Albert Cossery's THE JOKERS (tr by Anna Moschovakis)

 Many years ago, I decided it was finally time to take on a bit of Robert Silverberg, after a particular book of his, The Book of Skulls, had been recommended to me so many times I'd gotten tired of hearing about it. Forewarned against Silverberg's rampant misogyny, I still felt so entirely slapped in the face by it that I actually fantasized about how great it would be if an edition of it could be published without any women in it at all. I mean, think about that for a moment: I was wishing my own gender out of a book. I mean, kind of on the Thumper principle -- if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all? The Book of Skulls told a really cool story and wrestled with a lot of interesting ideas and depicted some characters who were quite hideous all on their own and I didn't need to see them mistreating women all along their cross-country journey to prove that.

Well, now I seem to have found a companion volume, perhaps a companion author to Silverberg as well. Except instead of a speculative fiction tale of a search for immortality and its costs, composed by an author widely renowned within his genre (but only within his genre), this one is straight-up literary fiction, composed by an author internationally acclaimed but again only in the circles of International Literature and translated fiction. But they have a lot in common.

Albert Cossery, a 20th Century Egyptian Man of Letters (known as "the Voltaire of the Nile") who wrote his letters in France and thus in French, was a terribly interesting and terribly talented man, but as I was warned in James Buchan's introduction*, he did not have a terrific attitude about women. But so don't a lot of terrific writers; Chuck Pahlaniuk, say -- the popular American novelist I was most reminded of besides Silverberg as I took in Cossery's short novel from around the middle of his long but lazy career, The Jokers.

As one might expect from the title, suggesting to us 21st century westerners nothing so much as everybody's favorite Batman villain, The Jokers concerns itself with a special kind of discontents in one of Cossery's unnamed imaginary Middle Eastern/North African cities. Their city , which is impossible not to imagine as basically being William S. Burroughs' Interzone, is ruled by a pseudo-military dictator known in the book simply as "the governor" who has banned begging and is flogging its population sort of half-assedly towards striving to appear a busy and modern city-state, with its people bustling around in a parody of purposefulness amidst glittering mid-century edifices that are mostly just cheaply constructed shells of same disguising the same old mud-brick architecture the place has always had. I could have used a lot more attention being paid to the state of affairs prevailing in a city run this way, but alas, I only got a very amusing opening prank at the expense of a police officer that I could definitely see happening in 2020s L.A. or Portland or NYC.

Anyway, our heroes want nothing to do with this prosperity play, of course, but can't be bothered to organize anything so effortful and banal as an actual armed uprising against the regime. The three we chiefly get to know -- Karim, an educated and capable young man who could easily fit into the machinery of state and do well there for himself and for his people, but who'd rather loaf around, seduce prostitutes and then not pay them, and make and sell kites; Heykal, a successful businessman who learned his trade in the prison system but never learned to read; and Urfy, who runs a small school with his mother, or used to before dementia took hold and left her pretty much helpless and hopeless. -- have convinced themselves that ridicule alone can topple the governor, but not just any ridicule. It must be ironic AF.

Their plot revolves around a poster campaign which will plaster the governor's face all over the city above an absurdly fawning encomium to him that will provoke the citizens to mirth and the rest of the nation and the international community to assuming that the governor is so insecure and pathetic that he has felt the need to mount this over-the-top propaganda campaign. It's an entertaining idea and one that I might have once thought entirely plausible, but now I just imagine a plot like this during The Former Guy's presidency and realize that the governor, were this to happen in real life, would probably just eat up the flattery, and the international community's sniggering would not bother him one bit.

Of course, the comparison doesn't really hold, because Cossery's unnamed city is nowhere near the Big Player on the International Stage that the United States is; it's much easier to laugh at what one has no very great reason to fear. I'm pretty sure the home of Karim, Heykal and Urfy is not a nuclear power.

On the other hand, their plot reminded me more than a little bit of one of my favorite short films of all time, Mat Nix's Me and the Big Guy, in which an ordinary citizen of a totalitarian state modeled on Orwell's 1984 uses the always-on two-way video screen in his home/cell to annoy the dictator into leaving him alone. Again, we now know that this wouldn't work; TFG would never stay tuned in to the film's nebbish protagonist long enough to get annoyed once the initial flattery got stale. Still, it's a glorious little ten minutes I hope to embed here if YouTube hasn't taken steps to prevent that sort of thing nowadays. 

