it as a picaresque novel. Even the two scholars who’ve bothered to study it repeat this mantra. Tomaz himself called it a “Quixote of Vileness”, but even so comparisons should be used carefully. Classic picaros like Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler are about conmen who trick others out of their money; Don Quixote is about a madman who tricks himself (and other characters) about reality. Dom Tanas is about a servile narrator botching his duty to trick the reader. Don Quixote owes to picaresque novellas its colloquial language and its hero evokes the fading values of the questing knight. Don Tanas is a panegyric with the bombastic, florid language of the panegyric that is about a nobody who has no values although the panegyrist tries to imprint on him the values of a questing knight.
Its structure is so unusual that I don’t even know another novel that uses it. The novel is in fact an intersection of three classic genres: it plays up the outdated values of chivalric romances and some tropes like the healing potions (which in Dom Tanas’ seedy world is reduced to a hemorrhoid-healing unguent that he dutifully applies to the ass cheeks of the powerful he wants to ingratiate himself with); it has the down-to-earth comedy and social criticism of the picaro; and it uses the Greek panegyric to mock the language of power.
This novel, as I’ve said, came out at a time when Portugal was no less interested in the avant-garde novel than Europe, the USA, and Latin America. It was ignored also because it was not the right avant-garde. Younger novelists flirted only with the nouveau roman and were too busy dismantling the traditional novel to consider Dom Tanas anything but the kind of antique they were too good for. And yet the similarities are many: they rejected plot – Tomaz used the most linear plot available, the biography, to show how a life’s story is just a speech construction. They rejected character – Tomaz named a novel after a character, something rare at the time, and yet he showed how a ‘character’ is just a category created by language. They avoided grandiloquence – Tomaz reveled in its potential for ridicule. They were suspicious of omniscient narrators, so was Tomaz. Dom Tanas is a self-conscious novel about the danger of fiction to fool readers. Besides, the panegyric is an essentially deceptive genre since its goal is to embellish, to lie, to seduce, as was so much of the state propaganda around him.
It’s a comic masterpiece of exaggeration. Dom Tanas doesn’t just have a good lineage, his surname is older than the Portuguese kingdom. He wasn’t just born, omens announced his birth. He didn’t just graduate from the University of Bologna, he earned the title of ‘General Doctor’ in all arts and sciences. Although hints indicate here and there that the Tanas clan is poor, the panegyrist imagines a sumptuous dinner the size of a chapter that could have happened. The second volume ends with an epic epanodos of hyperbolic comparisons to major figures of history. The reader, by the way, will do well to keep a manual of rhetoric to check what words like ‘epanodos’ mean because Dom Tanas is first and foremost an exercise in rhetoric and how its techniques hide a pathetic, petty life.
A panegyric is not so much life without the boring bits, as life without life. Where the biographer puts facts, the panegyrist puts facundity, augmentation, maximalist rhetoric. In ancient Greece orators were expected to invent; a panegyric doesn’t deal with how one life was lived, but how life should ideally be lived by all. It’s fundamentally didactic, using a personal life to impart an ethics shared by the community. Even if the deceased being honored had no virtues, the panegyric had the duty of creating an example of civic decency to be followed. What’s funny about reading 18th century panegyrics is spotting occasional moments of self-awareness when the panegyrist admits that he’s just adding a virtue to his subject because that’s what the genre demands. Tomaz wasn’t inventing his novel’s self-consciousness, he was playing the genre’s rules for laughs. The novel’s humor is born from the tension between the panegyrist’s puissant deification of Dom Tanas and the truth about this man’s mediocrity, a situation all too common in Portugal. The apogee of the genre was in the 17th century, but it limped on until the 19th century when it was reinvented in the press. It’s also insinuated that he’s writing this on behalf of Dom Tanas’ son, Dom Badanas, his “friend”. In a regime where journalists would sell their services for money, such friends were common. Tomaz’ friend Agustina Bessa-Luís, one of the few novelists he deemed praiseworthy, thought that Dom Tanas was Salazar. Perhaps. But he’s a type. Portugal was and is a nation of bronze statues, of marble busts dotting public gardens, of formalities and lots of titles behind one’s name. The Portuguese use different verb modes depending on the situation and the level of intimacy they have with the person they’re addressing. The way language shapes behavior is something they’re daily aware of.
The novel starts in the 18th century, before the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, and follows Dom Tanas’ education from childbirth until his meeting the major politician of his time, Sebastião de Carvalho, better known as the Marquis de Pombal, Lisbon’s rebuilder. The Marquis was a modernizer: he reformed education, opened the country to Europe, tried to reign in the Inquisition, and expelled the Jesuits from Portugal, whom he considered the source of all national evils. This move didn’t sit well with Tomaz, him being the nephew of a Jesuit priest, and brought up in a Jesuit school in Galicia during the Republic. If Tomaz didn’t like the Marquis de Pombal, Dom Tanas is worse because he seeks the Marquis’ favor to rise in society; in essence he’s an arriviste, like so many monarchists who bowed down to Salazar. Dom Tanas, however, is above all a container of the flaws the Portuguese perceive in other Portuguese: he’s a coward, a dunce, an ass-licker, a schemer; ultimately he’s the kind of aristocrat Tomaz hated because the aristocracy was his ideal of ethics.
Dom Tanas also partook in a movement towards awareness of Portugal as a historical enigma in need of answers; Portuguese writers couldn’t just register and report reality, as the neo-realists had done until then; it had to be investigated through its myths, symbols and history to explain how it had become what it was. Given the solemnity enforced by the regime, it was no wonder that this history is tirelessly mocked and shown as false, grotesque, ridiculous. The regime had manufactured a mantle of myths to cover it under. Tomaz’ novel mocks Portugal’s love for rhetoric, empty speeches, ceremonies, and the pedantry of its intellectual class. It was a savage attack on a Portugal made of scheming, incompetent arrivistes, and most of it rings true. Tomaz was a nationalist, a monarchist commonplace, but in the novel he relaxes, he writes against himself, he even laughs at his cherished world of aristocratic values and privileges.
When the first volume came out, Tomaz was 60. The younger novelists half his age who embraced the nouveau roman had a different relationship with language. They were very anti-rhetorical; there were reasons for that: rhetoric, eloquence, the political speech, Salazar’s voice invading the living room through the radio, pomp, public ceremonies, and Propaganda, were an oppression upon the quotidian. Language was a shield against reality. Since well-behaved language seemed to belong to the State, they heaped violence on it, they twisted linearity, smashed syntax, wreaked havoc in punctuation, delighted in nonsense, until literary language was reshaped into something no one would mistake for the clichés uttered at political rallies. Tomaz did the opposite: he embellished language to the point of unusability; he was so rhetorical, so artificial, he exposed language as nothing but a tool of power to be manipulated in the service of lies. He didn’t hide his debt to Francisco de la Isla’s 1758 novel Frey Gerundio de Campazas, a Spanish satire on baroque preachers in which overblown rhetoric is also the butt of endless jokes. Instead of abjuring tradition, he used it to mock tradition. The Baroque birthed Tomaz, he was his time’s most baroque novelist, but he turned its excesses into an indictment of a country that preferred ornamental words to ideas and ideals.
Dom Tanas de Barbatanas is unique in Portuguese fiction because it’s about bombast, and Portuguese novelists have always been wary of bombast. They like short novels, everyday words. Whereas the English and French novel adopted the journalistic style early in the 18^th century, Portugal remained mired in baroque rhetoric into the 1800s. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the British and American literature had so many stylists in the 1960s. In Portugal, however, a long prejudice against this Baroque past always implied a policing of style. It was easier thus to follow the French novel, which employed deliberate anodyne prose, than making such a radical overturning of “good taste”. As such, Dom Tanas is an island of extravaganza in Portuguese fiction. In it there’s pleasure in form and structure, in revitalizing old genres, and in questioning the nature of storytelling. Although Tomaz didn’t follow foreign literature, his fiction was always a bit more in synch with it, a bit ahead of what his countrymen were doing. In the 1940s he was one of the first novelists to develop techniques similar to Faulkner’s. Some of his novels from the late 1960s predate what we now call autofiction. Dom Tanas had less to do with the French novels being translated than the English-language novels not being translated, less to do with Tropisms and Jealousy than The Alexandria Quartet, The Public Burning, Ada or Ardor, The Sot-Weed Factor, those big comical, extravagant novels that were of course utterly ignored in Portugal in the 1960s. Perhaps, then, its oblivion was inevitable too.
However, it’s one of the few Portuguese novels I’d single out as worthy of translation. It’s a hilarious verbal tour de force, drawing its strength from the novel’s past but also fresh, unique, unlike anything written in the 20^th century, and for those reasons deserving of more attention, of better readers. - Luís Miguel Rosa
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/guest-post-luis-miguel-rosa-on-dom-tanas-de-barbatanas-by-tomaz-de-figueiredo/

