Vladimir Sorokin's BLUE LARD (Tr by Max Lawton

About midway through Vladimir Sorokin's infamous, absurd and obscene Blue Lard, a very au courant couple in an alternate (very alternate) mid 20th century Moscow go out on a very chic date that winds up forming a tableau of the most perfect encapsulation of the state of world culture in the 1990s I've encountered in a long time, maybe ever. It might seem ordinary at first: they attend a performance of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Ballet. But this ain't the stately, ornate palace of the arts you're no-doubt imagining right now. I mean, well, it is, but it's also so much more:

The hall of the Bolshoi Theater constitutes the primary sump of the Moscow sewage system.  Those who are superficially familiar with fecal culture suppose the contents of a sewer system to be a thick, impenetrable mass of excrement. This is not even remotely the case. Excrement makes up only twenty percent of its contents. The rest is liquid. Though this liquid is murky, it is still possible to survey the entire hall with strong enough lighting -- from the floor spread with carpets to the ceiling with its famous chandelier.

To attend a performance at this Bolshoi requires donning a kind of diving suit, and the lobby of the famous theater now functions as an airlock, from which the contents of the auditorium are pumped in and out to facilitate entry to the performances. The rest is pretty much a typical theater-going experience, just murkier. Oh, and you have to attach a special apparatus to your diving helmet to make it compatible with the drinks service in order to enjoy your champagne uncontaminated by #1 and #2 and whatnot. As is ever the concern when ordering comestibles in public, no?

By the way, sorry if any of the above grossed you out too much. But if it did, you might as well stop reading this post, and cross Blue Lard off your TBR, because the vast variety of offensive material packed into this novel, of which the Bolshoi sewer lagoon is by no means the most offensive, means it probably isn't for you. 

Except, well, you'd be missing out on a lot. Even a pretty decent and straightforward plot (well, except for some wibbly wobbly timey wimey bits) mixed in with outrageous scenes, nearly impenetrable slangs (including a lot in a sort of Russian/Chinese pidgin that only dorks like translator Max Lawton and Your Humble Blogger* likely really enjoy; there's a glossary in the back of the NYRB edition**) and off-kilter parodies of the works of most of Russian literature's greatest heroes that, to a 21st century reader, are gonna feel like the output of a Large Language Model force fed on Pushkin and Akhmatova, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Platonov and Chekhov, but are somehow both worse and better than that for reasons I'll get into later. 

Later in the book, after a hilariously explicit yet oddly tender sex scene that you've probably already heard about if you've heard anything about this book, the lovers have a bit of a literary discussion for their exhausted and happy pillow talk:

"I've forgotten what a book even is."

"That's forgivable for the leader."

"Are there interesting writers?"

"There are.  But not interesting books."

"In what sense?"

"You see... something is happening with Russian literature. But I still haven't quite understood what."

"Is it rotting?"

"Probably."

"Well, we're all rotting. As soon as a man stops growing, he starts rotting."

"A book isn't a man."

"Do you mean to say that books don't rot?"

Blue Lard is the first book that I've encountered that i truly feel could only have been written in the 1990s, a decade in which public intellectuals were making nonsense declarations about "The end of history" and predicting stagnation and stasis as all we had to look forward to now that the great Cold War had been "won" by the West. At the time I thought this attitude only prevailed in the West -- the former Soviet Union was still living through some mighty interesting times*** -- but here in this book that first saw print in 1999 we have the above arresting image of the flower of Russian arts and culture reduced to its very dregs, passed through a million digestive systems and still being circulated and presented as all there was on offer. And that's just for a start.

Egads, I love this weirdo, Sorokin.

But so,  what does all this have to do with lard, of any color? 

I'm not going to go too deep into the color stuff. Sean over at SFUltra handled all that just fine and I'd just be rehashing him. Suffice it to say that this particular term for the color blue in Russia has come to take on connotations not unlike our old use of "lavender." But what's the Lard?

Buckle up. 

