Book | The Damned Utd – David Peace

Do you like football? I must confess that it is not really my cup of tea. I tried to gauge an active interest in it back in 2011, a time in my life where football chat was ubiquitous and I did what I could to stay in the loop. Though watching the Premier League final that year was genuinely exciting, it was exhausting trying to maintain a regular and active interest in football after that. Sorry, guys. I bought this book a while ago to awaken some interest again but the book wasn’t really what I was expecting.

The Damned Utd wasn’t that great. It tells the story of Brian Clough, a big name in the history of British football. Ex-footballer turned football manager, the novel manically zigzags between his past managing Hartlepool and Derby County in the late 60s/early 70s, and his present in 1974 where he spent forty-four days managing Leeds Utd. If the overly dramatic narrative wasn’t a giveaway, Clough is a notorious tough, rough, hard-as-nails sort of guy and was renowned for his shitty attitude to other football players and his volatile nature. He sets fire to the previous manager’s old desk out of pride (though in real life, this never happened, and it’s the only exciting part of the book). Every other sentence has some kind of expletive in it. Clough is let go by Leeds Utd after he alienates half the players and basically fucks shit up. In the novel, we get Clough’s tortured psyche in the first and second person. Get a load of this:

You pace and you pace, up and down your carpet. Back and forth, you pace and you pace. The walls getting closer and closer, the room getting hotter and hotter. It is Sunday lunchtime and you can hear the church bells pealing, smell the Sunday joint cooking. Roasting. Peter is sat on your sofa. Peter is smoking. You pick up the phone. You telephone Longston at his home –“Can I have your permission to sack Stuart Webb? He’s locked the bar”.
“I know,” Longston tells you. “Stuart was action on my instructions.”
“He was what? Why? What’s going on?”
“You just get on with managing the team,” he tells you and hangs up.
You put down the telephone. Slam it down. Break it –
Peter is sat on your sofa. Peter is crying –
It is Sunday 14 October 1973

This just wasn’t my bag. The narrative was exhausting and difficult to take that seriously. Short clipped sentences, gratuitous swearing, mental machismo – it was relentless. It suffered from trying to be too punchy, grizzly and edgy. Are all sport-related books like this? In fairness, the novel was more about Clough’s notorious character rather than about the sport that defines him, but the dramatics were layered on a bit too thick. I think that it helps to be initially interested in football in the first place to get anything out of this book, particularly as knowledge of football culture is taken for granted. Would recommend to hardcore football fans or to those who like  biographies to be simplistic, intense and, most importantly, over-the-top.

Book | Vernon God Little – DBC Pierre

I read Vernon God Little at a somewhat appropriate time – this week it was announced that Eleanor Catton wins the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries while Pierre’s novel won the very same prize exactly ten years ago in 2003.

I liked this novel. It is amusing. I always have reservations about novels that are meant to be funny. In addition to the Booker Prize, the novel won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, a prize that celebrates comic literature. I can only think of two or three books I have read in my life that have actually made me laugh out loud. One of these is Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Another was Alan Temperley’s Harry and the Wrinklies, a book I read when I was nine and I remember tears streaming down my face when practising my reading with my teacher. Plenty of things I have read on the internet have had me crying so hard that I can’t breathe. Vernon God Little really is funny, and it’s no fault in the writing that it didn’t make me physically laugh out loud: it did make me laugh on the inside. Some books just don’t hit the right buttons.

Quite often my reaction on reading anything

The novel deals with Vernon and his plan to abscond to Mexico when all signs point to him as an accomplice to a school massacre. Vernon is innocent, but the cards are not stacked in his favour. There are unreliable traumatised witnesses, an overzealous bureaucracy, an incomprehensible attorney, friends of the family out to get him, and when the only piece of information to exonerate him is precariously near an unrelated buried gun with his own fingerprints on it, Vernon’s ridiculous situation and his outlook on the absurdity of it all sets his plan in motion. From there we follow Vernon’s crazy journey packed with hilarious American stereotypes and his struggle against his testosterone-driven desires and the long arm of the law, all done in Vernon’s idiosyncratic narrative voice full of expletives, hyperbole and teenage angst akin to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

I don’t have any quotes cause I went and returned the book to the library I got it from. But truth be told, it is a cracking read.