Gisela Elsner, The Giant Dwarfs: A Contribution, Trans. by Joel Carmichael, Grove Press, 1967.          
full text or  pdf


       Last summer at Salzburg, The Giant Dwarfs was awarded the Formentor First-Novel Prize; the next day Nathalie Sarraute's The Golden Fruits captured the Formentor Literary Prize. Some members of the international jury called Mme. Sarraute's work ""a classic""; others, including the Indian delegate, considered it ""unreadable."" A milder polarity of opinion is in store for Frau Elsner: no one in his right mind could call The Giant Dwarfs a classic; whether or not it is readable remains a question. Certainly Frau Elsner's technique is quite good: precise, cutting, monochromatically evocative, capable of various effects, from surrealist distortions to wild hilarity. Yet this reviewer, with the best will, found it difficult to keep turning the pages. For one thing, the theme is a modernist cliche; the bourgeois world, seen through the eyes of a child, remains continually in double-focus, humdrum and puritanical, brutal and sex-ridden. For another, the nagging parents, going through the ritual frustrations of domesticity, are too much like the non-characters Mme. Sarraute has made fashionable. And the obsession with objects (the father fuming over his unworkable collar button) or with information (the family doctor's spiel on a tapeworm), though funny enough arias in themselves, resemble too closely Ionesco's ""proliferation"" skits. Finally, this plotless work is annoyingly symbolic. Even the few memorable scenes (especially the child's forest outing where he ""discovers"" sex) do not energize the programmatic inertia.  - Kirkus Reviews  


I thought we’d go for a more literary bent with today’s post so here’s Gisela Elsner’s Formentor Prize winning novel, The Giant Dwarfs. Mine is a rather grubby 1967 Panther edition with cover art credited to David Bellamy and Jill Taylor.
This is a German novel (translated by Joel Carmichael) written in 1965 and is very much a part of the literary heritage of that country’s post-war period. Out of that time of immense emotional upheaval the literary association Gruppe 47 formed, a group of authors who wanted to bring their country out from the shadows of Nazism and promote democracy to the German people. Freed from the constraints of traditionalist propaganda, these authors introduced a second wave of literary modernism. Gisela Elsner was one of their number. Here she is, looking suitably bohemian:

Although not strictly speaking a ‘horror’ novel, I’ve never been one to compartmentalise things and it does contain enough grotesque, Kafkaesque imagery to warrant an inclusion on the blog.
Written in the first person, our narrator is Lothar Leinlein; a young boy describing the world he lives in. He describes it in great detail. Elsner has Lothar narrate the tale with a cold detachment. He does not take part in the absurd actions which surround him, he merely observes. We rarely witness any emotional responses from Lothar, even when he learns of the tapeworm living inside him.
This novel deals with the minutiae of life in much the same way as, say, Proust. But if Proust has the memory of his narrator involuntarily  brought to life by the smell of delicate Madeleines and Lime blossom tea, then Elsner would have poor Lothar Leinlein having to suffice with the smell of great slabs of meat and “heaps of food” mashed flat onto the plate. Elsner writes every tiny detail with a clinical precision which sets into contrast the grotesquery and chaos of the subject matter. She uses repetition to hypnotic effect, particularly in the opening paragraph of each chapter.
The first chapter is entitled ‘Dinnertime’ and we’re immediately plunged into watching, through Lothar’s eyes, the ritual of the hulking figure of his father gorging himself on these “heaps” of food. The father is a gourmand rather than a gourmet, it’s all about the excess. This sets the tone for the rest of the novel, being a satire on the excesses of mindless consumerism among the bourgeoisie.
This mindless consumerism brings to light the petty monotony of the adult world as seen through the eyes of a child. It throws into stark contrast the grotesque absurdity of the adult’s actions.
This is a world where people go through the motions. Elsner reduces humanity to its bestial nature, people gorge themselves on food without pleasure and have sex without passion. She creates a world where there is no room for the individual; in a chapter where Lothar and his father lose his mother in the busy streets they realise the only way they could identify her is by the clothes she always wears, a light coloured blouse and a dark coloured skirt; an outfit which all of the other women of the town wear; neither are aware of the physical characteristics or the personality of the mother. Later in the same chapter Lothar become separated from his father and finds himself alone. A woman in a light coloured blouse and a dark coloured skirt calls him in for dinner; as he sits at the dinner table we have an exact repeat of the opening pages of the novel where Lothar eats with his own family. Lothar is just an anonymous boy, the adults are just anonymous parents. People are interchangeable.
Elsner even reduces language to a base level. Lothar describes a framed quotation on his grandmother’s wall but, as he cannot read, Elsner has him describe the shapes the letters make in great detail; some authors would skim over this but not so Elsner, she devotes six pages to this. Here’s a very short excerpt to give you an idea:
“At its upper half and actually at the right of the stroke hangs a half-circle that opens to the left but is closed off by the half-stroke, and that is just as big as the two half-circles of the fifth letter that’s just been described. The seventh letter following after the gap as big as a letter consists, like the sixth one just described, of this vertical stroke as well as of this half-circle that hangs to the right of the stroke and opens to the left but is closed off by the half-stroke.”
And verbal communication becomes equally base in this novel. People fill the void of silence with stock phrases which, en masse, become nothing more than the braying of livestock.
I keep referring to this book as a novel, but can it really be classified as such? There is really no linear narrative running through the 239 pages; it’s a series of vignettes taken from Lothar Leinlein’s life. Each of these vignettes is equally absurd and unrelentingly bleak. There may be the faintest glimmer of hope that young Lothar will find a way to escape this nightmarish world but probably not, as the world Elsner portrays is the world we all live in, just viewed through a microscope. - Jason Lineham
https://whenchurchyardsyawn.com/2016/02/07/the-giant-dwarfs-1967-panther-gisela-elsner/