So, for about the first third or so of the book, told by the way, in epistolary form by a technician to his absent lover in the kind of prose that might remind the reader of James Joyce's love letters to his wife, Nora, if James Joyce had been a Russian science fiction writer, concerns a bizarre project. For the good of Mother Russia, hilariously mis-grown  clones of great Russian literary figures of the past are set to work producing new texts, not for the sake of generating those texts (which are shared in full in these letters), but in order to collect the weird and unspecifically powerful residue that these clones produce as a byproduct of their literary efforts, a blue substance very like bacon fat that the clones secrete when writing.

So basically, Blue Lard is misbegotten creativity (the only kind Sorokin foresaw his culture producing as the millennium ended****) made tangible and collected to use as fuel for grander projects. Our correspondent and his coworkers all believe that it will serve as fuel to power a nuclear reactor on the Moon. Russian greatness of the future must consume Russian greatness from the past in order to achieve Russian greatness in the present. Or something. How all of that is supposed to work is beside the point -- very much so, as at no point do we even come close to seeing this reactor, or the Moon at all. What does become of the Blue Lard is so much weirder than that. So much. As Lawton says in his "extraduction" at the end of the book, Blue Lard isn't meant to be understood so much as borne witness to.

Except, and I know this is the very height of hubris to even pretend to say, I feel like I did, in fact, understand that to which I bore witness, here. Just not on a conscious level. Or a rational one. But Vladimir Sorokin and Max Lawton put something in my brain by means of black excrescences on white paper, and that something will live in there forever, inflating the view my inner eye has of my brain, like Tetsuo's body in the last act of Akira, eternally. If you've already read this book, you know exactly what I'm referring to here. Heh.

But so anyway, this whatever that Sorokin and Lawton put into my brain, can I even explain it? In a blog post? You see here that I have tried. But I feel like I've failed, even as most people feel like they have failed to understand Blue Lard. But maybe it's not a matter of understanding, or of bearing witness, but of making the mighty effort to invent a new art form, a new kind of expression, with which we can convey our individual and idiosyncratic experiences of reading Blue Lard. I'm game. How about you?

Rips, ni ma de.

*Recall that Mandarin and Russian are the two languages that I've made the most effort to sort-of learn except my squirrel brain is even worse about hopping from language to language than it is from book to book.

**But you don't really need it. Context clues are usually enough to get the gyst, and I think constantly flipping to the glossary page would just slow you down/annoy you into DNFing long before the real fun of Blue Lard even begins.

***My perspective on this is still, I freely admit, colored by my old Beaudacious Bard College classmate's big ugly book about his experiences in Russia in the 90s.

****I think he's been proven wrong on this score, I'm happy to say. Not only has Sorokin himself continued to publish some fascinating work almost as fucked up as Blue Lard, but so have the Dyachenkos, Tatyana Tolstaya, Eugene Vodolazkin, Victor Pelevin, Dmitry Glukhovsky and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, to name a few whose work I myself have read. Perhaps not all of this will be regarded as immortal work for the ages, but some of it likely will, and none of it is rotted or boring or terribly conventional. I've certainly enjoyed it quite a lot, anyway, some of it, like Vodolazkin's Laurus, I've read more than once and even decided to try reading in the original because I've liked it so much. To say nothing of Belorussian, Ukrainian and other Former Soviet states whose native writers are getting the kind of international attention that used only to be possible for either very orthodox or wildly transgressive Russian nationals 

Laszlo Krasznahorkai's CHASING HOMER (Tr John Batki)

...when you stand there paralyzed and stinking, doused with gasoline, and see the flame of that lighter getting closer and closer, and when you still just managed to feel yourself being slightly lifted by the propulsive force of the explosion, only to have your small body spatter into tiny fragments before it's consumed, go ahead and try querying then about such things as: what is life.

What if the most melancholy writer out of Hungary suddenly decided to write his version of Run, Lola Run, but, instead of giving it a driving techno soundtrack, turned to an avant garde jazz composer for a bunch of creepily compelling tracks to accompany each chapter of the resulting novella? And disdained to give us any back story as to explain why his protagonist is a desperate fugitive? And what if he also turned to an illustrator of intense and compelling abstract-expressionist imagery to further enhance the work? You'd wind up with an exquisite keepsake of a chapbook that would not stand out on your shelf at all due to its diminutive size, but would be glad to have on hand whenever you needed a little emotional jolt.