Thoughts on the Nobel Prize for Literature 2013

Today the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro was woken up by her daughter to find out that she had indeed won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature – not a bad way to start your morning! As other various online news resources will recapitulate, Munro is a “master of the short story”, is often compared to Chekhov, yadda yadda, other articles (like this) will explain things better than I will because I can’t really comment much further on Munro herself having not read her stuff. Being somewhat aware of her mastery and reputation as a bigshot of contemporary short story writing, I have been meaning to read her short stories for a while but my local library never has her work there whenever I go. All I can really say is that I think that this year is a welcome choice not necessarily because of any triumph of nationality or departure from politics, or indeed because she is the 13th woman to win the prize out of 112 years, but because the short story has a potential chance to step out of the shadows of the novel.

You know what, Alice? You’re alright, you are

Short stories are always under-appreciated in comparison to novels. It is very true that they are much harder to publish than other types of literature but does this mean that short stories will be flying off the shelves thanks to Alice Munro’s recognition? I doubt it, to be honest. Only time will tell, but even in terms of receiving public recognition for her kind of works, Munro and other recipients of the Nobel Prize are not treated in the same way as those from other popular literary prizes such as The Man Booker Prize (particularly in the Commonwealth): recipients of the latter see much commercial success and marketability of their works compared to the former but the Nobel Prize recipients are argued to garner a more credible literary recognition that will be treated well throughout history. Munro’s achievement probably won’t make short stories any more publishable or favoured over other novels right now, but nevertheless her even furthered international recognition is a great feat that can last historically.

Both prizes are obviously subject to debate about their real literary merit and have both undergone much controversy over many years concerning who has (or hasn’t) won. The Nobel Prize, in particular, faces barrages of criticism almost every year, some of it justified. There will always be unpopular opinions on who should win, as it natural with just about anything ever, but when you pass over Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene in favour of two nobodies chosen from within the Nobel Committee itself (Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson in 1974), you’re in trouble. Rumour has it that Martinson killed himself from the worldwide backlash.

Other choices in the past have similarly stirred the butters of what constitutes literary merit. I can’t help but feel that there is a certain awful self-consciousness when it comes to selecting a Nobel Prize winner, as obvious choices have in the past been trumped by completely out-of-the-blue or compromised candidates. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it smacks highly of selecting for all the wrong reasons, for the sake of adhering to some allegiance to a misplaced elitist literary credibility. I guess my own reservations about literature being for everyone rather than for a select elite or niche few affects my view on this. Some “duds”, according to Wikipedia, include John Steinbeck in 1962 and Elfriede Jelinek in 2004, who were picked out as “the best of a bad lot”, or whose inclusion “ruined” the reputation of the Nobel Prize respectively. I’m not saying these are bad writers (I enjoy Steinbeck) but the ways in which candidates are selected seems contrary to the values of the Prize.

But obviously there is some good to the Nobel Prize. From tracing Nobel Prize winners, I have discovered the likes of José Saramago, Halldór Laxness and J. M. G. Le Clézio, who have become among my favourite authors and whose works have inspired me in many ways. There is obviously some sort of legitimacy in most of the chosen winners.