Gisela Elsner was born in 1937 in Nuremberg into a wealthy family. Her father was a member of the executive board of Siemens, and Elsner was chauffeured to the convent school she attended. Before finishing school she left her family home to live with Klaus Roehler, who was later to become an author and editor, and whose bohemian student lifestyle seemed to offer Elsner the freedom missing in her bourgeois family. Her parents were strictly opposed to the relationship and even turned to the police in order to end it. The correspondence between Elsner and Röhler documenting the struggle with her family was edited and published as Wespen im Schnee (2002). Around this time, in 1955, Klaus Röhler made his début at a meeting of the Gruppe 47 and, one year later, Elsner and Roehler published Triboll (1956), a collection of surrealist prose miniatures. After finishing school, Elsner studied German Literature, Philosophy and Theatre studies in Vienna for two years. During this time she continued living with Röhler, whom she married in 1958. When she gave birth to their son, Oskar, she left university without a degree.
The relationship did not last and, in 1962 after Elsner had left her husband and their three year-old son, the marriage ended in divorce. In the same year she read an extract from the novel she was working on at one of the Gruppe 47 meetings. The piece received very mixed praise, but attracted the attention of the copy-editor of the renowned Rowohlt publishing house where it appeared as Die Riesenzwerge. Ein Beitrag in 1964. The grotesque novel is an enquiry into the life of the lower middle-classes in post-war Germany as viewed through the eyes of a child. With uncanny precision little Lothar Leinlein registers the brutality lurking behind the façade of conventionalism and petty bourgeois decorum, exposing the world and everyday routines of the adults surrounding him as full of monstrosities. At the time it was  published the novel created a stir in the media and was even classified as harmful to minors in Austria. Yet it was received favourably by literary critics, translated into twelve languages and Elsner was awarded the prestigious prix Formentor for it. Even if Die Riesenzwerge in many respects set the tone for much of Elsner's later writing, it remained her only critical and commercial success.
In the following decades she published various novels which, in characteristically complicated and over-long sentences, dealt with the collective amnesia of West-German society with regard to the Nazi past and the terrors of family life. Although a critical examination of gender relations is a recurring theme in her novels, in particular in her modern-day Madame Bovary adaptation Abseits (1982) and the 1984 novel Die Zähmung, Elsner gained no popularity among the emerging German women's movement, arguably due to the fact that contemporary ‘Frauenliteratur’ consisted mostly of heartfelt confessional literature while Elsner's highly artificial language rendered an identificatory reading impossible. In addition, her texts put an emphasis on women's complicity in their own oppression, a notion which was at odds with the predominantly radical feminist theory which informed much of the German women's movement of the time.
Another theme to be found in many of Elsner's writings is that of class relations. From the 1960s on, Elsner had attended the meetings of the Dortmunder Gruppe 61, a group of writers who sought to engage with industrial production in a different way than the Bitterfelder Weg had in the GDR. Elsner herself publicly voiced her sympathies for the GDR in several interviews and joined the West-German Communist Party (DKP) in 1972, but she never subscribed to the aesthetics of socialist realism in her writing. Much like her female characters, the blue- and white-collar workers appearing in texts like Das Windei (1987) and Otto der Großaktionär (published posthumously in 2008) are mere negative mirror-images of their oppressors and provide no positive role model. In the late 1980s her publishing house cancelled her contract because her works were no longer commercially viable. Elsner was not able to attract the interest of a new publisher, leaving her feeling artistically isolated and powerless. Moreover, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the GDR, Elsner lost her hope of a social alternative to capitalism. She committed suicide in 1992.
While Elsner has often been termed 'Jelinek's older sister' for her merciless satirical style and choice of subjects, there is very little research on her works. In 2000, Oskar Roehler, Elsner's son, directed a film, Die Unberührbare, based on his mother's last years. Although the film was a success, it did not heighten interest in Elsner's writing. Only recently, Verbrecher Verlag, a small publishing house in Berlin, has begun re-editing Elsner's writing, among them works which have never before been published.
Compiled by Anja Henebury
https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/research-centres/centre-study-contemporary-womens-writing/languages/german/gisela-elsner

Zigmunds Skujins, Flesh-Coloured Dominos, Trans. by Kaija Straumanis, Arcadia Books, 2014.




When Baroness Valtraute von Bruegen’s officer husband’s body is severed in two she is delighted to find that the lower half has been sewn onto the upper body of the humble local captain Ulste. She conceives a child only to see the return of her husband in one piece.
A beautifully written surrealist novel cum political allegory, Flesh-Coloured Dominoes transports the reader between 18th Century Baltic gentry and the narrator’s life in the modern world. The connection between the two narratives gradually becomes clear in a mesmerising fantasy of love, lust and loss as Skijunš creates a work of sublime art that is funny, moving, enlightening and philosophical in equal measure.