The characters in The Jokers entertain no such hopes of being finally allowed to plot revolution in peace, of course; plotting revolution is work, and besides, what would they find to laugh at smugly, to feel superior to, to trade witticisms about, without the greatest joker of all, their city's fearless leader, to kick around?**

Interestingly, Cossery kind of lets us see what it would be like for them in a scene which has Karim having to submit to a police interrogation, which turns out to be the job of an old frienemy, Hatim. Hatim is a bit excited as soon as he sees Karim in the wating room, because he considers Karim a worthy foe, the kind of revolutionary that makes policing worthwhile -- but Karim, as part of the Big Joke, denies any dissatisfaction with the current regime at all, even seizes the opportunity, when the Governor Himself passes by, to kiss the Governor's hand and praise him as a Good Father to His People. Hatim senses this isn't sincere but can't see a way past the irony and is left deeply unsettled by the pointless encounter. Again, I can't help but think, wouldn't it be lovely if this worked? But alas...

I sound like I hated this book, but honestly, I didn't; I generally don't make the effort to write about books I don't like, both because I really don't have the spoons to waste and because I agree with W.H. Auden, who opined long ago that writers of bad reviews are usually just showing off. Better to let bad books sink into obscurity. But so, no, I didn't hate The Jokers, even with its misogyny that I haven't even gotten around to really describing yet, because Albert Cossery, and his translator Anna Moschovakis, have produced a really engaging and compelling little novel here, with just enough of a plot to keep it all going and a lot of ridiculously entertaining scenes, such as one midway through when Heykal, just moments after putting up the very first poster in a casino bathroom, watches a drunk stagger in, try to take a pee, look up and see the dictator's face staring down at him above a ridiculous paragraph of praise to him, and keels over stone dead -- while the dictator himself is sitting in the VIP section of that same casino, fending off the Jokery trio's young friend Soad's badgering attempts to get him to join her on the dance floor. And I like Cossery's insistence on idleness being a virtue, and his dandy-heroes could be my heroes if they would only include people like me in their plans. I can write poster copy, too, guys. Never mind that I could theoretically also have a baby. Guys? Guys?

But so, let's talk a bit about Soad, a 16 year old girl whose father is close in the governor's counsels, and who gladly turns over all the information she can because she has a crush on Heykal. When first we meet her, Humbert Humbert-ish-ly, the first thing we learn about her is that she has a wispy, underdeveloped body. The only point of view we get from her is either fawning admiration of Heykal or waspish hatred for a famous singer, a middle aged woman, who was her father's mistress for a while. Everything else is just cavorting and giving Heykal the eye, which only ever brings Heykal to ponder how much the true object of his admiration is Urfey's poor mad mother, about whom he rhapsodizes emetically: 

All the tenderness in him went out toward the face of the old madwoman, Urfy's mother. Her insanity was what he admired more than anything; she existed on a plane free of corruption, an extraterrestrial universe of inviolable purity, immune to the usual abominations. Heykal, who cared about nothing, was jealous of Urfy's crazy mother, this sublime being buried in a basement in an unsavory part of town; the schoolmaster possessed the one thing that could actually move Heykal.

Never mind the poor woman's actual circumstances.

But back to poor Soad. Toward the novel's end, she gets the Susan Pevensie treatment; her father, sensing that the governor's ship is sinking and he's not going to have the mental or economic resources to deal with raising a teenager on his own, has finally given her her late mother's jewelry and made her start dressing like an adult so she can quickly be married off. Her last scene with Heykal is as bad as anything C.S. Lewis wrote about Susan; now that her hair is up and her jewels are on she has no attraction for Heykal, who suddenly shifts to equating her to all the other women in the cafe where they've met for a last exchange of intelligence:

There was the little girl*** and her mother, and apart from that just two other tables occupied by ladies gorging themselves on cake and blabbing quietly to each other. Heykal was nauseated by the women's voraciousness.

I mean, they're just hanging out in a cafe? Having a nice conversation and a bit of cake? They're not, like, wolfing down a ten course meal and talking with their mouths open and spitting crumbs everywhere and looking his way and licking their chops? They're just there? Where they maybe are often because they like to be idle just like Heykal and his friends do? They might even have a more sophisticated understanding of what's going on in the governor's circles? Or just be nice, ordinary people who are hurting no one? But anway... then poor Soad arrives, proud of her new grown-upness and knowing that she looks nice, but when she makes the error of fishing for a compliment, she's told she looks "Superb!... You remind me of my grandmother!" And when she reacts to this as any teenaged girl might, Heykal gives her a dirty look and muses on how

She had just voluntarily crossed the border that separated her from childhood; from now on, she would no longer be able to move him. She was a woman now, and she knew how well he was defended against the ploys and duplicity of her sex. 

What? You thought I brought up Lolita by accident?

I really wonder what it was like for Anna Moschovakis to translate stuff like this from the French. Here's another choice passage:

Karim was relaxing. He leaned against the stone parapet that ran along the cliff road and studied the languid asses of the woman strolling by, so plainly visible beneath their light dresses. How different they all were! They came in every shape and size. In the veiled gray light of dusk, these amazing asses took on a life of their own, promising him sensuous delights. The owners of the asses were, for the most part, so ugly that even a sex maniac would run screaming, but Karim barely noticed; he seldom looked at a woman's face.