Unfortunately, I was only able to get Chasing Homer out from my public library. As an ebook.

This did not, though, in any way, diminish its impact. For one thing, Max Neumann's artwork looks great in grey scale (there's not a great deal of color in the original images); for another, it doesn't matter what format you're reading in to enjoy the text and hit the embedded QR codes at the beginning of each chapter so you can listen to the short percussion-only tracks scored by Miklós Szilveszter. Which, like all film nerds, I've always associated Krasznahorkai with composer Vig Mihalyi, but he can hit me with a new-to-me Hungarian anytime he wants!

But so, Chasing Homer. So named not because it's the protagonist's name, but that of the very idea of Homer, the poet, as the chase proceeds through country most of the world first came to know, and possibly will only ever know, as described by him/them. I think.

Who is chasing whom, though, and why? If you can't enjoy a work of prose fiction without having answers to questions like these, this isn't the novella for you; it's not about that at all, for all that our unnamed protagonist is constantly on the move, barely daring to rest or eat or drink or even eliminate, lest his relentless unknown pursuers catch up to him at last. It's about the movement, constant and relentless and breathless and frantic.

Through our fugitive's eyes (I'm going to use a singular they to refer to them here, though I reckon the protagonist is probably male; I find that there is a whole level of female prey experience that is missing from this narrative), the whole of 21st century society is one giant pack of predators, carefully watching and waiting for a misstep or a pause; every stranger who does or does not make eye contact a spotter or a herder there to steer one into a trap as they proceed from street to street, neighborhood to neighborhood, city to countryside, country to country. Crowds can be simultaneously a refuge and a menace, to disappear into or be caught at last within. Movement is on foot, by bus or train or boat, it doesn't matter. One can never be sure that they've shaken a particular perceived pursuer, let alone the pursuit as a whole.

The resulting novella feels even shorter than it really is, raising the reader's heartbeat and then leaving her panting as though she herself had just had to sprint away from trouble. I've never done cocaine or much in the way of any other stimulant stronger than caffeine but I imagine I'd feel much the same from the jolt of this book, if I did.

Benjamin Myers' THE PERFECT GOLDEN CIRCLE

He knows there is something else under all this. He knows there exists an under-England, a chthonic place of hidden rivers and buried relics, of the bones of extinct animals and battle-slain bodies. Layer upon layer of it, laminations of land, each made from stories packed tightly by the weight of time so that they become something else, just as wood becomes charcoal. So many stories, so many unseen footsteps. So many secrets that go beyond the limitations of the here and now.

I have a well- documented history of loving things like crop circles and of loving the people who love them. One of my favorite people ever to live was an aficionado; it's over this shared love that we first became friends. I still miss Mac Tonnies, all the time. 

I wish he was still around to have enjoyed The Perfect Golden Circle, Benjamin Myers' delightful character study of English eccentricity and the single- minded pursuit of a certain very unusual art form. 

 The Perfect Golden Circle is a delightful piece of conventional prose fiction, structured entirely around the serial creation by two men of vast crop circles of increasing scope and intricacy, intercut with snippets, John Dos Passos-style, of public reactions to same, mostly via the press. 

One way in which this novel, which takes two real "land artists" from the 1970s and 80s as inspiration but in no way tells their actual stories, really stands out is in its treatment of male friendship as something that can just be, without elaborate shared backstories or pseudo-psychoanalysis or invented conflicts or petty rivalries or toxicity of any kind. While they are very different men with no real reason to even know each other, let alone spend hours in the pub planning and more in the farm fields of England in the dead of night executing their plans, they do all of that, always together. Falklands War veteran Calvert and crustpunk Redbone don't even have a meet cute in the text of the story; we meet them in the third year of their project, the year they've decided to go beyond having a strange shared hobby and turn it into, as Redbone describes it at one point, a pursuit of art, myth and mystery. 