'Skujins is a master at personae and a cosmopolitan writer, filling his landscape with extraordinary and unforgettable characters' - World Literature Today


'There are few figures in contemporary literature as well respected as Zigmunds Skujiņš' -Virginia Quarterly Review


There are plenty of reasons you can fail to find the rhythm of a book. Sometimes it’s a matter of discarding initial assumptions or impressions, sometimes of resetting oneself. Zigmunds Skujiņš’s Flesh-Coloured Dominoes was a defining experience in the necessity of attempting the latter. It has quite possibly the most misleading, inaccurate cover copy of all time. Surrealism is an overused term, applied to anything odd, just to the right of realism, but Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is the most straightforward work I’ve seen called Surrealist. This isn’t a criticism of the book itself, it couldn’t be, but when you go into a story wanting the unsettling, funny, and strange, then encounter dry, if beautiful and emotional verisimilitude outside of a few occasions, it is hard not to be disappointed. In addition to claiming Surrealism, the copy tells us that Skujiņš’s novel is split into two parts: the eighteenth century and the modern world. By modern world it means the era of World War II, and with a child protagonist, very much of that wide genre of storytelling.
But enough with the damned throat-clearing and correctives, a book needs to be seen on its own actual terms. Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is a novel with a sense of physical detail that gives the time periods and their characters lush life and a nuanced creation of how those characters interact with each other—both in their emotional connections and in the single touch of the fantastic, where lives separated by time intermingle and overlap. It is the story of a family in a Latvian town surviving the multiple occupations, Russian and German, of World War II, and how just as that history can’t be separated from the past, neither can the individuals from one century to another.
In the eighteenth-century chapters, Baroness von Brīgen mourns her husband’s death in battle until the performing clairvoyant Cagliostro leads her to believe that her husband has survived in some form, telling her “Where there were two, now there is one.” This, and the name of a man, a Captain Ulste, who was recorded as having died with her husband, compels her to visit the Ulste family, where she finds the man alive. He tells her of a doctor supposedly capable of performing miracles, including sewing his top half to the bottom half of her husband. Recognizing the bottom half in the way that lovers do, she sleeps with Ulste and becomes pregnant. And here is the dominant trope of the book, two discrete parts making a new whole, then continuing on in the world to create more. Whether it be people and their nationalities, machines, countries, concepts (“The combination of man and horse has a certain nobleness to it”), magic tricks, the trope runs rampant.
In the twentieth-century portions a boy and his half-Japanese step-brother are raised by his grandfather and another Baroness, who has an uncertain relationship with Grandfather (as he’s called throughout). When Grandfather’s last name is revealed to be Ulste the two histories start to solidify their own cleaving. This is further complicated when the Baron von Brīgen returns to his wife alive and whole, top and bottom. Upon learning of his wife’s pregnancy, he is unable to come to terms with the result of his and Valtraute’s independent actions, and ends up killing himself before the birth of her child. This series of events is the single potentially fantastical core that runs through Flesh-Coloured Dominoes. For a while, following Cagliostro and his colorful retinue (a hermaphrodite chambermaid, a dwarf, a German with five chins, a raven-like astrologer) there’s hope that more of the impossible will occur, but once his later miracle is shown as mere trickery, that hope dies. The eighteenth-century chapters become the period fiction of a baroness and her life among the aristocracy and play clear second-fiddle to the twentieth-century chapters.
In this, there are skillful recreations of life. Readers are familiar with the modern means of showing characters’ awkwardness or boredom, and Skujiņš introduces them to older fidgeting: “The audience can sense something, the tension builds and expands, women in tightly pulled corsets gasp for air in shallow breaths and nervously flick their fans. The men fiddle with their little phials of cologne, bringing their moistened fingers first to the tips of their noses, then to their earlobes.” These small movements of people create a living period, a recognizable variation of our own time, and of the twentieth century of the book. Skujiņš also portrays the morality of the era both as performed and as lived: sex outside of marriage is officially frowned on, but it’s acknowledged that everyone is doing it, often; women dress in their corsets, covering themselves fully, but happy to use the wide skirts to their advantage and publically pee in a garden.
The two periods reflect each other in ways big and small, both showing the fight of the traditional and the modern, both showing hope and fear for the future of culture, both showing characters facing down their ignorance of history. This ignorance is something the novel works against. Flesh-Coloured Dominoes serves as a primer for Lativian history, including asides like Louis XVIII temporary court in Jelgava. In her afterword, translator Kaija Straumanis explains that the original Latvian text contained footnotes, outlining history or explaining phrases from foreign languages, which she blended into the actual narrative. That these are as unobtrusive as they are—only in retrospect do a couple phrases stick out as being incorporated footnotes—shows how well she handled this challenge, one too often performed with stiffness.
Less balanced is the book itself. For the first half or so, the historically older chapters are more interesting, with their potentiality for the magical, for that reality to be somehow different from that of the chapters closer to modern life. In this half, the World War II sections do little to be distinguishable from any number of other tales of that war and the Holocaust. It is material we’ve seen before, separated mainly by being Latvian, with those cultural and historical touches. At some point, however, the balance tips, and the later sections are the more compelling.
The personal relationships of the family members become more complex, more intimately seen. They grow, as relationships should, and the book is the better for it. The narrator and his brother become more familiar with the world, with Grandfather and the Baroness, and more capable of acting and understanding others’ actions. Grandfather is the focus of the narrator’s attention from the beginning, and the way he shapes the boys eventually becomes the shaping of the narrative itself. He creates the narrator’s sense of the world by teaching him what to pay attention to, how to see whole stories instead of one side.
Further unbalancing Flesh-Coloured Dominoes are the ending chapters, suddenly set in the actual modern, our time. They feel extraneous, extending the novel without gaining much. There seems to be an effort to make sure the reader didn’t miss anything, confirming things we already sensed or spelling out ideas already present. What is new could have been incorporated more smoothly, earlier.
While a book hard to settle into, with a structure that is weighted oddly, there is still much to enjoy. Descriptions are exciting along the way, and what Skujiņš has enthusiasm for shows through. Characters, even minor ones, have unique voices: “The pale man’s voice sounds hollow, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a barrel.” Similes refuse the obvious: “He sits frozen, his portly body jammed crookedly into the chair like a misshapen candle in the socket of a slender candlestick.” Facial expressions are physically elaborate, and express much: “If there was anything to read in his motionless face, its features cut as if out of dried-up glue, it would have been mouldy, fly-flecked arrogance and a complete lack of interest in the scene in front of him.” In the end, whether through unsettled expectations, a lack of consistent quality, or too much excess material, Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is not a book that will live on in my mind, but Skujiņš writes skillfully enough that any future translations of his work are worth consideration, if hesitant. - P. T. Smith
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=13762


The narrative itself is split into two parallel stories.  On the one hand, 18th century Baltic German gentry in the framework of Russian Czarism empire: baroness Valtraute von Bruegen with the help of the famous count Caliostro is searching for her husband who has disappeared during Turkish wars, with great effort it is finally established that her husband in a battle had been torn into two and that his lower part has been stitched to the upper part of the local captain Ulste of humble origins.  After having found the lower part of her husband, she conceives a child from it and is considering at great length whom to consider as the father of her child, but then her husband returns - in one piece.  On the other hand, we follow as if the life story of the author himself through the turmoil’s of the 20th century in Latvia; the story again is atypical, nationalities intertwined in a inseparable mix - Latvians, Germans, Jews, Japanese, whoever else.  The connection between the two narratives becomes gradually clear; they click together in details, mentioned as if in passing.  It is also a moving experience of life. Skujiņš is known as a master if style - eloquent storyteller, weaving fantasies around history and enjoying the language. - portal.unesco.org/


Zigmunds Skujins, one of the most renowned Latvian writers of the late twentieth century, was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1926. His work has been translated across Europe and several of his books have been made into films. He is the recipient of numerous Latvian and international literature awards, including a lifetime grant from the Latvian State Culture Capital Foundation.

