ReadySteadyBlog

Faber on Knausgaard

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:35:08 GMT

Michael Faber recently rather dismissively reviewed Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Death in the Family. The novel has been widely praised elsewhere, and led another reviewer to write: "I started writing reviews in [1996] and had not read an author entirely new to me that I believed was a masterpiece. As I read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, I thought that this is perhaps the closest I will ever get." There is a big difference between Faber's the "bulk of the text, however, consists of mundane family life described in microscopic detail. All the dull stuff that most novelists would omit, Knausgaard leaves in" and Mitchelmore's "something remarkable emerge[s] from darkness and silence". What accounts for it?

To be fair, Faber's incomprehension ("half the book's bulk seems devoted to activities such as lighting cigarettes, drinking beer, going to the newsagents, making small talk") is not idiotic – it did, however, amuse me that Lee Rourke tweeted: "This review is beyond wrong-headed; utterly, utterly, utterly wrong"! You can see (a version of) Faber's case against the book as soon as you begin reading: it does seem to be no more then lots of cliches plus lots of banalities ("infelicities in the text... merciless specificity", Faber states). Detail piles upon seemingly inconsequential detail, not a lot goes on, but the clue to the fact that this is a misreading is spelt out within the text itself. Faber's cluelessness does, however, show very clearly what the critical priorities of most novelists and reviewers are: the tyranny of the well-turned phrase and bon mot; the realist's dream of the fully rounded character. They are all bastard children of Flaubert and Dickens who seem to think that literature can be equated with good manners. It is like a lover of classical music going to a punk concert and reporting back that it was a bit shouty. It is not an opinion one should take seriously.

Faber sees something praiseworthy in how the novel starts: it "begins with a grand meditation on post-mortem microbes worthy of Jim Crace's Being Dead." It begins, in short, with a clear attempt by the author to help the reader attune to what will follow. A Death in the Family does not begin startlingly well and then just descend into trivia. The odd, disconcerting, haunting opening, immediately foregrounding Knausgaard's focus on death and his relationship with his father, plays on through the rest of the quotidian exposition like a minor chord, a discordant humming, constantly in the background, beneath the banal. The detail, here, quivers with what Freud called the unheimlich. Inside and underneath "mundane family life described in microscopic detail" is the mundanity of death; a mundanity which, in its specificity, undoes us all, and which this shockingly good novel makes its theme whilst, simultaneously, holding the detail of life in rare and lucid focus.

'Jew Boy' talk

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:03:22 GMT

On Thursday May 3, 6-8pm, Tower Hamlets Local History and Archive, Bancroft Road, London E1 4DQ, Ken Worpole will be talking about Jew Boy by Simon Blumenfeld (republished by London Books with an introductory essay by Ken):

Simon Blumenfeld's 1935 novel Jew Boy distils poverty and politics in the tumultuous world of the Jewish East End in the 1930s, where boxers mixed with anarchist and communists, and Yiddish actors and poets rubbed shoulders with gamblers and gangsters. All were united in their hatred of fascism and prepared to use force when necessary to defeat it.

Swedenborg again

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:18:54 GMT

During a recent trip to the London Review Bookshop, I spotted a copy of Iain Sinclair's Blake's London: The Topographic Sublime in a gorgeous, limited edition, little grey hardback. I have mixed feelings about Sinclair's work to say the least, but considerable interest in Blake. And some degree of interest in Swedenborg too...

Back in 2006, Richard Lines wrote a lovely piece here on RSB about Swedenborg – Henry Sutton: Poet, Journalist and New Church Man, and he was mentioned on the blog, again in 2006, when Lars Bergquist's definitive biography came out.

Nice list here of writers influenced by Swedenborg (including Borges) on The Swedenborg Society website.

Best European Fiction event: tonight!

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 08:50:50 GMT

Tonight, Monday 9th April, at 7:45pm, London's Southbank Centre will host the UK launch for Best European Fiction 2012:

Welsh, Dutch, and German authors will share their stories included in the collection. Duncan Bush, Sanneke van Hassel, and Clemens Meyer will discuss their work with the anthology's editor, Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon, as they confront the issue of what Europe itself means in the 21st century and how the notion of a "European literature" is a continually diversifying concept.

For more information, and to purchase tickets to the event, please click here.

To read interviews with series editor Aleksandar Hemon and personal statements by contributors to this year's volume, click here.

Mieville, and Savage Messiah

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 09:47:46 GMT

In his stunning, controversial recent article for the New York Times, author China Mieville describes the London Docklands, the definitive Thatcherite regenerated playground of the rich as “a thuggish and hideous middle-finger-flipped glass-and-steel at the poor of the East End, every night a Moloch's urinal dripping sallow light on the Isle of Dogs”. London is a city being overbuilt for the advantage of someone, but that someone doesn't appear to be the people who make London breathe. As Mieville writes, “Everyone knows there's a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city.”

