Wednesday 9 April 2014

A Writer's Life

How y'all been?  Busy, I hope.

What have I been doing?  Well, today I sent my new novel out into the world, to find representation and love.  It's called 'Shadow of the Mountain', and it's a contemporary novel about love and faith, about what leads a young man from a small town in Wales to fighting a war in Afghanistan.  I'm incredibly proud of it.  I spent two years writing it, poured everything I had into it - and then some emotional reserves I didn't know I had besides - and the result is something I hope you, and many other future readers, will want to buy in the not too distant future.

It's hard work, writing a novel.  It's not something you can truly do just on weekends, around your other jobs and hobbies and social life.  I mean, I know many do - many even have success doing it his way - but you do have to make sacrifices.  For two years I've barely been out socialising.  I've spent most of my free time bent crooked over a writing pad, putting this feverish dream of a novel that was in my head down onto paper.  Okay, sometimes you go out, because you need a break away, for an evening or so, but in that time you won't escape that novel burning inside you.  If you're anything like me, you'll spend that outside time cornering some unfortunate friend in the corner of a pub and babbling incessantly about plot twists, character development and the themes of your novel.   But when it's all done - when it's out there, letting others read it, and for the first time in months your free of it... that's a great feeling, that rush of freedom bubbling through your veins.  You might even look at all those pages, the multiple drafts on your hard drive, the scribbled notes left behind, made on beer mats, and waiters dockets and scrap paper, and think: never again.  But you're a writer, this is who you are, and so...

I began writing the next novel yesterday, in the pause between finishing Shadow of the Mountain and sending it out.  It's been at the back of my mind for some time now, an idea growing, shaping itself in the subconscious, and now it is a life, ready to be transcribed onto the page.  Who knows what she'll be like in two years.  I can't wait to find out.  Such is the life of a writer.  Please don't think me as mad as this blog post has undoubtedly made me sound.  If I do happen to meet you out in a pub, I promise not to corner you and burble wildly.  Can't promise you won't start, though, because this writing lark: it's infectious.

Sunday 16 February 2014

The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño - a Review



Roberto Bolaño is a novelist whose work I return to frequently.  He has progenitors in Borges, Kafka etc, but feels distinctly separate from them as to become something unique.  Since his untimely death in 2003, Picador in the UK has slowly been releasing everything Bolaño wrote, it seems.  These releases have not come chronologically in Bolaño’s career, but from scattered times in his life, and there does seem to be something apt about that.  Their latest release is actually the last Bolaño worked on in his life – he was prepping it for publication when he died.  Called The Insufferable Gaucho, it is again translated by Chris Andrews into English (he has done sterling work on Bolaño in the past, and does so again here), and is five short stories and two essays.



The stories, for the most part, offer something of worth.

Jim, the opening piece, is brief.  Jim is a Vietnam vet now living a poet’s life in Mexico.  The little Bolaño tells us actually speaks volumes about the psychology of Jim, but ultimately the piece feels under-developed, almost like an offcut from The Savage Detectives.  I suppose this criticism is my way of saying, I liked Jim but wanted to know more about him, and that is a testament to Bolaño’s skill as a writer.

The title piece is much longer.  The Insufferable Gaucho is a retired judge, Manuel Pereda, who leaves the financial ruin of Buenos Aires and attempts to reconnect with the land at his ranch in the rural pampas.  Pereda is an interesting character too, another cool portrait drawn by Bolaño.  He is a man attempting to understand a world that changed inexplicably and suddenly around him.  Bolaño’s prose is taut here, and there are some wonderful lines.   “Police work’s about order, he said, while judges defend justice.”  These ideas of order and justice echo throughout The Insufferable Gaucho and the other stories.

Police Rat was the piece I cared least for.  It tells of a rat, Pepe, who is a police officer in the tunnels – man made and rat made – investigating a series of murders of other rats.  Its conceit – the anthropomorphisation of rats – allowed me no point of entry in which to care for Pepe or the problems of the rat world.  Consequently, Police Rat felt quite disposable.  However, something chimes in this story with something Bolaño was doing in his masterwork, 2666.   Police Rat shows a loner attempting to solve a series of murders – and a series of murders haunt the central section of 2666 in ‘The Part About the Crimes’.  I wondered later if Police Rat had been a way for Bolaño to discuss the Ciudad Juárez murders indirectly, metaphorically, or at least with a little distance, for they were clearly something that troubled his subconscious. 

Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey, the third story, tells of an Argentinian writer who travels to France to locate a filmmaker who has turned his novels into films without credit.  His journey – as all literary journeys tend to – reveal to Alvaro more about himself than he expected and alter his perspective on the world.  This is a somewhat tired formula, but Bolaño at least finds an interesting avenue into it, and has fun along the way.

Two Catholic Tales, the final story here is, as its title suggests, two stories: The Vocation and Chance.  The presentation of these stories is the most unconventional.  They seem to be one long paragraph, but are separated by numbers.  The contents 1. The Vocation and a young man is considering the priesthood, and as he waits for his calling, discusses films and muses on the martyrdom of St. Vincent and 2. Chance, in which an inmate in a mental hospital remembers his youth and makes an escape into a madder city.  This literary diptych contains more than it initially seems too, and I feel requires a second reading to be properly considered.