Marcelle Sauvageot, Commentary, Trans. by Christine Schwartz Hartley and Anna Moschovakis, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013. [1933.]


COMMENTARY is a narrative—hovering between the genres of memoir, theory, and fiction—about a female artist whose abandonment by a lover precipitates a refiguration of her ideas on life, love and art. Sauvageot died, after many stints in sanatoriums, at the age of 34. Commentaire was highly prasied in its time by Paul Claudel, Paul Valéry, André Gide, Charles Du Bos, René Crevel ou Clara Malraux.




Though eighty years have passed since its initial appearance, Commentary is a tale that still needs to be told. Though we may flatter ourselves into believing that we conduct our love affairs more maturely than did the barbarous moderns, even in these “enlightened” times readers will discover that Sauvageot’s unsparing honesty about sexual love can still provoke deep recognition.—JENNIFER MOXLEY





When, in the morning, daybreak awakens us f rom a dream, we close our eyes and remain still, trying to recreate and continue the scene. But the day's light has destroyed everything: words are without sound, gestures without meaning. It is like a vanishing rainbow: some hues survive for an instant, disappear, seem to return: there is nothing left.

Joan Perucho, Natural History, Ballantine Books, 1990.
                


Antoni Mantpalau, a young Spanish aristocrat of the early 1800s, agrees to aid a village beset by an evil force and is stalked by a thirteenth-century vampire until their final, bloody confrontation




The first of Catalan author Perucho's works to be published outside Spain, this fantastical vampire story set around Barcelona during the Carlist civil wars of the 1830s is, in its bookish fictiveness, reminiscent of Borges and Calvino; yet its strong infusion of Catalan culture lends it an accent all its own. Young aristocrat Antoni de Montpalau, a passionate scientist, progressive and liberal, having deduced scientifically that a vampire has committed a mysterious series of murders, is drawn into pursuit of the creature, which has assumed the aspect of a Carlist guerrilla leader known as the Owl. Montpalau is soon captured, however, by the Carlist General Cabrera who turns out to be one of the Owl's victims; despite their political differences, the two become fast friends. Fully aware that only if the vampire is destroyed before his victim, can he himself avoid becoming a vampire, Cabrera's involvement in the hunt becomes increasingly urgent, while the vampire metamorphoses always in startling guises. Unfortunately, Perucho's novel, for all its invention and playful mock erudition, disappoints in its failure to draw the reader into its conceits with an impelling narrative flow or to point outside itself to larger meaning. - Publishers Weekly




In this tale, gentle reader, our writer pits good against evil, tranquility against turmoil, and destruction against love. A desperate vampire is wreaking havoc in the countryside of 19th-century, war-torn Spain, a noble scientist has come forth to challenge him, and a true love story has emerged. Does it sound too sweet? It could have been, but the proof is in the reading. Skillful Catalan novelist Perucho relates this tale with poetic rhythm, punctuated with scientific reflections and logic and set within the backdrop of the Carlist war. The publication of this work is welcome, not only for the novel itself, but also for the specialness of its native language. Catalan voices from Spain were suppressed for years; in Franco's Spain the language in any form was forbidden, causing its world of letters to collapse. But in today's Spain, Catalan writing is flourishing; our world is enchanced by its reemergence.
- Michelle Lodge


Vampires have come a long way since 1897 when Bram Stoker published "Dracula." There have been rock 'n' roll vampires, stand-up comic vampires, romantic vampires and now in Joan Perucho's "Natural History," a Catalan vampire with political convictions.
Set in the Spain of the 1830s when liberal forces in support of Queen Isabel II and her mother, Maria Cristina, were fighting off a challenge from the pretender, Don Carlos, the novel describes a vampire hunt in war-torn Catalonia. The protagonist is the young liberal aristocrat and naturalist, Antoni de Montpalau, who has passion for collecting and classifying odd species and for whom even the common goat goes by the name of Capra Hispanica.
Although he has no belief in the supernatural and dismisses his cousin Isidre Novau's claim to have sighted the famous pesce cola as "nothing more than a hallucination caused by excessive ingestion of canned food," Montpalau's calm positivism is frequently disrupted--by the auguries of bats in flight, crazy bulls, a mysterious assassination attempt and puffs of smoke that take on unusual shapes.
And as inevitably as Sherlock Holmes is lured by the Hound of the Baskervilles, Montpalau is drawn to the village of Pratdip where every morning somebody is found dead with blood drained from the body and two small holes in the neck. Braving bandits and war and laden with garlic, Montpalau and his cousin Isidre make their way to Pratdip, which is dominated by a ruined castle, surrounded by a "veritable orgy of wild mushrooms, goats, partridges, lettuce and emeralds." Here they are met by the baroness d'Urpi and her daughter, Agnes, with whose help Montpalau identifies the vampire as 700-year-old Onofre de Dip who had been seduced by a Romanian vampire duchess but had returned to Catalonia out of nostalgia for his native land.
Although Montpalau saves Pratdip from further devastation, Onofre escapes destruction and resurfaces as a Carlist guerrilla known as the Owl. He is naturally drawn to the cause of authoritarian monarchism but paradoxically feeds on the Carlist Gen. Cabrera and tries to turn him into a vampire. Captured by Cabrera's forces, Montpalau providentially saves the general by feeding him garlic water and, when the Carlist forces are defeated, gallantly helps him escape to France. With the defeat, the Dip also gives himself up, weary of his 700 years of wandering and Montpalau marries Agnes to the music of Chopin.
"Natural History" is, as this summary is intended to suggest, not so much a vampire novel as a diverting spoof of historical novels and travel literature. The cameo appearance of historical characters like Gen. Prat, Frederic Chopin and George Sand reminds us of the way historical novels often pass off improbable fictions by giving them underpinnings of historical fact. In "Natural History," these historical encounters coexist with bizarre fantasies like the discoveries of a large phallus impudicus , of giant fleas and of human beings turned to stone.
The pursuit of the Dip into the mountains of Catalonia allows the author to parody travel literature, the writings of geologists and naturalists, 18th-Century treatises on the improvement of agriculture, the legends that surround all shrines to the Virgin, and the populist reverence for folklore.
The novel is thus a diverting collection of pastiches--of royal proclamations, popular songs, proverbs and most amusingly those travel books whose authors take delight in impassively consuming whatever exotic dish the peasantry prepares for them. Thus Montpalau and Novau eat a dish "invented by lower Aragon's transhuman shepherd" and which consists of "lamb tripe wound around oak branches and roasted over an open fire. Part of its excellence derived from the way it crunched between one's teeth, but its most exquisite and refined peculiarity was that it still contained the beast's excrement." The index of the novel is a comic masterpiece. - Jean Franco
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-02-12/books/bk-3088_1_natural-history