I mean, maybe I could convince myself that Karim and Heykal are being satirized for their horrible attitudes toward half the human race, if I was being paid very well to do it, but I know that publishers, even the famous NYRB Classics line, pay as little as they can get away with for translations. Let's hope she got a grant.

I'll stress again that I did not hate this book, but I did hate how I felt after finishing it: hopeless, tired and more than a little skeeved out. So I'll say I can see why this book and this author have garnered admiration, but I'll say also that someone is going to have to make a very concerted and sincere effort to get me to read any more of Albert Cossery's work. Humor and style aren't everything, and my TBR pile is still approaching the infinite, y'all.

And, apropos of nothing, I haven't read any Houellebecq beyond his Lovecraft book and The Elementary Particles, either.

*Which I only skimmed at first; I tend to prefer to take my fiction as it was written and only to turn to forewards and whatnot afterwards. Kind of like people who try not to see trailers before they see an actual film, I want a pure experience if I can pull it off.

**In other words, they remind me a lot of a guy who was one of my best friends from age three until we graduated high school, whom I wanted to punch right in the junk when we met up for drinks in 2016 and he told me he really hoped one Donald J. Trump would be the next President of the United States because it would "never be boring." Anybody who values politics as entertainment being more important than at least trying to make other people's lives a little bit more bearable seriously needs a punch in the junk at least once. But I kind of used to do that to him sometimes when we were little, and I was in a public place, so I refrained that time.

***Before Soad's arrival, Heykal has been all but flirting with this little girl, even to the point of imagining spiriting her away from the cafe and her "monstrous" mother.

Robert Silverberg's THE BOOK OF SKULLS #OneBookAtATime

Elevator pitch time: Robert Silverberg's "Sci Fi Masterwork" The Book of Skulls is In the Company of Men meets The Holy Mountain* but in, you know, prose. Only I'm pretty sure I'm expected to forgive all of the scorchingly misogynist** elements of the former because it's a product of its time. Only I'm kind of failing at the forgiving thing. But it has enough remarkable qualities to make me really want to find a way to forgive it, but forgiving it feels like a bit more gender treachery than I'm comfortable with nursing in my heart and so I'm having a real David Foster Wallace-style internal conundrum about this damnable book.

It was about 1/3 of my way into The Book of Skulls that I realized I was eyeball deep in the first genuine hate read of my life. But also that I could not stop admiring what Silverberg was pulling off here, even as I seethed with hatred and ill wishes for all four of his protagonists.

The Book of Skulls tells the story of four Harvard boys who have decided to make a spring break road trip to Arizona, following up on some esoteric research they've done that has led them to the cautious but fervent conclusion that the secret to eternal life/youth/vigor is to be found at a secret desert monastery there. Said Harvard boys being, in their four different ways, exactly the kind of nasty, bullying know-it-all jerks that I chose to attend a fraternity-free liberal arts hippie college in the forest to avoid. As in it's not just their misogyny that makes them unpleasant. Super-rich, carelessly arrogant Timothy; driven, ruthless, tightly-wound Oliver; bitter, cynical, sneering Ned (who is also a bit of an awful caricature of a gay/bisexual man); and scrawny, scholiastic, intelectually domineering Eli (a bit of a caricature of the Manhattan Jew) redeem themselves only in odd moments of conversation, mostly in the book's second act in Arizona, when they start really wrestling with the fascinating questions of if this quest of theirs could possibly see fulfillment, what it would really mean to live forever (in a strong and healthy young body), belief, faith, and each other. Lots of tasty talk about metaphysics, for those of you who enjoy that sort of thing, which I do.

And we get to know them really, really well, because the duties of first person narrator are shared equally among them, chapter by chapter, the narrating stick tossed around the circle like a skittle. Which, yes, is one of this novel's many stunning technical achievements, because The Book of Skulls could definitely pass Robert Anson Heinlein's Godbody test.***

This all comes to the fore with stunning rapidity, long before Arizona, though, because the immortality they seek has some mighty interesting strings attached: for anyone to succeed, four must apply together, and of those four, only two may receive the boon. Of the other two, one must willingly sacrifice himself (as in suicide) and one must be murdered by the other applicants. That's a hell of a scenario to play out and spend a whole novel entertaining, and Silverberg gets enough mileage out of it to make an infinite number of trips from Massachusetts to Arizona.

Before they're even out of Manhattan, the boys are all making their cases for what the outcome is going to be -- if the claim/offer doesn't turn out to be bunk. Interestingly, they all seem to agree, and to make a very persuasive case for it, each with his own arguments as to how and why the predicted outcome would be so. And, but here's the thing, this happens many, many times through the novel. Every few passes 'round of the narrative skittle, the reader is persuaded of a different outcome, while simultaneously unable to dismiss the previous versions thereof. This is utterly, jaw-droppingly masterful.