Finally, the two essays.  The first, Literature + Illness = Illness, seems to offer its conclusion in its title, and Bolaño goes out his way to prove it, discussing his own illness (he of course knew he was dying), French poetry (particularly Mallarmé’s "Brise Marine" and Baudelaire’s “The Voyage,”), and the responsibility of art.  Its tone is peripatetic, and perhaps not always clear, but there are nuggets of gold here.  If you have read any of Between Parentheses, a previous collection of essays from Bolaño, you know what to expect.

The same is true of the final essay, The Myths of Cthulhu.  This time Bolaño discusses Latin American fiction – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa amongst them – and though this essay feels underdeveloped beside Literature + Illness = Illness, it is not wholly without merit, and when Bolaño is firing on all cylinders, and he does a few times here, he is exceptional.

The Insufferable Gaucho is, then, an interesting addition to Bolaño’s collection of works in English.  It is not a starting point for the new reader, but to those already familiar with his body of work.  They are written with his distinctive voice, with his passion and humour.  They are, as all his works are, full of heart, and written in the face of tragedy.  Always worthwhile.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - a Review



Donna Tartt announced herself brightly in the literary firmament with her debut novel, The Secret History, in 1992.  That novel bought oodles of critical acclaim and enormous pressure for her to produce a follow-up.  What followed seemed a Salinger-like silence, until, finally, a decade later, she produced The Little Friend.  That novel again bought much critical acclaim to her door, and unfortunately for her fans, another decade plus silence, eleven years this time.  The Goldfinch, the novel born from that silence, was published in 2013, and rather unsurprisingly now, to more rapturous critical acclaim.  When the critics of the future come back to look at late 20th century, early 21st century fiction, it is certain Tartt’s name will figure highly in their estimation.



Tartt’s fiction has always been concerned with young people coming of age, of their exploration of sexuality and identity, from the six students in The Secret History, to Harriet in the The Little Friend.  The protagonist here, Theo Decker, is cut of similar cloth.  The novel opens with a bang, metaphorical and physical – Theo loses his mother in a terrorist action committed in an art gallery.  Waking in the rubble in the aftermath, a dying man seems to exhort him to rescue a small painting by the Dutch artist, Carel Fabritius (The Goldfinch of the title), and gives him a ring.   These actions send Theo on a quest, an action he is willing to undertake because, before the explosion, he had seen a red-haired girl, Pippa, with the old man, and wanted to meet her.  This quest brings him into rich Manhattan society, friendship with an elderly furniture restorer, Hobie, before seeing him whisked away by his absent father to Las Vegas where he befriends a Russian émigré and school boy, Boris.  As his life begins to spiral out of control – drink, drugs, art fraud – he retains hold of the one permanent thing in his life – the Fabritius painting stolen on the night of the bombing and his love for the little red-haired girl he hopes one day might love him back.

It becomes obvious, in hindsight, that Theo Decker’s life became frozen in the glare of the bomb blast.  Though he ages – the novel covers at least a decade – he seems to lose nothing of the child-like possessiveness that governed him as a child.  He cannot let go.  He will not relinquish the painting, though he knows the authorities are looking for it.  He will not let another into his heart until Pippa loves him (with the exception of Boris, who steals a place in his heart, and proves again how strong Tartt is on platonic relationships between same-sex couples).  He will not give up his criminal actions until he feels he has repaid the massive debt he owes Hobie for his protection, education and friendship.  And, ultimately, he will not give up his grief, and refuses to dream of his mother until, finally, he has let go of all those other things, whilst in Amsterdam (seen as the novel opens) as he tells us in the opening line, “While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.”

This telling of the reader of the novels solution at its opening is not new to Tartt.  She did the same thing in The Secret History, leading to one critic labelling that novel “a murder mystery in reverse.”  It is only through reading of the novel that the reader understands why these events have occurred.  It was true of the murder committed by the six friends in The Secret History, and it is true of Theo Decker dreaming of his mother here.

As I read The Goldfinch a number of points of comparison came to mind.  The most frequent mental image that chimed was that of Great Expectations.  Here is Theo, taken from his family like Pip in that novel, and granted a somewhat mysterious benefactor.  There is a girl – Pippa here, Estella there – with whom the narrator is captivated but who remains cold towards him.  It is testament to Tartt’s skill as a novelist that these mental echoes at no point destabilise her narrative.

And what skill!  She proves equally skilled at providing lessons on how to spot fake antiques (without slipping into authorial teacher mode), and at detailing the friendships between men, as she is in showing what it is like to be off your head on prescription medication.  Alongside musings on Russian masters of art, there are thriller elements that would not be out of place in the latest commercial action film.  Then there is the core of the novel, the friendship between Theo and Boris, a comic double act that might surely take its place in the pantheon of the great literary double acts, Vladimir and Estragon or Mason and Dixon, crossed with a touch of Laurel and Hardy.  Their interactions are always the highlight of the novel.  In lesser hands these tonal shifts – comic to thriller, romantic to nightmarish - might have created an off-kilter narrative, but Tartt retains great control of her material, and even at its weakest moments, The Goldfinch sings beautifully.  We just have to hope we readers don’t have to wait until 2025 for her next novel!