Our hero is the dashing, aristocratic but arrogant Antoni de Montpalau. The novel opens in the First Carlist War (1830s). The war was fought over the succession to the Spanish throne. The supporters of Carlos V wanted a return to an absolutist monarchy. They were opposed by supporters of the regent, Maria Christina, acting for Isabella II of Spain, and were known as liberals. Antoni de Montpalau was in the latter camp.
However, we first meet him as naturalist. We see him interested in exotic (and fictitious) species such as Avutarda geminis. He is interested in the bat, which he calls Vampiris diminutus and says can suck human blood. There is no bat in the real world called Vampiris anything and the vampire bats, which have completely different names, are only found in South America. He even has a vampire tree, which eats live rats and spits out their skeletons!
We follow him and his cousin, Novau, to Gràcia, a bastion of liberalism, where the Montpalaus have a farm. While visiting the local Liberty Café, a man tries to assassinate him and he only just escapes with his life. The man escapes – his shadow is seen fleeing – but he leaves behind a sulphurous smell. The shadow and the smell will haunt Montpalau throughout the book.
Back in Barcelona, Montpalau meets the great and good, including Ferdinand de Lesseps, Chopin and George Sand. Barcelona society has to pretend that the couple are married, in order to accept them, which, of course, they do. When Sand swears, they have to ignore that, too.
Montpalau has a group of intellectual friends, who discuss scientific issues. One of them mentions the Dip, which Montpalau claims does not exist. It is, he says, a supposed being who changes into a spider, a bumblebee, a vulture, a horse and then an elephant. He rejects its existence entirely. He is editing a book on Catalonian natural history which, in fact, exists. You can read an OCR of the Catalan version here. - The Modern Novel
read more here

Sigitas Parulskis, Darkness and Company, Trans. by Karla Gruodis, Peter Owen Publishers, 2018.


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Lithuania, 1941: Vincentas makes a Faustian pact with an SS officer: in exchange for the safety of himself and his Jewish lover, Judita, he will photograph—"make art" of—the mass killings of Jews in the villages and forests of his occupied homeland. Through the metaphor of photography, Sigitas Parulskis lays bare the passivity and complicity of his countrymen in the darkest chapter of Lithuania's recent history, in which 94 percent of its Jewish population perished.


The novel "Darkness and Partners" deals with the topic of the Holocaust in Lithuania. Mass killings of Jews begin in Lithuania during World War 2. Lithuanians soon join the Nazis who organize the Holocaust. The book reveals the drama of a man who became a witness of mass murders of the Jews, the murderers' drinking companion, their mate who is unable to change the flow of events. S. Parulskis tires to look at the Holocaust through the eyes of the perpetrators.


LONDON (Reuters) - Lithuanian writer Sigitas Parulskis first confronted the enormity of the Holocaust during a visit to London when he stumbled across a museum plaque showing collaborators from his small town who took part in the mass murder of Jews.
    Decades after the end of World War Two, in which six million Jews across Europe were annihilated by the Nazis, some Lithuanian artists are confronting the role played by compatriots in the killings.
For Parulskis, Lithuania’s leading novelist, playwright and essayist, the discovery in 2010 that his northern town Obeliai saw 1,160 Jewish residents killed by the Nazis and local militias led to soul searching and resulted in the country’s first novel to confront the traumatic wartime legacy.
    “Darkness and Partners” created a storm at home when it was published in 2012.
    The graphic novel, which has yet to be translated into English, centers on Vincentas, a young photographer living in a rural town, who captures the gruesome work of Lithuanian executioners at the behest of a brutal Nazi SS officer nicknamed “the artist”. At the same time, Vincentas pursues a clandestine relationship with a Jewish woman.
    Parulskis said he was accused by some Lithuanians of seeking to make money, gain publicity, or feed “a Holocaust industry”. Others urged him to keep such themes taboo.
    “It does not matter if we are Lithuanians or any other nationality - we cannot simply avoid it,” Parulskis said on a visit to London. “There is shame within us and if we do not expel this shame, it is not a good thing.”
Despite anger from some, Parulskis was awarded Lithuania’s person of tolerance award in 2012 and also received positive support from other Lithuanians. 
Lithuania was annexed, along with neighboring Baltic states, by the Soviet Union under a 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, gaining independence in 1991. After World War Two, the legacy of the Holocaust was virtually blacked out.
“During the writing of my book, I went back to my town. The center of town would have been completely empty the day after the Jews were killed. It would have been like something from a horror film,” Parulskis said.
    “Jews who were erased from the life of that small town ... they have not disappeared from my memory nor, as a consequence, from the map of existence.” 
    The capital Vilnius was known across the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of the region due to its once vibrant cultural and religious life.
Lithuania’s Jewish population numbered around 220,000 when the Nazis invaded in 1941 and just over 10,000 survived. German squads were assisted by Lithuanian auxiliaries in killing Jews.
    Lithuanian film director Audrius Juzenas also explored similar themes with his 2006 movie “Ghetto”, which dramatized a Jewish theater company that performed in the Vilnius ghetto and was adapted from a play by Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol.
    Juzenas ‎is working with Parulskis on filming Darkness and Partners.    “All of this concerns our history where citizens - who were Jews - were killed. Experiences of that period are a message for the future,” Juzenas said separately in London.
    “You need to face the truth to find out what you want to tell your children and what you want from your future.” - Jonathan Saul
 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lithuania-holocaust-writers/lithuanian-artists-grapple-with-compatriots-dark-role-in-holocaust-idUSKCN0PX13L20150723

Sigitas Parulskis,The Towers Turn Red, Trans. by Liz O'Donoghue, Southword Editions, 2005.