Like it or not, the Nobel Prize is here to stay

Basically, as far as I see it, the Nobel Prize is a bit of a laugh. It’s always fun to try and pre-empt who will win and why and whatever. I am amused by the fact that Bob Dylan has seriously been considered a strong candidate (but if Churchill won in 1953, anything is possible!) and I feel somewhat confused that Haruki Murakami has been the bookies’ favourite twice now. He is a very good author, but I just don’t see him as lofty Nobel Prize material. The Nobel Prize for Literature will always be a bit fishy, whether it’s because of a candidate’s favourable political leanings (Vargas Llosa, Sartre & Mo Yan vs. Borges) or because of their obscurity over popularity (Tranströmer vs. Rushdie). But it doesn’t mean that the Prize isn’t significant. It’s often right, and often wrong, but that’s just the game, yo.

What I will close with is that Alice Munro seems like she deserves it. She seems like a nice, down-to-earth lady, and her choosing wasn’t down to anything contrived. Though she has decided to put down the paper and pen for good, her response to receiving the Prize is just awesome: “it’s nice to go out with a bang”.

Book | The Curtain – Milan Kundera

Let me start off by saying that as an ex-English Lit major, I really wish that I had read The Curtain three years ago when I bought it because it is one of the most elucidating things I have ever read in regards to furthering my understanding of literature. Move over, Lukács and Watt.

This is the most airtight, coherent and mind-blowing essay I have ever read regarding the legacy of the novel. It is split into seven parts, each part broken down into pithy structured musings about many things relating to the novel: history, art, consciousness, nationalism, narrative, aesthetics, humour… it’s all there. Kundera focalises most of his arguments around Cervantes’ Don Quixote, but also a lot of other fiction whose origins stem mostly from Central Europe, referring to writers such as Franz Kafka, Witold Gombrowicz, Robert Musil, Max Brod, Hermann Broch, as well as other greats such as Fielding, Sterne, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Flaubert… in order to make his points. Throughout the essay, Kundera’s sensitivity to his national identity as a Czech emigre tends to structure and organise his methodical approach to discussing the novel which makes for an interesting perspective that reframes ideas of Western canon.

Because History, with its agitations, its wars, its revolutions and counter-revolutions, its national humiliations, does not interest the novelist for itself – as a subject to paint, to denounce, to interpret. The novelist is not a valet to historians; History may fascinate him, but because it is a kind of searchlight circling around human existence and throwing light onto it, onto its unexpected possibilities, which, in peaceable times, when History stands still, do not come to the fore but remain unseen and unknown.

How’s that for a smart-sounding sentence? It’s one of these kind of books which can be used as a valuable resource alongside essay-writing. Need to say something that supplements your point in a much more concise and intellectual way? Quote pretty much any sentence from The Curtain and you’re all set.

What illumination feels like

Everyone should read this. Why?

First of all, if you’re an English major, you are shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t.

Secondly, everyone should read this because it talks about the novel in such a clear and informative way. For people who feel intimidated, or indeed, altogether discerning of all the pretentiousness and pomposity involved in academic discourse concerning literature, The Curtain is pragmatic and refreshing to behold.

I read Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years back and I must hold my hands up and admit that it didn’t grab me. I may need to give it another spin now.

Book | Bleeding Edge – Thomas Pynchon

Reading Bleeding Edge was a perplexing return to my late childhood of long dial-up loads, collectable plushie toys, F.R.I.E.N.D.S, and an unhealthy relationship with video-game consoles. Written fifty years after his first novel, V, Pynchon transposes his familiar devices of character mayhem and narrative confusion this time to the awkward millennial space around the dotcom boom and 9/11. The novel bleeds (haha) with post-millennial syntactically corrupt internet memes (such as 1337speak and AYBABTU), jokes about the awkwardness of technologies’ new-fangledness, nods to video game characters (and enemies), and obscure pop-culture references that even I recognised from the most impenetrable parts of Pynchon’s prose to which I naturally caressed my thick-rimmed glasses out of self-congratulation.

We follow Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator with the multi-tasking skills and abilities of a Swiss-Army penknife, who hones her detective expertise on the peculiar behaviour of a computer-security firm, hashslingrz, founded by the mysterious Gabriel Ice, all the while juggling bringing up her two sons, and making time for a rainbow of other quirky characters who either assist or distract her from her mission.