But the book's primary delight is describing the near-miss adventures the pair experience over the course of their summer as various other denizens of the British countryside at night, from rabbit-hunting weasels (in more than one sense) to tipsy toff landowners to the ever-increasing number of crop circle fanciers, armed with crackpot theories, homemade detective gear and flashlights, who are hoping to catch the aliens/fairies/secret agents/whatever in flagrante.

This was an especially enjoyable read for me on the heels of Andy Sharp's English Heretic, similarly concerned with English geography but altogether different in how the landscape might be interpreted. Here the land is scrutinized by Calvert's experienced logistical eye as he seeks the right field for the right project, which must not only be big and flat and full of ripening cereal crops but must also be accessible to two guys in an ancient VW van, and near a feature, natural or man-made, of sufficient height and, again, accessibility from which to view their creations in all their bizarre glory. 

It's better still if they have an interesting local name which can be incorporated into their private nomenclature. The best of these is the Cuckoo Spittle Thought Bubble, with the first two words coming from the name of the elevated landmark and the latter two describing the design they pressed, step by step with planks and ropes, into the grasses -- carefully and respectfully so as not to break the grain stalks and ruin the harvest. 

Ruining the harvest comes later, when the press blows up the sensation and people start flocking from as far away as exotic Oklahoma and Wyoming (heh) to see and study Calvert and Redbone's work, camping and trampling and dumping and landing helicopters. At least the more enterprising farmers can make up their losses by charging admission to see their new wonder.

Another source of great charm in The Perfect Golden Circle is the pair's consistent enjoyment of the attention given their work and the wild speculations about it. They take particular pleasure in seeing how close the press comes, in naming their productions on television or on the front pages of daily, sometimes national or international newspapers, to giving them the same names Calvert and Redbone did themselves. 

I'm reliably told by a friend on one of my book-focused Discord servers that Benjamin Myers is a reliable source for very, very good and beautiful books, but that no two of his are very much alike. Based on this one, I'll be exploring more of his work soon -- but not too soon, because I don't know if you've really noticed, but I'm on a year of trying to read only one book by any one author, and I'm doing my best to stick to that, but it's hard when I keep getting invited on buddy reads and book club forays. So I might cave and get, say The Gallows Pole or something sooner. Who knows?

Pip Adam's AUDITION

I am thinking very hard for a moment but trying not to go quiet like we did the last time we tried to think very hard.

One of the sillier, yet rather profound, bits of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy concerns the Belcerebons of the planet Kakrafoon. Formerly a highly civilized and quiet race, their perceived smugness about their civilization annoyed the rest of the galaxy into afflicting them with the dread social disease of telepathy. Once so punished, in order not to broadcast their every stray thought to the rest of the world, Belcerebons had to keep up a constant stream of chatter, at the expense of all other activity. Their planet thus became a very noisy and inane place.

I mention this because a similar fate, though not under similar circumstances, has seemingly befallen the crew/passengers aboard the star ship Audition, a craft powered by sound. And while any sound would originally have done, these crew members soon have to resort solely to talking because, well, they're not on the Audition because of their superior skills or merits, but because they are afflicted by a freakish and continuous growth. This growth, which has resulted in our characters all having been about three times normal human size in every dimension at the time of the ship's departure from Earth, has left them, as Pip Adam's touching, inventive and at times weirdly theatrical novel, Audition, begins, confined to the three largest spaces on board ship, into which they now barely fit so they can't move anymore, can't make the sounds of footsteps or opening and closing doors or rustling fabric; the only sound they can make is by talking, calling out to one another by way of a continuous babble of conversation, which at first is just status reports on how their legs are losing circulation and maybe gonna die and fall off or how the big skylight on the basketball court where one is trapped is now just a keyhole relative to the size of their still-growing eye. When that runs out, they start trying to piece together how they got there, but are quickly thwarted by a big problem: they don't seem to remember anything from their pasts except that they had been launched into space because they were too big to stay on Earth.

They were the unwanted. That was clear to them, perhaps it had been from the start. They took up too much room.