Sigitas Parulskis (born in 1965), a Lithuanian poet, playwright, novelist, and literary critic, is one of Lithuania’s most fêted and influential contemporary writers. A graduate of Vilnius University in Lithuanian language and literature, Parulskis has published articles in many of the country’s most prominent newspapers and journals. He is a translator of Russian, American, and British literature and has worked as a lecturer in Creative Writing at Vilnius University, and is currently a lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. His first book of poetry, Iš ilgesio visa tai (All That Out of Longing), was published in 1990, and was soon followed by several books of poetry and essays, a collection of short stories, and five novels. He is also the author of several plays and theatre scripts. Works by Parulskis have won all the major Lithuanian literary awards. In 2002 the novel Trys sekundės dangaus (Three Seconds of Heaven) was recognized as best book of the year and garnered Parulskis the Lithuanian Writers’ Union Prize. In 2004, Parulskis received the National Prize in literature and the Lithuanian National Art and Culture Award. He received the Person of Tolerance Award for 2012 for his most recent novel, Tamsa ir partneriai (Darkness & Company), which tells the gripping story of a young Lithuanian man drawn into the events of the Holocaust in Lithuania. Parulskis is singular among Lithuanian writers for the ironic, incisive, critical, and sometimes provocative style in which he explores the traumas experienced by Lithuanians of his generation, who grew up under Soviet rule and came of age during the country’s transition to independence. The most beautiful moments in his writing explore the loneliness of being human and the brutal, primordial nature of reality with unsurpassed sensitivity and depth, and a soft irony unique to this author. Works by Parulskis have been translated into Russian, English, Latvian, Finnish, Polish, Czech, French, German, Greek, Swedish, and Italian among others.
Trys sekundės dangaus (Three seconds of heaven, 2002) The framework of the novel’s plot is constructed from the narrator’s memories of Soviet life. In post-1991 Lithuania the protagonist receives a Western sovietologist’s offer to recount his experience as a paratrooper in a unit in the Soviet military that was stationed in the former German Democratic Republic. When the idea fails (it is impossible to mechanically reproduce one’s experience), he takes another attempt at recording his story with a tape recorder, but this time alone in a small health-resort town near the sea. There the protagonist consumes a large amount of alcohol and ends up at a centre to become sober. There, in his bed and hung over, episodes from his past life appear – as a Soviet army paratrooper, his study years, his love for Maria, and episodes from the stories of his unplanned encounters with other women. In addition to the authentic, brutally obscene experience, which takes on an existential dimension, the novel is compelling in its language and style. The book contains slang and swear words, physiological, bodily sensations, but in the text all these elements fuse into what could a kind of “existential linguistics“. Critics have pointed out the writer’s rare ability to employ several language codes, to weave together the layers of the sacred and off-colour everyday talk.
Murmanti siena (The Murmuring Wall, 2008) The novel tells the story of four generations of Lithuanians, and effectively becomes the story of 20th-century Lithuania. The characters get involved with the communists, the Nazis, the Holocaust, the freedom fighters, and independence. They are also involved in their own lives: love, relationships, family, the past, the town, the city, the Church… The ‘murmuring wall’ of the title is both a real wall standing on the family’s homestead, and also a central metaphor for 20th-century history. It is all about either isolating the frightening evils that hide behind it, or fencing yourself off for safety and support.
Tamsa ir partneriai (Darkness & Company, 2012) Through the very contemporary metaphor of photography, leading Lithuanian author Sigitas Parulskis confronts the darkest chapter in Lithuania’s history and tries to understand “what happened to our peaceful nation” during the Nazi occupation that led to the murder of 94 per cent of its Jewish population. Accompanying a squad of local executioners to the villages and forests that were the main sites of the Holocaust in Lithuania, Vincentas descends into a paralyzing moral abyss – he is a powerless witness to both the horror of the events and the banal humanity of the killers. But his camera cannot protect him, and as Judita has warned, “the war will rip the masks from all of our faces.” When she learns of his secret, Judita rejects him and goes in search of her husband, a musician, in the Kaunas ghetto. In a surreal and harrowing climatic scene, the two lovers are reunited with the SS officer, who has orchestrated a sadistic erotic game that will seal each of their fates. Weaving together historical detail, heart-breaking poetic description, sensuality, Biblical references, and elements of magical realism in a thrilling plot, Darkness and Company is ground-breaking: it is the first major novel by an ethnic Lithuanian to examine the Holocaust in that country. It is also a powerful work of fiction that speaks directly to readers of all nationalities.
Reminiscent of the aesthetics of shocking beauty juxtaposed with horrific ugliness in such cinematographic masterpieces as Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties, Parulskis’ Darkness and Company is a tour de force, a blow to the reader in its handling of the tragic history of his nation – and a sigh of relief. The Holocaust is not sinking into oblivion in Lithuania. Instead, it is powerfully reinterpreted by a young writer whose experience would naturally lead him back to the 1980s, rather than to the Second World War. – prof. Leonidas Donskis.
Mano tikėjimo iltys (The Fangs of My Convictions, 2013) is a multi-layered and multi-genre book. With documentary-like detail, this often existential and ironic Parulskis essay describes the recollections of a Soviet, i.e. a twentieth-century, man, and additionally includes I am Love, a theatrical monologue. The writer himself suggests to the reader that these words come from observation, experience, and imagination. Within them, behind the dense (self-conscious) irony and veil of light sarcasm lies solid life experience and emotion, a variety of manifestations of being, reflections, realities, and recollections. The better part of the texts display Parulskis’ usual clear and evident thinking and writing style, next to which appears a new, and almost cynical fatigue of the narrator, that doesn’t stand-out, but reveals itself slowly – after all, convictions have fangs, but hold no promises. - http://ltbooks.nkpk.lt/catalog/view?id=16535

Pamela Ryder, Paradise Field: A Novel in Stories, Fiction Collective 2, 2018.
www.pamelaryder.com/index.htm
read it at Google Books
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Pamela Ryder’s stories vary in style and perspective, and time lines overlap as death advances and retreats. This unique and shifting narrative explores the complexities of a relationship in which the father—who has been a high-flying outsider—descends into frailty and becomes dependent upon the daughter he has never really known.