In his recent review for Eye Magazine, it is within this population that Rick Poynor locates the author of Savage Messiah, Laura Oldfield Ford. "She tells East Enders sick of being 'pogrommed' out of their estates by yuppies that the solution lies in their own hands: Wreck it! Loot it! Burn it!" he writes: "Embedded at ground level, Ford exposes a dispossessed, deeply disaffected alternative London to which out-of-touch political masters should have paid more heed."

Via the Verso blog.

Latest articles on ReadySteadyBook

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:19:43 GMT

The latest articles here on ReadySteadyBook, include Shiona Tregaskis' review of Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp ("Antwerp reads like the gathering of forensic evidence – loosely pertaining (or perhaps not at all) to a murder in the Costa Brava..."), Danny Byrne's essay on László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance ("his material is some of the oldest in literature: in fact, the symbolic devices read at times like a post-Nietzschean take on Elizabethan tragedy...") and Cassandra Moss's take on Gerhard Meier's Isle of the Dead ("the past, whilst immutable as a remote, completed whole, offers, in fine detail, movement and malleability")...

Unmissable stuff, so please read, comment, Tweet etc!

Also, make sure you haven't missed Simon Critchley's annotated bibliography for The Faith of the Faithless ("On my reading, what is being called for by Kierkegaard is a rigorous and activist conception of faith that proclaims itself into being at each instant without guarantee or security, and which abides with the infinite demand of love, the rigor of love..."), and my interviews with the boys from The White Review ("To dismiss the discussion of complicated subjects as elitist is to deny people a stake in them...") and George Craig, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, and chief translator for the Letters of Samuel Beckett ("Beckett's handwriting is a perpetual source of difficulty, but long acquaintance makes it, for the most part, manageable. Translation is a problem mainly because SB does not simply "use" other languages, but plays with them.")

Again, A Time Machine: Stewart Home

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Again, A Time Machine: Stewart Home: SPACE hosts the first UK retrospective of Stewart Home’s work –

From his earliest work Stewart Home has expressed an avantgardist desire to write himself into the archive of culture. Mixing myth and polemic, with plagarism and a savage ideological critique, the parodic manifestoes of Generation Positive, progressed into the self-historicising magazine Smile, the Neoists, and finally The Art Strike – an aggressive appropriation of Gustav Metzger's strike proposal (more...)

Opening Thursday 5 Arpil 6:00pm until 9:00pm (SPACE 129-131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH.) Show runs until 20 May 2012.

Mitchelmore on Knausgaard

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:08:01 GMT

I started writing reviews in the year Josipovici's review was published (1996) and had not read an author entirely new to me that I believed was a masterpiece. As I read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, I thought that this is perhaps the closest I will ever get. Such is the reach of the word masterpiece beyond craft and industry considerations, my instinct was not to review at all but to thrust the book into the hands of friends for whom reading is absolutely central to their lives (not many).

But I must write something. Reading My Struggle was often like reliving fragments of my own life – an intensity resonating in a void – and a review would mean explicating this in formal terms, and that wouldn’t be right. Yet the terms available seemed too personal, something to be shared only by handing the book over in silence. How then to recommend?

Lovely review from the matchless Mr Mitchelmore of Karl Ove Knausgaard's highly-praised A Death in the Family.

George Steiner: The high priest of high art

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:56:53 GMT

George Steiner’s profoundly European sensibility has rarely been more evident than in this series of meditations on what Maurice Blanchot calls the “exultant antagonism” between poetry and thought (more...)

George Steiner: The high priest of high art

Martin Walser on Faith and Fiction

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:49:08 GMT

When I read Barth, I notice – and I am sure many others do as well – that we have fallen asleep and have produced legitimizing explanations for all kinds of substitute pleasures. Of course Barth can motivate you to wake up and to stop retreating to pseudo-justifications for social, political, or biographical success. But that alone is insufficient. That is the reason why Kafka’s “The Trial” is so important for me. The protagonist Josef K. is asked to appear before a court on his 30th birthday to testify about his life. When he realizes that he cannot justify his life with the things he has done, he despairs. He sees lawyers, artists, and finally a priest. The more he strives for justification, the more he realizes that he is lacking it. You cannot finish the book without confronting these themes in Kafka’s writings. The book is incredibly radical; it ends in a staged suicide. That is more than simple fiction (More...)

He continues: "You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism. Behind us are two thousand years that have been marked by questions about God. Today’s atheistic calm, even from intellectuals, is equal to the eradication of our intellectual history." Superb stuff from Martin Walser (in an interview in The European Magazine.)

Not quite at the same level, but I did also enjoy Melvyn Bragg attacking Richard Dawkins' 'atheist fundamentalism' in this video on The Telegraph's site.