Then we start to get a little more information about the crew members - Alba, Stanley and Drew - from the perspective of one of their earthside trainers in an extended flashback. The Giants, as they came to be called, have been herded to a big sports stadium in Europe to be trained for their special mission: they are to be sent in giant spaceships to explore and maybe colonize other parts of the galaxy. A joke is made that this will make room for 540 regular sized humans, as many jokes are made at the Giants' expense, for as they have grown, so have the distances that their nerve impulses must travel. Like the dinosaurs to which these poor people are often compared, they seem slow and stupid to the rest of us, and dangerous, and greedy for resources, and did I mention dangerous? People who are different are always dangerous, you guys. Even if they can't accidentally step on you and squash you like a grape.

But so before these Giants get launched into space, they must be "trained" -- really, conditioned, brainwashed even -- to follow patterns of behavior and belief set by the normal-sized humans (though, the Giants always tell us, they hate being called that), and to forget as much as possible their lives before the stadium they've been taught to call the "Classroom." Presumably this is so they don't develop resentments over how they were treated prior to the "launch 'em into space" solution was adopted, but also in general to make them more biddable. Thus all their prior habits of speech in the book's introduction begin to make sense as programmed responses. They've really done a beautiful job with the ship, you guys. The Classroom was beautiful, too. The teachers were so kind. The food was so delicious.

And so they all find themselves in space, unable to recall anything about their previous lives as ordinary human beings, compulsively responding to lights and sounds like trained monkeys and unable to hold on to the simplest thoughts once a behavioral trigger is activated. It's horrible to behold, even just in print, a real tragedy that seems inescapable even before they come up with a seemingly doomed idea: 

We thought if we broke the ship, we'd remember,' Drew says. 'That we'd get it back. Ourselves before the classrooms.' The ship settles again, suddenly, and the sound levels out. 'And we were wrong,' Alba says.

It's pretty much the most tragic observation I've seen made in speculative fiction, and remember, I've read stuff like The Sheep Look Up multiple times. But...

About 2/3 of the way through this gently strange and obscurely distressing book, Audition morphs into a kind of first contact story, and once if the best, in terms of conveying the truly alien, that I've encountered that was not written by Peter Watts. Because what our trio encounters at first adjusts them/itself into something in accord with Alba's and Stanley's and Drew's senses and understanding, accommodating them so beautifully they think they're maybe in Heaven, but then starts pulling them along to meet the new universe and awareness halfway in a very subtle and convincing manner:

Stanley and Drew are beside her and they’re under the tree where they spent the first night. It is changed. Some kind of autumn has come over it. Its branches reach the ground now and it’s a different colour. The sky around it has also turned. Everything is shifting from the pastels into much more saturated colours. The brightening has been happening, Alba now realises, gradually the whole time they’ve been there. But now it’s at a point where it affects everything. The whole world sings in the bath of the colour field that comes from the sky but the tree has definitely changed colour, it isn’t an effect of the sky. The three newcomers who aren’t that new anymore shade their eyes from the brightness but T.J., A.J. and R.J. look at them with open eyes, waiting for them to sit down. The locals are stiffer in their movements and possibly taller. They sit in a more anchored way than the first day they sat together. They are taking up a different space. Alba looks at Stanley and then at Drew and none of them have changed in the same way. No physical change has come over them at all. They are the same as when they first arrived. Which surprises her because her insides feel completely rearranged.

I can't say much more about this aspect of the novel without giving too much away, so I'll just take a moment to marvel at how it transforms the entire rest of the story, including some pretty distressing material that comes up once our trio manages to break their conditioning and remember how they knew each other before the Classroom, before they even became Giants. Audition isn't here to coddle us and our delicate little feelings (though it's not here to brutalize us, either), you guys.

What it is here for, is to ask us to ask ourselves how certain we are that the world has to be the way it is now, that people have to have the relationships that they have, that what we know now about the universe is all that we can know, and that we are right about what we think we do know. That's all a pretty big job for a novelist, but judging from this book, my first read from both author Pip Adams (and from her fascinatingly off-beat U.S. publisher, Coffee House Press, which, more from them very soon!), Pip Adam is up for the job.

I think I'm going to need to read this one again sometime soon.

Andy Sharp's THE ENGLISH HERETIC COLLECTION: RITUAL HISTORIES, MAGICKAL GEOGRAPHY

Can we use film geographies to create cultural maps across a slice of time?

A long, long time ago when I first became concerned that all I ever seemed to read or watch was fiction, I made a particular effort to start adding more non-fiction to my cultural diet, went to the University of Wyoming's Coe Library (from which you could check out any number of books for a whole semester), and grabbed a big stack of stuff. One of which was Simon Schama's then-brand-new Landscape and Memory, a book that in many ways changed my life. Among other things, it led me to concoct, sometime later, one of my odder blog posts about how I personally had imagined the landmarks and locations of The Lord of the Rings when I was a kid.

Landscape and Memory is just that kind of read. But it's one that is almost sui generis; it wasn't until I discovered* W.G.Sebald and especially Rings of Saturn that I found anything to compare. 

Now I've found a third such project, a book that sums up a unique artist's strange and fascinating and definitely Ballardian (he even references Simon Sellars!**) oeuvre, English Heretic. A project that seems to have been aimed specifically at my little head but about which I'd been totally unaware until somehow I learned about Andy Sharp and The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography.***

Imagined in direct opposition to English Heritage and all it stands for, Andy Sharp describes his English Heretic project as a way to "use place as a means of fecundating the imagination." The resulting book is a survey of decades' worth of incredible creativity and energy, rendered in very serviceable prose, with lots of astonishing little insights popping up like graveyard ghouls from a cemetery that's older than my entire country.

As the quote I used to start this post indicates, a lot of Sharp's work begins and ends with film locations and sets, especially those appearing in the low-budget esoterica of the 1970s folk horror masterpieces he loves (many of which can be enjoyed via YouTube or Tubi as of this writing), like Witchfinder General or The Blood on Satan's Claw or The Shout or The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. I have seen precisely none of these films, but I'm looking forward to doing something about that soon. Judging from the trailers, I'm in for a pretty good time!

Anyway, a discussion of the latter film yields exceptional fun: The filming of Living Dead took place partly at a somewhat famous church, Hathersage in Derbyshire, and was interrupted by a coach load of tourists who "on witnessing the zombie orgies informed the authorities." The film crew had been working and camping it there for three days without official permission, of course. By the way:

The tourist party had come to Hathersage to view Little John's grave which takes up seven feet of the burial ground. Little John is the church's most famous inhabitant. I'd like to imagine Little John's reanimated corpse joining forces with Guthrie**** and his undead merry men to reap anthropophagic revenge on the do-gooding snitchers of Hathersage.

Sharp goes on to connect elements of the film's plot with actual local folklore, but leaves us to speculate whether the filmmakers were consciously aware of that folklore when making the movie. I mean, it's way more fun that way, right?

One location I can't believe Sharp didn't write about in any of these projects of his, is Winspit Quarry, though. You may think you don't know this place, but, friends, if you've ever watched much of the original Doctor Who series, you've likely spent rather a lot of time looking at it: it's that quarry Privately owned but publicly accessible at your own risk, this has to be one of the most haunted locations on the Sceptered Isle. It's stood in for so many alien planets, you guys. The psychic ghosts of so many rubber-bodied aliens are stalking it. And it's not like Andy Sharp doesn't know his Doctor Who or his Blake's Seven or anything. But maybe this is simply too famous a location for him.

Sharp isn't only concerned with films, though; another major cultural touchstone for this work is most of my very favorite psychologist, James Hillman's, later works after he developed his "acorn" theory of personality development, which I first encountered in a book he collaborated on with Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotheraphy and the World is Getting Worse.***** The personality at its youngest and least developed is Hillman's acorn, which is tiny and nut-shaped but contains within it the potential to grow into a vast and branching oak tree; as it becomes a sapling it develops "nubs" which Hillman views as behavioral and obsessional interests that hint at the personality's mature form, destiny and role in the world. Sometimes, as with, say, Winston Churchill, Hillman sees these nubs in a kind of negative, as when he considers Churchill's childhood stammer as a kind of fear or intimidation of the promptings his soul was giving him that prefigured that one day he would have to save the world by his speech. I believe Hillman went further with this notion in a book of his that I still haven't read but which turned out to be his most popular, The Soul's Code.

Anyway, Sharp calls on Hillman and his acorn theory as he contemplates personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, J.G. Ballard and Max Ernst, all viewed through the lens of place. He particularly goes to town on Ballard, whose fractally fascinating life as a child in a Japanese prison camp, an avant-garde writer of incredible science fiction short stories and a single father who only really got weird with it after his wife's untimely death left him raising four children a stone's throw away from a major film studio.

Of course Sharp is most interested in Crash, though The Unlimited Dream Company and The Atrocity Exhibition get plenty of attention, too. But it's Crash and its unforgettable character of Vaughan who really haunts English Heretic, as a fictional subject of Sharp's "Black Plaque" project, again, in direct mockery of English Heretic's plaques concerning the doings of various celebrated English people in various English places.

Sharp likes the nastier sort of person, of course. Don't we all?

At the rate I'm going, all but homebound on the high plains of the western U.S., I'm never going to get to visit the U.K., will never see any of these places with my own failing eyes. Thank Yog that people like Andy Sharp and Simon Schama are writing the next best thing to being there, books like English Heretic.

*Thanks to my late, lamented friend Lethe Bashar, aka Chris al-Aswad.

**IYKYK

***And no, I don't remember how I found out about this book, and it's driving me crazy. I've interrogated my usual suspects and nobody's owning up. So maybe Andy Sharp has just been beaming this book at my bean since 2020 and my skull is just too thick -- I do famously have incredibly dense bones, like freaking Wolverine -- to have admitted the signal right away. Or something.

****Guthrie played a drowning victim who spends the film as a soaking wet "submarine zombie."

***** A book which I cannot recommend highly enough, old as it is. Hillman and Ventura bounce off each other beautifully, and pushed each other into a lot of wild ideas that the rest of our culture is still catching up with.

Zülfü Livaneli's ON THE BACK OF THE TIGER (Tr Brenden Freely)

One hundred years and change ago, the Young Turks deposed the ante-penultimate Ottoman emperor, Sultan Abdulhamid II, and sent him, his wives and most of his children into exile in the then-Ottoman-controlled Greek City of Salonica/Thessaloniki. He was one of those rulers who was never meant to hold power, but when the throne came to him anyway, he gave up his idea of being a merchant and climbed up onto the the metaphorical beast named in Zülfü Livaneli's On the Back of the Tiger, a historical novel concerning Hamid's final years, and spent the next 30+ years of his life doing his best to look like he was riding that tiger rather than just being carried away by it. 

The novel, rendered into transparently readable, even journalistic English prose by Brenden Freely, is chiefly derived from the notebooks of one Atif Hüseyin Bey, who served as physician to Hamid and those members of his family who shared his exile. The doctor is thus a major character in the novel alongside the deposed sultan, and one of the book's greatest pleasures is watching the former's attitudes about the latter shift from resentment and hostility (Atif grew up with the prevailing idea of Hamid as the standard wicked and bloodthirsty tyrant) to grudging respect, to sympathy and even a kind of fondness, despite the constant criticism of his contemporaries, a number which includes the future first president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

He was now certain that he and the former Sultan had reached a new agreement. It was as if he was the judge and the sultan was the defendant. One was interrogating, and the other was being interrogated. The doctor laughed aloud at the sense of power he felt, then began coughing from the cigarette smoke he just inhaled. After he got his coughing under control, he thought to himself,  Having power is a wonderful thing.

The uses and limits of a monarch's power when he sits atop a deeply entrenched bureaucracy is the main question On the Back of the Tiger sets out to explore. Abdulhamid II is regarded by history as the last absolute monarch the Ottomans allowed, but even he assumed the throne only by agreeing to become a constitutional one. That he dissolved the parliament within a year of his enthronement is the first charge laid against him by his doctor as stand-in for his people - but Hamid easily deflects this by pointing out that said parliament was one in which Turks were a decided minority; the parliament was composed of members of pretty much every ethnicity and religion the world had to offer, and most of these granfalloons were seeking independence from the Empire and thus had every incentive to undermine it and obstruct the executive (the Sultan). And Hamid became Sultan during another round of the Ottomans' historic conflict with Russia. Therefore the parliament forced Hamid's hand.

Hamid's sobriquet in the West, and amongst his own peoples in secret, was the Red Sultan, for all the metaphorical blood on his hands, chiefly for the Armenian genocide that happened on his watch. But how much responsibility can really be loaded into one man, even one popularly understood to be omnipotent? Was he really omnipotent, astride the tiger of state that fought him constantly and sought always to attack and devour him? 

His doctor keeps having to ask these questions as they get to know one another, as the doctor struggles to reconcile the historical villain with the mild, civilized and cultured man who takes more pride in his carpentry skills than in his lineage, and whose family members show real devotion to and affection for him at every turn, further undermining his monstrous reputation.

These conflicting ideas come to a head in, for example, an early conversation the doctor has with the former Sultan about the fate of an ex-official imprisoned on his orders, and presumably executed in jail on those orders, too. The Sultan insists that had he wanted that man dead, he would have just ordered him executed. The man's actual death by strangulation while imprisoned, Hamid says he didn't know of until it was too late for him to prevent it. How much power can one man wield over the vast and complex apparatus of an empire, comprising individuals constantly having to interpret their mandates and act on their initiative to do what they assume is his will? As they've been doing for hundreds of years according to tradition and perceived necessity?

Livanelli doesn't pretend to have the answers to any of these questions, but in inviting us to ponder them he invites us to think about our own current crop of wannabe Sultans, including the ones in Turkey and Hungary and Trumpistan. And while I certainly don't like being asked to extend sympathy or respect to these autocrats, the thing that really separates them from people like Hamid stands out in very sharp relief that finally makes me, at least, decide that I don't have to. Hamid never made the kinds of speeches that these guys do. At least not in public. At least not overtly. At least not in front of TV cameras.

But what did he say in private? Those things, we're never going to know.

But it sure is interesting to think about, isn't it?

Fleur Jaeggy's THE WATER STATUES (Tr by Gini Alhadeff)

On his face had been spread as though with a spatula, an expression of peace, a sermon painted over a pale complexion. Though thin, at the core of his bones there was steel.

When a book is full of sentences like this, as Fleur Jaeggy's The Water Statues is, I wind up thinking even more about the translator than the author. I can't help but imagine Gini Alhadeff sitting and pondering each one, searching for a precise word order, an exact placement of modifying phrases and clauses, with an expression of concentration but also a slackness to her face not unlike the novella's protagonist, here.

The Water Statues, though even more compact than its page count might indicate, is densely packed with some of the most extraordinary sentences I've ever encountered, and for this reason alone is a book I would suggest to anyone because at least one of them is bound to resonate for them. So yes, the temptation to quote half of the book here is powerful, but I resist, because I don't want to rob you, reader, of the experience beyond what I already have.

The Water Statues might be an account of a young man, Beeklam, wondering why he can't grieve as his father does for his recently deceased mother, but then again it might be an account of that same person but as an old man, Beeklam, who is regretting the sale of his three best statues, one of which someone at some point had named after Beeklam's dead mother. Why not both, you might ask, to which I would reply, not this time. This book is like one of those weird plastic holograms we used to see all the time that contained two completely different images but only showed one at a time, depending on how light was hitting it. The old man, Beeklam, really doesn't seem like he was ever the young man, Beeklam, in the past, or vice versa. Their stories just occupy this same space. 

And what a space it is. Beeklam lives in Amsterdam in a house near the water with a flooded basement full of statues. A 21st century reader can't help but be reminded of Susanna Clarke's magnificent Piranesi, though this space is small and confined, with no tides washing through to freshen the waters and bring sea life to its rooms. Beeklam has deliberately caused this out of a desire to live like one who has drowned. 

Yes, it's all very strange, the more so for a static, dreamlike quality that would feel to have leaked over from something like J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World but for the habit of The Water Statues' characters to soliloquize as though a proscenium arch has just appeared above them, a quality all this novella's own.

I have read stranger books, even just this year, but none of them have made me feel quite as unmoored as this one