Through the Viewfinder: PAMELA RYDER with Peter Markus
Pamela Ryder writes sentences like no other writer I know. I remember my first encounter with her fiction, a story called “Hovenweep” as it appeared as the opening story in Gordon Lish’s The Quarterly #29, a story that begins, “We are too much in the open here: sky, sky, slick rock, heat, and high above us the circling birds.” What is this word Hovenweep? I remember asking myself. Might it be a made-up word to go along with the world of a made-up fiction? It was a dizzying reading experience right out of the gate, one filled with the sensations that I go out seeking when I pick up any work of fiction, any work of art: to be bewitched by what I see and hear, by what I hold. I was immediately held. And was not let go, and did not want to let go, for all the sentences that then followed. “We are left too much unshadowed by the shape of them,” the second sentence then went on to say, “escaping past the canyon walls, winging down the stone, unshaded by the deer-stripped juniper that juts above the river.” I knew I was in a place. I was placed inside this place: a place of shadow and light, stone and bird. I was sold, not so much by what was being said, but by how the sentences were being delivered and slung, fasted as they were to the page, and to my eye. I could not, I dared not, I did not want to look away. The magic of fiction was taking place here in this moment: the given being displaced by the made. I remember, too, soon after I read this story, taking it in with me to a fiction class I was teaching and reading the story aloud to my students, and trying not to stop at the end of each sentence to marvel at the joys to be found at the stoppage of every period: the shapes of the sounds, the rivers that Ryder was able to carve out of stone, the images of blood squeezed from ink. That story, “Hovenweep,” a word I still to this day don’t know what it means or if it is a made up word or if it, perhaps, makes reference to a kind of flower, or weed, a thing of the actual world, later appeared in Ryder’s second book, the collection of stories A Tendency to Be Gone. Open this book to any page and read at random any one of the sentences you’ll find there and expect to be immediately transported to worlds made of dirt and stone and heart. Yes, more than anything else, Ryder is a writer of ferocity and the bravest of hearts. Her new book, Paradise Field, digs even deeper than ever before into the fertile ground of family and fathers and daughterhood and tells us what it is to live and die with strength and grace and indignity and meaning, what it means and what it feels to be, in the end, left alone to our own devices. What it means, in the end of all endings, to tend to those emotionally loamy gardens, to give due passage and a ritualized bidding adieu to those we call our own—in this case the father of this book, a WWII fighter pilot, a man who most often, in Ryder’s own words, was a man “gone, flying to parts far-flung.” I had the pleasure of asking Ryder some questions by email about this latest book and her life as a writer and what it is that keeps driving her sentences. - Peter Markus read more

Pamela Ryder, Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories
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The stories herein transport us through realms as varied as the language that tells these tales. "We are too much in the open here," says the narrator of “Hovenweep” visiting the Canyonlands and finding her life laid bare against a landscape of desolation. In “Tendrils, As It Were", the ribbons that bind a wedding bouquet unravel as surely as the marriage does. “Arroyo” takes the reader on a road trip through the desert and into a relationship that is “past the point of pulling over, turning back.” In “Solstice,” a coalminer’s wife busies herself with ordinary chores rendered luminous while she awaits her husband’s return from the “everlasting winters of the pit". The explorers of “Overland” search for the source of a river in terrain as tangled as their motives, while the purpose of the expedition disintegrates. The off-kilter bishop of “In the Matter of the Prioress” accuses a nun of unearthly seductions, but cannot help divulge his private passions. In “A Tendency to Be Gone,” a recluse portrays isolation in the language of enchantments, and reveals the talismans that keep her secrets safe. “Seraphim” delivers us to a mediaeval convent as plague sweeps the Continent, and its inhabitants face the devastation to come. With sentences that are plain and precise, or lush and illuminating, this collection is a guide through the literary habitations of uncertainty and the topographies obsession and redemption


"When Ryder offers you a furrow, and this she will do, this she will do, here’s my advice: not to tarry, not to resist; hasten, instead, to fetch yourself down into the narrows with her, and find there a sensorium unlikely to crop up in your experience without your having the luck of her fastidious companionship in the lead. Ryder is a vigilance, a pervigilance, a field guide with scruples on every page." -- Gordon Lish

"There is a powerful alchemy at work in these stories, transforming everyday words and giving them new life, luster, and meaning. Ryder's is the rare and wonderful prose." -- Lydia Peelle



"I had him once to hold. I have a stone to hold. From this day forward. We go forward, we watch the road, we listen for the hills. I listen to the stone: there is no singing. Once there was singing; we were singing. We were kneeling and we sang the words we knew. There was a ringing bell, fingered rings, him never to be slipping through my fingers, my folded hands. There was a hymn, a hollow sound. There was a joyful noise. There was a moon-white paper marked with my name, his name. The paper was unfolded, unfrayed. We were not afraid. We would take a chance. We would last. We would stay awake, see signs."
The words move you and the stories carry you away. That's what they're for, to take you somewhere else, maybe somewhere new, whether it be down the road or a thousand years ago. Stories create new worlds or they make our world new, imbued with magic, with wonder.
My mother asked me for the hundredth time in the almost month since I've been back what I want to do, what interests me. I told her, Nothing matters so much as stories.
"My father is out on the curb, picking through the throwaways. He is what I have folded. He is holding a shirt to his shirtlessness. He is showing me what to save by taking a stitch in time."
Pamela Ryder's A Tendency to be Gone offers stories that matter, the kind that transport you, that move you, emotionally, geographically, temporally. No two stories are the same in terms of style or even content -- from lyrical to declarative to almost Victorian, she builds reality around us. And though the collection is diverse, it is cohesive.
The title sticks in my head and it's very appropriate for the collection. There is a strong sense of things past, of something gone, of leaving, as well as a greater force at work, whether it be god or devils or the enormity of nature, the insistence of Time. Within these she weaves lives, sometimes broken, other times breaking, but always searching. For what?
Ritual and repetition, signs, significance of any kind: these are people possessed. They need something, anything, and maybe they don't know what it is. Maybe they never knew or will never know. Maybe they had it and can only hope it will come again. The enormity of their surroundings swallows them as the prose hits all senses and we fall into it, into these worlds, these places, completely consumed by a collapsing house, the neverending wilderness, the countless rocks and hills.
"She takes me under. Pushes me into the place she wants my mouth. She wants me drinking from the river. She wants me head-down in the water, mouth to stone and split-legged in the dark. She finds the pebble of me, the slippery banks of me where I am winged and unescaping. Where I am sliding stream-bottom stones, stirred on by the scent of something wounded. I am face down and willing. I am unfolding, unstruggling, undone."
Her ability to describe settings, to allow that setting to seamlessly become a body, a human body, to be sexy and profound at the same time continually impresses me. I read the collection again this last weekend, and it's better than the first time -- richer, fuller. The stories opened up to me in new ways, differently than the first read where I was mostly just riding the prose, enjoying its sound, its texture. But this time, this time the stories are more than just beautiful: they're real and they matter.
"I will have a bed. I will make an unmade bed of stone. I will pretend a pillow for my head. I will pretend the stones will keep me safe and where I am: face down to the rock, powdered with the ashes where the rock was burning." - edward j rathke
http://thelitpub.com/featured-books/a-tendency-to-be-gone/


oklynrail.org/2017/07/books/Through-the-Viewfinder-Pamela-Ryder-with-Peter-Markus