It would be too sloppy and inaccurate to say that Bleeding Edge is basically a modern retelling of The Crying of Lot 49. Much like that novel of the 60s, there’s a female protagonist on a mad chase throughout a world of secrets and conspiracies, dashing to rendezvous with one eclectic character to the next, wading through an obfuscating mire of obscure cultural jokes and ironic references, only to conclude that the way in which the big bad world governs over everything ought to be revealed and countered.

As I say, this is inaccurate. Bleeding Edge departs from Lot 49‘s familiar countercultural conclusion and it even departs from the usual sprawling headache of narrative clusterfuck. Bleeding Edge seems to come as a new novel for a new century where the actions and reactions of the past can no longer operate as effectively as they used to.

How I feel reading a Pynchon novel

As expected, the novel reads like his others. There is a point in a Pynchon novel where you finish a chapter, where the sentence structure all makes sense as you read, and you pick up a joke or two, you keep reading till the end, and then you realise in summary you have no idea what happened from what you just read. It’s a bit like a lull, but it shouldn’t be a lull, because there was no point where you felt you had to stop or go back and reread what you didn’t understand. Anyway, this is the hard-to-describe magnetic and yet soporific effect of Pynchon’s prose. It is confusing yet entrancing, without really knowing why. But there was one point in the novel where the prose shifted from its usual tangles into a style that came as a bit of a contrast, once Pynchon touched upon 9/11.

Pynchon takes a dramatic departure from wise-cracks and razor dialogue for all of a chapter or two. 9/11 is a game-changer. Maxine’s journey is given a new and much more serious context to bounce off of instead of the mysterious nameless lightness of an indirect and illusory higher power of governmental control and surveillance. Serious shit is happening now with visible proof.

Everybody is still walking around stunned, having spent the previous day sitting or standing in front of television screens, at home, in bars, at work, staring like zombies, unable in any case to process what they were seeing, A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumbstruck, undefended, scared shitless.

And so Pynchonian binaries come into play, as characters and situations throughout Maxine’s journey can be interpreted to imply that the U.S. government were complicit in 9/11, and of course, the converse is also true. The interruption of 9/11 also challenges the modern day consumerist lifestyle dependent on all sorts of banal cultural detritus, collectables, wacky and diversified restaurants and venues and cocktails (or lunches, “a corrupt artifact of late capitalism”), and most importantly, emergent technologies. As the swamped phonelines worry and disappoint anxious citizens and surviving bystanders seek refugee status in New Jersey thanks to basic human nature, how much can technology really help us?

“The day was a terrible tragedy. But it isn’t the whole story. Can’t you feel it, how everybody’s regressing? 11 September infantilized this country. It had a chance to grow up, instead it chose to default back to childhood.”

There is little resolve to Bleeding Edge. The novel ends far from the conclusion of Lot 49, where Oedipa decides to “keep on bouncing” – finding a middle-ground between complicity in the all-powerful mainstream governmental systems in place and fighting for countercultural micro-political recognition. There is no fight against anything really anymore, there is no “us” versus “them” dichotomy, or even a squat to pass out safely in à la V‘s The Whole Sick Crew. The twenty-first century’s acceleration of technological knowhow and the increasingly publicised lives led in all conceivable realities mean that everything is out in the open and there is nowhere left to hide and retaliate. The novel’s title, by the way, refers to new technology released into the mainstream with a high risk of unreliability. How apt. Bleeding Edge is nostalgic for a time where Rolodexes could be used unashamedly against a barrage of wireless systems and cameraphones, before technology potentially dooms us all. Maxine wraps it all up and accepts her own lot, as it were, and the novel ends with the burden being passed to the future generation to figure out what to do. Thanks, guys.

If you thought this “review” was just magical, be sure to check out my other one on Pynchon’s “V”.