And there's more masterful where that came from.  We're not just dealing with the present Timothy, Oliver, Ned and Eli here. We're dealing with their past selves, and their projections of themselves, imaginally, into an infinite future (of these, only Eli really bothers to plan out what he might do with all that time, and his plans are wonderfully grandiose; of the four he's the least loathesome by kind of a lot. Of the four). And that's not all, either, because, like I saw happening in Dostoevsky's Poor Folk,in addition to the different versions of the characters in the voyage through time, we're also dealing with each character's projections, his internal emulators, of the other three. I'm too lazy to do the math right now, as usual, but it's somewhere upwards of seven versions of at least of the four characters being juggled around in Silverberg's and our heads at pretty much every given moment in the narrative, and it never gets confusing or annoying or anything but stunningly brilliant.

But still, as I believe I've mentioned already, I hated these characters and I wished them ill. So even as I was riveted watching their fascinatingly ugly (and yet weirdly also tender, because there are real emotional bonds there) group dynamics, what really kept me reading was my ill-wishing hope that they were all heading for doom, or at least disappointment.****

Yes, I read this book fervently hoping for an Alejandro Jodorowsky "zoom back camera" moment for this quartet, so I could point and laugh and say it served them right -- but as story got into its second act, at the mysterious monastary, and I realized how much I was thinking of The Holy Mountain as I read, and I further recalled that this novel and this film are almost exact contemporaries of one another (The Book of Skulls was first published in 1972; The Holy Mountain was first released in 1973), and I managed to dial back the hate for a while. This was because, awful as these Silverberg boys are, they are not a patch on the assembly of asshats that Jodorowsky paraded on pretty much the same quest.

So perhaps the point both Silverberg and Jodorwosky had in mind at the time, a time of turmoil, ugliness and let-down -- Vietnam, Watergate, violent protests and overreactions to protest, the sexual revolution (which, I just read yesterday, may well have had as much to do with penicillin and its power to cure syphilis as it did with the birth control pill -- maybe even more so) in its wild and heady pre-AIDS days, etc. -- was the idea that we have to go through  an ugly, frightening, appalling stage (in other words, an adolescence) in order to develop into something finer? Most people think caterpillars are ugly, and even the ones that grow into the prettiest butterflies often cause a LOT of economic/aesthetic/ecological damage by eating like hogs while they're caterpillars (though the ecological and economic damage they cause is abetted by our agricultural practices, of course, just like arrogance and misogyny and other horrible character traits can also be laid at a society's door, if no one is bothering to take corrective/preventative action before the kids are turned loose on the world "young, dumb and full of cum").

Regardless of whether this attempt-to-forgive has any merit, I'm still stonked with admiration at this book. This is very different from loving it. I just recognize it as a wildly successful work of art. And hey, it did something that many say art should: it made me uncomfortable.

And hey, I did have fun hoping that the monastic order waiting for the boys in Arizona would be those magnificent bastard hoaxters, Casaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo from Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

Now I think I'm going to read that, since it's thematically related to this one I've just finished and all. Plus, it's very likely my favorite book of all time, it's been many years since I've indulged, it always makes me smile, and after mind-vomiting my way through this, I need to smile for a bit.

*And they really, really, did not need to meet ever.

**And homophobic, and anti-Semetic, and anti-Catholic elements, too, but those fade into the background in the light of the casual awfulness with which women are treated, described or portrayed here. Even in a moment we are perhaps supposed to read as laudably sympathetic/empathetic, when one of the protagonists is observing to himself that the waitress serving them at a greasy spoon has had a long day, he has to throw in a remark like "there was an acrid, cunty smell coming off her." Really? Really? REALLY? And then there's the moment when one character confesses a rape to another, and that other is only actually interested in the incest angle of said rape. This is not a plot spoiler, by the way, more of a trigger warning. The detail of the confession has absolutely nothing to do with the plot except it needed to be something shocking. Well, uh, congratulations, Captain Asshat Silverberg. But so seriously, I would rather read a book with no women in it at all than one in which they are always and only treated as objects, and objects of contempt to boot. I would gladly read a fan-edit of The Book of Skulls in which all the appearances of my gender had been excised. Gladly.

***Godbody also being a novel told in multiple first person accounts, to a degree of perfection that is truly astonishing, Heinlein said of Ted Sturgeon's last and finest novel that a person could, if he or she had a friend choose passages at random from the text to read aloud (preferably without the guesser seeing where the passage is physically in the book), unerringly identify who the narrator is just from a sentence or two. I have done this several times; have even tried it with both people who have and haven't read the book making the selections, and it didn't matter which of those my reader of the moment was; I could always tell.

****So this is a very different enjoyment from that I gained from watching the antics and machinations of the Bastards In Space of Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels.