Necessary Doubt

The book fell into my hands again after a span of 20 years. I had been fiercely enthusiastic about it then: it had set down thought patterns in me. I had gone on to read all of Colin Wilson's books which I could find - which was not very many, four or five perhaps.

I wondered what impact the book would have on me today. I feared the judgement of a past self which would be reawakened.

I began to read. I was more aware this time of the social context. Details of rooms and London streets were vivid. The novel is set in the early 1950's - the sexual frankness and openness to new trends makes it feel like the sixties, but the gentlemen's clubs and occasional servants give it one foot in the Victorian era.

As I read on there was surprisingly little that that was familiar. Almost nothing. As though I had never read it -- all that remained was the recognition of the ideas driving it, but no recognition of people or place. There were dim associations for a scene where they call on a ex-chief inspector who is dressed in a bright orange dressing gown. A couple of references to excellent brandy which I recalled finding pretentious. At one point the main character drinks two bottles of wine in a night - when I read it 20 years ago I wondered if that was humanly possible.

The Boy in the Gap

Jack Sammon recounts his childhood years growing up on a small farm in the west of Ireland in the early 80's. The father died some years previously. He and his older brother Seán learn the skills of farming and the rhythms of nature from an aging neighbour - Martín Conway - who becomes a father figure to them. Lambing season, bullying teachers, fights at school, and scoffers in the pub are all chronicled. The prose is underpinned by Jack's sensitivity to the landscape and the seasons.

I took to visiting the faery wood whenever I could. I would climb another oak tree and sit on a bough looking out over the lake, watching and listening, sometimes talking aloud to the air. Things still had a wintry look to them. The hills in the distance might have a white cap from a night of snow or hail. The flock of whooper swans was nearing the end of the winter stay on the lake, and would soon be off to their breeding grounds in Greenland, Martín said. I counted upwards of thirty-three and wondered how many of them would make it back again the next year and how many would perish on their migration.

The novel is written as Jack's memoir as he waits on remand to be tried for some unnamed crime. Each chapter begins with a short passage in italics depicting Jack's inner mind as he sits in his cell. The narrative he writes in the prison-issue exercise book is neutral and slow-paced, in a functional prose. The italic passages however are fragmentary and immediate mixtures of memories of his arrest, experiences on remand, and despairing thoughts.

The Infinities

The first sentence is beautiful:

Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.

A central conceit of the novel is that the story is narrated by the gods - the Greek gods. And so the musings of the mortals are interspersed in the sequence of events. An old scientist called Adam is on his deathbed, his mind drawing closer to the eternal perspective of the gods. He was a renowned mathematician / theoretical physicist whose abstract works have given rise to a whole new range of technologies. But this is only touched on lightly (too lightly IMHO). This world is far from sci-fi -- it's set in a Big House, with drawing rooms, lawns, servants and tweeds and cravats.

Banville - as usual - touches on elusive thoughts and aspects of humanity where contemporary fiction rarely ventures.

Between the motion
And the Act
Falls the shadow

as TS Eliot put it, and that's the node Banville hacks away at. His prose is rich with ideas and allusions. The god's eye view injects an intellectual playfulness into the novel.

A pied horse kicks up its hoofs as they pass by, gallops friskily a little way, stops and turns its head and looks back at them boldly, showing them its behind and flicking its tail from side to side.

This however doesn't look much like a god's eye view -- with its sex / shame overtones this comes straight from John's subconscious. I would have wished for more joy, light, and piercing insight in these gods. Something far beyond the human.

When old Adam recalls a visit to Rome he thinks of:

in all the rooms a worrying fecal smell, and the unseen below-stairs staff audibly at their larks.

When he visits Venice it's engulfed in drizzle! And when he pours a glass of water - you guessed it - it's cloudy. In the universe as represented by Banville, we can acquire all the mathematical skill we desire, marry a beautiful woman, read great poetry, travel to Venice, Athens, and Stockholm: but we can never escape the itchy tweed trousers and oniony armpits. Grimy facticity waits to drag us down into our itchy, smelly bodies.

The intensity of things in themselves on the other hand you might also call it.

So it's like a challenge, to enjoy the thrill of Banville's dancing thoughts as he seems simultaneously hell-bent on sticking the reader's nose in the toilet bowl.

But for all that, it's intensely fascinating and well worth the moments of god-like exhilaration, or the calm tableaux settings. This is a very visual novel. At times the feeling of reading it is more like watching a large and complex painting. There are things depicted which you feel must have significance: a small boy staring out from a train window, a clock face reflecting the dawn sun, a plucked chicken on a bench, bare stairs leading out of the frame, a man with a battered suitcase mopping his face with a hanky.

It's definitely a work I'll read again, and read new meaning into it.

Cut Through the Bone

I admit to a bit of prejudice against short short stories. Often they seem imposed by busy editors who want to introduce new writers but don't have the time to read through a stack of 5,000 word stories.

But I like to read at least a little of what contemporary writers are up to, and it was easy to find Rohan's work online. She's been in dozens of online magazines. I read Kriegsspiel first. It stuck in my head like a probe. Then I read another one called Imagine. And then this slighly longer one where a family go to extraordinary lengths to show they will be a good home for a puppy.

I bought her collection Cut Through The Bone. Her stories have great variety, but they will often use the surreal to probe real emotions. The scene and voices may be hyper lucid, but the motives will be obscure. There are traces of Kafka - who also wrote dozens of shorter pieces. It's hard to describe what's so attractive about her writing. The best pieces have that quality where you feel they stand as a completed whole, not something pasted together with the aim of entertaining the reader. And you can go back at look at it from various angles, but still you will not see it through to the core.

Fjord of Killary

I love Kevin Barry's short stories and I should have got around to reading this one in The New Yorker a lot sooner.

The narrator, Caoimhin, leaves the big city to take up work as a hotel manager in a small town in the west of Ireland. He is college-educated, a minor poet, and exhaustion has begun to rise in him like dry rot. He has not written a line in five years.

"They were all nut jobs," he says of the locals at the start. "Maudlin bastards."

The locals (or drinkers as we might equally call them) build a cosy life for themselves centered on the hotel bar. They argue endlessly of how long a journey might take from one town to another. But they are aware of the forces that negate humanity. It's in the hammering rain / rising waters / the howling dogs. "It had the look of death's dateless night out there."

This is how the local undertaker describes a man he buried some weeks before: "He went into himself. He didn't talk for a year and a half and then he choked on a sausage. You'd visit and he'd say nothin' to you, but he'd know you were there."

Their lives are put to the test. The storm rages outside and the water rises to the third step. Voices are lowered to whispers. At last they are forced to retreat to the upstairs.

The story brings to mind another time when a flood posed a question mark over humanity. That other crisis led to a new covenant. This time the refuge is a small upstairs bar where Caoimhin plays nostalgic 70's pop and serves free pints. He comes to the realisation that these people are the only humanity he has, the only humanity to whom he can address his writing.

He experiences a profound sense of Acceptance. "I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last."

He renounces his inner turmoil, his dissatisfaction with the world. Things have always been the same since the inn was established in 1648 and will always be the same. His creative acts can only have meaning in relation to the people who surround him. When he has accepted that, it will set him free to write again. All the madness that went before is dismissed as 'the gloom of youth.' He will not "go into himself" like the un-named man the local undertaker buried the week before - a man whose age is significantly given as one year older than the narrator.

The subtle horror of the story is left entirely implied.

All About Life & Death

A very reliable guide from someone who's been through it all. Covers more than 200 patterns on the cusp of life and death.

Other interesting titles include:

Takao's Astute Use of Brute Force
by Takao Shinji

Killer of Go by Sakata Eio

A Monkey Jump Workshop
by Richard Hunter

Mastering Ladders by Thomas Wolf

Cosmic Go, by Sangit Chatterjee and Yang Huiren.

The Way of the Moving Horse by Janice Kim

Click the cover for the full-size sumptious cover image.

Dorian

It's loosely based on Wilde's original, updated to 1980's aristocratic, gay London. In a clever tweak, Dorian doesn't just keep his good looks, but he is the only one who doesn't fall to the ravages of AIDS through excesses of intravenuous drugs and casual sex.

Just so you know what you're in for if you start this novel:

While Dorian resumed lounging, Wotton crossed to where a table-top fridge resided on a gilt-painted escritoire. He opened it and retrieved a hypodermic, its plunger extended, its barrel full of red blood. 'As if in anticipation, I was actually having a hit when the constabulary called on the related matter. I popped it in here to stop it clotting ... there!' With one fluid motion Wotton commenced injecting the room's colour scheme into his main line. 'Ah!' he grunted. 'Fixing coke is the perfect modern pleasure, because even as you do it you want to do it again. It's like powdered greed dissolved in desire. All of human striving is here - measured out in millilitres.'
Dorian affected to ignore Wotton's moustache of chemical sweat, just as he blanked the Z of pink water that the bandit sprayed on the wallpaper with his hollow épée.

Supercilious, bleakly camp prose, where the highbrow is gleefully shoved up the ass of the lowbrow. It never lets up. Even when Wotton dies - and after 250 pages you get to like the old bugger - when his wife picks up the phone to inform the doctor:

The automatic switchboard put her on hold and she listened to the Four Seasons for what felt like three of them.

The City & The City

This is an alternative-world sci-fi novel in the tradition of Philip K. Dick. The setting is a divided city, or rather two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma. Each is a city-state with its own language and political system. The world seems to be a parallel-universe 1990's - the USA and various countries are mentioned. The location is perhaps somewhere in the Balkans, but that's not important.

The two cities partially share the same physical place. The novel begins in Beszel. It is illegal to notice things in the other city. Certain roads are cross-hatched, so the next pedestrain could be in your city or in the other city. Clothing, design, and even the way a person walks all give subtle signals as to which city a person is in. Residents are brought up knowing how to "unsee" the people and objects of the other city - and if for an instant they misread the cues, they avert their gaze with embarassment.

This conceit begs to be interpreted as an allegory - perhaps of the homeless, or perhaps of the unseen third world workers in sweat shops a thousand miles away. The novel doesn't linger on the setting, but quickly gather pace like any thriller. A body is discovered, a maverick cop sets out to investigate.

It's a great read. The taboo of "unseeing" adds a strange force to the story. Even the writing style slows and becomes elliptical when such matters are discussed. Then the pace picks again and you follow the devious twists through the city and the other city and what lies between them.

Awkward & Real

Jinx Lennon is a Dundalk-based punk folk artist, and prophet of what's real. He's been on the go for two decades now. The first decade only local gigs, but in the last five years word has got around and he's been up and down the country and through the UK. Generally gigging to crowds of at most 200 people.

Don't let life turn you into a stone

Jinx is not part of the entertainment industry. He's not under any record label, no PR company represents him. He doesn't even have a website designer - his website seems designed to repel all but the most determined.

Too much comfort is like hydrochloric acid, it's corrosive

He burns with anger and passion. The passion of the message shapes his songs: sometimes they are hypnotic, sometimes melodic, sometimes a harsh chant. He is living through his songs. Jinx will not come off stage and become a different person. He does not think about the act; he thinks about the message.

I hope I don't turn into one of those singers who fills his set with all sorts of false angry songs

And where does Jinx target the inauthentic, the bullshit?

Well, it could be football -- a multi-million pound industry run by international magnates who have no interest in the game, yet it harnesses working class loyalties. It's a sad and ridiculous sight to see Irish fans spending their money on the game.

... or it could be the fake answering-machine voice people put on at work

... or those who sit like zombies at home glued to their television for six hours on end.

... those who end up like The Stepford Wives, falling into an unconscious way of behaving

... or middle class students at a protest, who when bank managers five years later will be looking back at how silly they all were

What Jinx is about was summed up for me in the song Awkward & Real.

I must
I must keep it awkward and real
If it's not awkward and real I won't do it
I won't do it yeah
I hope I don't turn into a marionette
on tiny invisible strings

I can't find the lyrics to his songs online, so I wrote a few here. My favourite trance-influenced My Head is Slowly Disappearing up my own Arse is included.

Awkward & real is the way it has to be in an age when every song or novel is understood to be a product designed to attract attention and earn money.

Hinterland

This is an anthology of 20 sci-fi stories by German writers, some well- established, some new. They were all inspired by the music of Daviod Bowie.

See my news page for more details

The Devil's Carousel

This is a loosely-connected series of stories set in the Centaur car plant somewhere in northern England. We are immersed into the world of that factory: the assembly line is the widow; management level are collectively the Martians, and I never figured out exactly what Zombieland is, but it's where particularly boring work is done.

The antics on the production floor are fascinating, but it's a planet to itself. The Martians are on another planet, and spouses are there to be taken for granted in the few free hours away from work. In part there's a delight in the subversive humour of the factory floor, the colourful characters and repartee. But the same sardonic narrative voice goes on to describe petty thieving, suicide, and a mental breakdown. The laughs become uncomfortable laughs. There are no hearts of gold here. There may be a message here about the dehumanising effects of capitalist society, but the narrative voice is too fatalistic to have belief things can be better.

This is a voice that rarely reaches the bookshelves. Without looking at the author's bio, you just know it's based on personal experience - not just a few months of the daily grind, but years and years. This is a cynicism and wit which has developed to cope with a life sentence on the factory floor.

His prose too is a tool that he has developed for his purpose. It's a magical mixture of defiant wit, rather awkwardly-constructed sentences, and shopfloor slang. Hammered to perfection overt decades, but not glossed.

Brushstrokes and Glances

This collection of poems is comprised of two parts: the first half are poems which involve in some way the visual arts. Many were written in art museums, a few directly mention particular artists, and some are about the poet's mother (Juanita Guccione), herself an artist of some renown.

One that struck me is the poem Basquiat, about the New York graffiti artist who died at the age of 27. Some of Marbrook's political indignation springs out:

I think he's politely suggesting we dig out
from under the contempt
business buries us in.

I first got to know Marbrook's work through his cultural/political blog at http://www.djelloulmarbrook.com/ In this blog he uses the skills and insight acquired from a long career in journalism to maintain a war against bullshit. During the Bush era it was like a blast of common sense. This was a person who had worked for the mainstream papers, and has a longterm view of the relationship between the life of society and the media. The blog gives him the freedom and space to say things that could not be said in any newspaper. Without condescending, without being sensationalist, without commercial censorship.

Marbrook had spent years keeping the blog, and it had grown to attract hundreds of readers daily. The following question bugged me:
Why would someone who is so successful at addressing a mass audience regard poetry as the main project?
Perhaps I had accepted too much the preconception of poetry as a marginal activity. Perhaps I was half-convinced that many a poet would swap their verses for the chance to gain such a pulpit.

But back to the present collection. Basquiat brings out the poet's more vociferous side. Understandably so if you read up on the artist's life and works. I Saw Mona Lisa Once on the other hand is more a step-dance of thought.

The eye is best that distrusts the mind.
Image runs a gauntlet of lies
until one or the other dies

The second section in the collection is not so strongly associated with the theme of the visual arts. Some poems are posed like conundrums.

When the future started I must have missed it.
Just as well, it has never been as urgent
as the past, which I have no desire to undo
but a grand compulsion to understand

His work often has a taut interplay between wit and gravity. Between the private and the political spheres. The reader would do well to take his lines seriously.

Where I leave a thought becomes
a galaxy, the matter of astronomy

But Marbrook always delights and surprises with his twists of thoughts. At one moment he's pondering the strange long eyes of mummies.The next he's musing on an impatient mother at the gallery, or a visitor wearing Ray-Bans

I think the danger of UV
is not as great as seeing well.

So if you want to understand why an eminently sane person would prefer to write a poem rather than an essay in a national newspaper, read Marbrook's poetry, either this or the previous collection Far From Algiers.

The New Uncanny

Fifteen tales that probe the subconscious and leave little smouldering devices there. The anthology poses the question: what form does the uncanny take these days? What can give us the creeps?

The answers offered in this collection can be anything from getting trapped in a foot massager in an airport concourse, to a game of Sims that blurs into reality.

Quite simply, these are gripping tales that anyone will enjoy. But if you ever sat up in your pajamas for Tales of the Unexpected or The Hammer House of Horror, then you should definitely treat yourself with this collection.

The beauty of collections such as this is that they also give you a chance to suss out good authors you haven't read yet. It's tougher than it's ever been to find out the really good stuff and this book will set you on the trail.

The Silence Room

These short stories are often set in libraries, and feature bookish eccentrics, men of strong taste, and lots of chain smokers. The Waits-esque atmosphere emerges strongly in Tabs - a study in hand-rolled cigarettes, male companionships, obscure poets, and the abolition of smoking in libraries. This piece is unabashedly a question of taste. And if it is to your taste, you'll find yourself echoing Harry's pronouncement on his beloved poet: "It's fuckin' mint. I don't care what any cunt says." Whereupon Harry rolls his licorice Rizla.

Another perfectly-achieved piece is The Cricket Match at Green Lock. It is set in England at the height of Englishness, some time between the wars. A cricket team go by train (a minor line such as exist no longer) to some small village to play a fixture game. They spend some time trying to locate the cricket pitvch. When at last they do, their opponents are grimly silent and eerie. Then the clouds open up and they find themselves scrabbling their way through rivers of mud.

This unsettling prose-painting is a dirge to the generation lost in the trenches, but also to a lost Englishness.

Some stories borrow much from 19th century horror. Some stories unexpectedly morph and vampires eneter the fray. In Sylvie we meet a poet, his lover, and the rival - the girl's "friend" Dax, a slightly older, foreign-born intellectual. Dax is too ironic and intellectual to be a sexual rival, yet there he sits, freely and absent-mindedly placing a hand on the girl's thigh. The animosity takes on the extra dimension of hatred of the poet for the critic who has declared that poetry is dead and has a phalanx of Theory to back him up. A post-modern academic as a vampire - it's a brilliant conceit.

But the writer is sometimes too conscious of being a writer to commit himself to something as plebian as action, conflict, violence. O'Brien's narrative rarely loses itself to the moment, never in fact really allows things to happen. There's a wonderful passage where the narrator remembers having sex in the open air in the Botanic Gardens. The memory gets side-tracked into minor details about the fog and the chestnut trees. "The night was holding its hot, damp breath as if something was about to happen."

But something is happening right now we feel like screaming at the narrator. Of course O'Brien is intentionallly teasing us here to good effect. But in other stories this reluctance to commit to action seems cowardly. Like saying: This is not really a vampire story.

At least that's how I was beginning to feel until I got to Once Again Assembled Here. This story of a man's return to a small industrial town has real pathos. There are lost ambitions in there too, spurned fidelities maybe, and working class anti-intellectualism. It's a magificent story and one I'll mark to read again.

By the way don't let the Irish name fool you. These stories are all set in England. Not exactly modern England, but in small towns of viaducts, docks, libraries and quaint pubs.

Crossing the Border

It's a new experience for me to see JCO doing stuff that is not really her style, but seems borrowed from the zeitgeist around her. For example in The Transformation of Vincent Scoville she lampoons literary academia. Vincent is assigned the task of making a scholarly study of a bequest the college has received - the love letters of some niece of Rudyard Kipling. "These holdings are so valuable that they were specially weather-proofed, you know, and treated in a delicate series of chemical air baths ..."

We meet the other staff, the department's poet, "who even had a book to his credit", and who complains that the secretaries make constant mistakes when typing out his poems for publication. And the neurotic, psycho-babbling Sondra who could have just wandered in off a Woody Allen set. Hell, it has never occurred to me before that JCO must have watched Woody Allen films. Imagine her watching "Everything You Alway Wanted to Know About Sex". No, I can't.

In Customs she executes the precisely delineated task of depicting the 20 minute blast of anxiety on being stopped at a border. The story evokes a dizzy dread that the woman being questioned is on the cusp of a disintegration of civil confidence, a descent into degradation. The shadows of twentieth century history hang over this short piece. Indignation, guilt, anxiety, and a desparate attempt to reassert normality all contend in a vortex dragging her down -- and then the uniformed official waves her on.

In another story JCO tries on the role of a Catholic priest. It's interesting but not totally convincing.

Most of the stories have a unifying theme - they read as though sketched out in advance. This gives the reader a grounding. Any elusiveness is in the thought-processes she is trying to capture, not in the prose technique. The most closely-observed realism is informed by an philosophical insight that makes you stop on the page and ask: are ordinary people really like that? Are they not perhaps more simple?

Faceless Monsters

This is a fascinating and very enjoyable collection. I don't know what factors made it such a success. It could be the hard work of Nuala Ni Chonchuir as editor. Or maybe it's because chances were taken, and the writers didn't try to be consciously 'literary'. And there are two stories by each writer, so if the first one doesn't knock you over, maybe the second one will. Or the third in Dara's case,

Aideen Henry's two stories in particular grabbed my attention. There are always surprising images, stray observations that leave a ghostly after-affect on the narrative.

In a scene with two ex-lovers meeting after many years:

They fumble behind two menus and she orders green tea and he another americano. They look out the window and watch as a woman turns to her little boy and wags her index finger in his face. The boy doesn't react but looks past his mother at Elizabeth until his mother tugs him by the arm to walk on with her. His eyes are locked on Elizabeth to the last. Rain streams down the window.

This child appears momentarily like a portent, an oracle who neither reveals nor conceals his meaning, but indicates it with a glance.

Dara O Foghlu's A Monkey Is For Life is a story of a man called Coley who gets thousands in compensation for an industrial accident. Enough for him to retire wealthy. So what does he do?

The smartest thing to do with the money, he decided, would be to buy two new cars - neither of which he put tax or insurance on - and a monkey called Panther.

Coley had the local tailor fashion a tweed jacket and matching paddy-cap for Panther to keep out the cold. When they tugged the monkey into his outfit, the tailor remarked how much like Coley's late father he looked.

"He's certainly hairy enough," the tailor said. "All he's missing is the cigarette hanging from his lip."

And on it goes, an unpredictable shaggy-monkey tale with a tragic ending.

Faceless Monsters is published by The Atlantic Collective in Galway. Here are the authors and contents. The launch in Dublin will be held in The irish Writers' Centre Parnell Square.

Instruction manual for Swallowing

Fascinating stories. After finishing each one I would go back and try to figure out why and how it worked. They are like crafty little mechanisms with innards you can see into but still can't understand.

Marek is adept at using the surreal to probe the more elusive nooks of the real. In one story the narrator's wife is pregnant with thirty-seven babies, and finds a doctor who will help her bring all of them to term. She swells out to a monstrous, repugnant size.

He writes a detached prose that presupposes an objective 'scientific' point of view. The dialogue often has that functional quality that you used to get in science fiction. His style reminds me of Philip K. Dick. In theme too, one of the stories, "Robot Wasps" could be from PKD.

Another story about what seems to be a large thorn caught in a boy's big toe, evokes a more visceral reaction than hardcore splatterpunk.

His prose doesn't come flagged with indicators "now I am trying to entertain you" "now I am trying to be poetic". It's an instrument manipulated in accordance with a logic you cannot divine, but which is never arbitrary. There's a weird precision to his phrasing.

Straw Dogs

The book's conclusions can be summed up thus: Man is nothing more than an animal. There are no truths. History has no meaning. Our ideologies are all vanity. Our free choice is an illusion. We should learn "to live skillfully" in order to be happy.

"Man is weaker and baser by nature than we used to believe," as the Grand Inquisitor puts it.

The trip to these conclusions is what makes the book fascinating.

Humans are like any other plague animals.

Only someone miraculously innocent of history could still believe that competition among ideas could result in the triumph of truth.

Humans think they are free conscious beings when in fact they are deluded animals.

We deal with the death of a friend in much the same way we step aside to avoid a falling slate.

And so on it goes, relentlessly dedicated to reductionism. We will never emerge from the forces that dominate the world today, which he lists as big business, organised crime, hidden parts of government. Where are democratic governments, universities, individuals?

At times the books seems to become a litany of facts presented from an utterly pessimistic angle. For example, many science writers find it inspiring that quantum mechanics puts paid to determinism and leaves scope for consciousness and freedom. The very laws of the universe do not seem to have been set down from the beginning. But the way Gray slants it is: "Even the most basic features of our ordinary experience may be delusion."

The narrator refrains from drawing conclusions on what ordinary behaviour should entail. Are we to continue to fight for justice, even though it is an illusive concept, nothing ever changes etc. etc.?

I use the word 'the narrator' because I am not convinced John Gray, the whole person, stands behind these views. Nevertheless, I hope we never find ourselves on the proverbial sinking hot air ballon together, John and I.

The back blurb states

... will probably prove to be one of the most important books this century.    - Mail on Sunday

Please. Even if armageddon is here and now and nothing makes sense any more, and we've given up long division as being too advanced for human brains - even if we're crawling around with our underwear on our heads, there are tails coming out from our rears, and there is no truth but the might of the majority, please PLEASE let's not elevate The Mail on Sunday to be the arbiter of what is the most important book of the century. For fuck's sake.

The Seducer's Diary

There is a caricature not yet extinct in popular culture of an effete romantic, one who will still write poetry about moonbeams, fall hopelessly in love with girls who laugh at him, brood at night on how to interpret a sidelong glance, deplore the crude manners of tradesmen. It is interesting that this caricature exists at all: generally a caricature is an exaggerated representation of a familiar real-life original. But in modern fiction I can't think of any such vorbild: one has to go back at least 60 years. It might be that the original is familiar to people from reality.

Kierkegaard's seducer is a refined aesthete, taken to the nth power and folded back on itself, but there is no suggestion of a hard fall to reality ever impending. Such a fall is not even conceivable. When we enter the seducer's world, through the means of this diary, we enter a scheme of aesthetics & ethics that is the world, and only the ignorant turf-cutters and servants cannot be expected to participate.

The seducer is a young gentleman in Copenhagen around the year 1840. The worldview and sensitivities of the seducer may broadly be taken to be that of young Soren's at the time. He begins by describing his observations of girls: girls stepping down from a coach, putting an umbrella up in the rain, squealing with delight at fancy articles, taking off a glove, curtseying, waiting anxiously, hurrying through an art gallery, standing calmly in a doorway, walking slowly preoccupied with her thoughts.

Her head is perfectly oval; she tilts it a little, thereby accentuating her forehead, which rises pure and proud without any delineation of the powers of understanding. Her dark hair rings her forehead softly and gently. Her countenance is like a fruit, every angle fully rounded, her skin is transparent, like velvet to the touch - that I can feel with my eyes.

There is no consciousness of self-indulgence here. Not even when he gets his man-servant to wait six hours in the street to inform him when a particular young lady is passing, just so he can casually greet her and see her curtsey. This curtsey sets him in a very particular mood, and he has come to reply on seeing it. There is nothing more he wants from this girl.

He continues to roam, hunting down smiles from strangers.

I would give a hundred rix-dollars for a smile form a young girl in a street situation, and not ten for a hand squeeze at a party.

So at last he comes to Cordelia, the girl he wishes to seduce - that is, to seduce into falling in love with him. The moment of love-rapture is of value in itself, and to show its absolute nature, it is necessary that such a moment is not traded off against a signed and stamped validation by the world at large. It should be possible to discuss the aesthetics of love, its variations and development. Reasoning is an exercise in re-arranging content and deducing new content. But love-rapture is content itself. A women can dispense with reason in attaining new content. Similarly true lovers don't need to fill silences with small talk; the silences themselves are full. There is a lot of such thinking, and the reader will sink into mires of thought. Because this diary was published as part of an extended work that has come to be regarded as philosophy, this Seducer's Diary is interpreted through these concepts. The cover cries out for an image of a cute girl exposing a leg as she descend from a carriage; instead it has some abstract painting. The world at large in fact is ignoring what (K.?)/the narrator regards as "the interesting itself" and takes notice rather of the dialectic of ideas.

The work may be an attempt by K. to subjugate sexuality to intellect where in real life he had been so out of control it is excruciating to read of it.

The Pleasant Light of Day

High Country, like the title story too, has a daring simplicity to it. A young man takes the bus, hitchhikes, and walks to try to reach the remote uplands. But is is hard to escape the ugliness and noise of the towns. The people he encounters are drunk, talk ceaselessly of money, or try to cheat him. This is not pessimism; it is a minutely realistic account.

There are too many people in the world, inhabiting every square metre of arable land. Six billion, seven billion, or eight billion - whichever it currently stand at, it's too many. The story reminds me of my own attempts to reach the mountains around Dublin on a bicycle: getting caught in vast roundabouts, finding what appeared to be a country road only to arrive a few minutes later in Tallaght, then at last gaining altitude, looking back at the city spread below like a coarse-grained vomit, and then getting caught in a traffic jam up the mountains. And the cars are much faster than in rural Romania where O'Ceallaigh was rambling.

When he descends from the woods towards the backs of some houses "he felt furtive, as always, slipping invisibly through such places".

The story is as real as it gets. But also a footnote, a tiny plaint, to Wordsworth's ambitious vision of the relationship of man and nature.

'You Believe in God?' is another that dares to tell a commonplace tale, one that invites the reader to respond "Why do you have to tell this story? It doesn't show any insight into muslim culture." The story is of a commonplace confidence swindle. It concludes:

Wherever you travelled in the world, no matter how strange it seemed, an inevitable sameness forced its way through. People smiled at those who handed them money, despised those who had none.

When I read writing that confronts reality head-on like this, I ask myself "How did this ever get published? How did it manage to receive the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur of the print section of the international entertainment industry?"

Tombstone Blues is a great read. It's an unpredictable traveller's tale, with diary extracts, notes on history, quotations from St. Antony, religious reflections, Egyptian traffic chaos and much more. The reader is drawn into an involvement with the narrator - disagreeing, fascinated, or sympathising. At one point there's a scene of anal sex. What the hell is this about? Is this what O'Ceallaigh thinks the reader wants? Is the writer taunting us?

It's an unresolved story, jutting uncomfortable through the boundaries of fiction, failing to maintain a coherent theme or consistent aesthetic, awkward and real.

O'Ceallaigh is the most interesting recent writer out there. He's crucial reading for anyone who hates literature and for anyone who loves literature. If Dan Brown was the first thing you read, let this be the second. Very likely you'll throw it across the room.

Hard Shoulder

The back cover blurb - for once - gets it perfectly:

When McBride, a young Irishman, leaves Co. Monaghan for the building sites of London, and then Germany, he is confronted by a harsh new world and the volatile men who have mastered and mythologised it.

Many, many thousands went to London in the 1970's and 80's and stood out on Cricklewood Broadway for a start. Peter Woods has lived through it and documented it faithfully. From the first mention of subbies, the Redcap, subs before breakfast, dead men and hop-ups, I knew this would be the real thing. Woods is not writing like a journalist holding the reader's hand for a shocking tour of something-should-be-done-about-it. He writes as though he were still among these characters, still meeting up with them of a Friday night, though perhaps now with a more cushy job as a barman.

"Riveting, at times frightening" is how Colm Toibin describes the novel. I would go as far as "terrifying" in places. Isolated men, far from the community they were born into, with nothing in their lives but work, no-one to tell them who they are or what they should do with their life, nothing to stop them plummetting straight to alcohol, crime, and self-forgetfulness. It's a man's world, sealed-off, even in the case of well-balanced family men. And there are men here who have been rejected by their families, those suffering mental illness, those with a great burden of shame -- all end up at some time or another looking for a day's work on the sites.

I shared with three others, who they were varied, sometimes by the week

says the narrator of his lodgings. It's hard - and unfaithful to reality - to forge a coherent narrative out of a concatenation of varying workplaces and flats. The reader quickly realises it's not essential to remember all the names and details. The story involves you more and more deeply, even though - like life - it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Woods shares the love of mythologizing that these men have, their legends and stories of big money to be made.

This book is like a wormhole to a world from which by rights no such report should have returned.

Life & Times of Michael K

This is a precise, lucid, and above all dignified account of an ordinary man caught up in troubled times. Michael was born with a cleft lip. His early life is sketched out: after a minimal education at a special school he became a gardener.

Because of his face K did not have women friends. He was easiest when he was by himself.

In other novels this might be the cue for the protagonist's descent into perversion, piquing the reader's interest with a dash of body fluids. Coetzee has other aims in mind. He does not shy away from depicting the deprivations of K and hs mother, but he does so with a distanced, respectful aesthetic.

Double trouble strikes them: K is about to be let go from the public park, and his mother becomes too ill to work and is bed-ridden.

She proposed that he should quit Parks and Gardens before he was laid off and accompany her by train to Prince Albert, where she would hire a room while he looked for work on a farm.

This plain style eschews any attempt to capture the colour of working class language or thought. It gives precedence to the bare facts of the story, and emphasises K's rationality. K comes up with plan after plan of how to cope with the increasingly chaotic world about him. A civil war begins. When a permit for the train tickets is refused, his first ingenious solution is to construct a wagon from bicycle parts so as to be able to push his mother all the way to Prince Albert.

But the attempt to escape to a simple rural life is thwarted again and again. His mother dies, K drifts, is picked up for a military work gang, escapes, is brought to an internment camp. His plans narrow, he grows more remote from the world: all he wants is a quiet corner where he can grow pumpkins. From an outside perspective we would say he is traumatised by war.

Towards the end of the story K reflects on some people who gave him charity:

They want me to open my heart and tell them the story of a life lived in cages. They want to hear about all the cages I have lived in, as if I were a budgie or a white mouse or a monkey. And if I had learned story-telling instead of potato-peeling & sums I might have known how to please them.

There is an integrity and faith to this book which is not conveyed in any praise of its prose or structure. It stands against me, a coherent vision, trying to convince me.

Far From Algiers

These poems have something of the teenager's self-absorption about them. This is not meant in any negative sense - maturity and knowing who you are are vastly over-rated. The keen concern with the watching self in these poems rests on top of a whole career by the author - two careers in fact. The poet has served in the navy and was a journalist for many years. The resemblance to a teenager's thought is disconcerting, testimony to the resilient bonds that connect us to our formative years. To be a self is a work-in-progress.

A boy who looks embarrassed to be young
skulks beneath the scaffolds avoiding light:
I hope I will not have to be his like again:

This stanza, (in Sinistral) depicting the poet as an outsider

I am to the left of belonging,
forlorn, bereft and looking in.
Some are conceived under stars,
I was conceived under stairs.

is followed immediately by this stanza, which takes a step sideways.

You asked what my background is.
I wish I had one, but if I did
I would probably know less than I do
and be more certain about it.

It is disturbing to encounter the child within, to recognise how much has remained the same. Maybe it's a source of comfort too, to know that there is such a resilient continuity.

My wake is smaller
than a periscope's.

Nothing ever happened
that couldn't without me.

These are the hidden thoughts that form the driving engine of a personality. The poet feels an affinity with all who have an inner self - Van Gogh is the subject of another poem. There is an objective reason for Marbrook to be an outsider - he was born in Algiers, never knew his father, has a strange name (Djelloul What kind of a name is that?) and shares the experience of the exile. But he is hardly unique in being an immigrant in the USA; one feels the poet's sense of being an outsider is more metaphysical. He is aware of the selves he has deployed to make a way in the world. It's not just the foreigner who has to adapt to the world we live in. It's anyone who stubbornly keeps faith with themselves. Many never succeed.

Sometimes for me it's a couple of lines in isolation that echo back and forth in my head.

Whoever's selling nothing is a truly frightening man. I hope you've met one lately.

The poems as a whole are testimony to the persistence of the self across decades. Although that self is not static, but constantly off-balance, it endures. The course of this century has seen ideologies clash, religious beliefs wax and wane. It's all happening so quickly it seems a man's life has more solidity than an empire.

I first came across Djelloul Marbrook by reading his online commentary on culture and the media. Since 2005 he has been turning his lucid mind to topics ranging from the panzer blondes of Manhattan to the war in Iraq. He has an insider's knowledge of the changes in the newspaper industry.

The more I read his blog, the more curious I became as to what his poetry could be like. He seemed to be very capable of saying exactly what he wanted to say in his almost daily posts. What more could he convey in poetry? And more concretely, why would he invest so much time in a medium that is read by so few, when each post on the blog instantly gets hundreds of readers?

Marbrook is a late-comer to being a published poet, which says nothing about how long he has been writing poetry. His collection won the Wick prize in 2007 which got it out to the world at last.

Lord of the Rams

Ronan Smith relates the mishaps and adventures of growing up in Munterconnaught - a place that I presumed was fictional because the name sounded so ridiculous and I couldn't find it on any map. A Cavan man informed me however it is very real. You couldn't doubt the reality of the events depicted in this saga either. It's all related in the third person, a mock-heroic account of the minutiae of play-school, school, and first shaky steps in a nightclub. I gave the loan of the book to the same Cavan man, and it was the third book he ever read in his life. I don't have a copy to give a taste of the style, but I recall well the tales of teachers driven to distraction, an attack on the school bus, the dog that ate shite, the first time getting drunk. It's a cross between St. Augustine and the garrulous man-at-the-bar. You will instantly recognise the tone, you've heard it somewhere.

The book is an antidote to all those biographies of ex-Big Brother stars who are puffed up with confidence that every detail of their lives is fascinating. Well, The Rams is not puffed-up: he knows that every detail is fascinating and the reader - if in the right mood - will agree. It's a good book to dip into. You'll find yourself reading parts aloud for anyone in hearing distance.

"Gods make their own importance," wrote Patrick Kavanagh, who lived not a million miles from Cavan. But Ronan Smith is more modest. He makes no claim to be a god, just a lord ... The Lord of the Rams.

How Late It Was, How Late

You wake up with Sammy and then follow his life step by step for a week, in and out of hospital, interviews with the police, and fumblings around the corporation flat. Sammy has gone blind after starting a fight with the police and taking a hiding. He accepts this new problem as just one more in a long line of woes. Only after a couple of hundred pages he suffers a panic attack as he at last realises he is a blind man and everything has changed. But this feeling passes too.

There is a terrifying authenticity in this account. There is no appeal to anything outside of Sammy's world. No use of irony, no collusion with the reader, no message, no hint that this is presented as entertainment or edification.

The reader - that is to say, me - can't help wondering what the writer is up to. Does he mean to suggest that Sammy is the archetypical human? Is he saying something about the ordinary man at a loss in a bureaucratic world? Or does he take pleasure in throwing this portrait in the face of the middle-class reader: this is the real human for you, the rest is just conceit.

Kelman carries you through the swells and ebbs of the protagonist's moods. Sammy's experience become your own. You live through the changes in the world that only after reflection you can recognise as moods. On a sentence level, the prose in the working class vernacular is hardly a great innovation. That kind of thing has been done before. It needs a good ear, that's all. The genius here is spread out over dozens of pages at a time. And also there's the tenacity to carry through the project: a minute by minute narrative, not spiced with unlikely events, sticking only to the language and concepts of Sammy's world. And to trust that this is worthwhile.

All the same, it's a once-off kind of book. It's like an exercise in purism. And though you may finish the book and think you have met the whole Sammy, you haven't. You have only followed Sammy's actions and heard what Sammy himself knows of himself. This book is not the final word.

You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free

Jeremiah - good-hearted everyman with a weakness for gambling - is on the plane home to Scotland tomorrow after twelve years in the old US of A. He pops out of his motel for a drink. This sets him off on a chain of encounters, reminiscences, and regrets that takes him through three different bars and a long walk in the snow. All of it is related in the Scottish Glaswegian dialect.

He's a bit of a misfit in the states: his camaraderie is treated suspiciously, his accent is misunderstood, he gets accused of sexism. But more than that, he's a red-card immigrant, which means the State Department has officially determined he is an atheist and socialist.

The novel up to that point had been so realistic that I was half convinced this was a political development I had yet to hear about. But no, this is a USA that is just a notch further advanced along the path it seems to be taking. (Recent change of president notwithstanding.) There is more paranoia of immigrants, more inequality, more political correctness. The airlines have fallen on hard times and planes regularly crash. For reasons that remain in the background, swarms of the destitute and luckless camp out around the airports. These are controlled regularly and undesirables (whether panhandlers or political suspects) are brought to "Patriot Holding Centers".

Jeremiah works at such an airport as a low-level security guard. That is, he recalls his time working there as he sits in the bar. The description of the hierarchy and functioning of security takes on a life of its own and is like a novel within the novel. He'll wander off for pages about the gambling schemes (intricate as any financial derivative) concocted with the homeless, or the ghostly trolley-pusher dubbed The Being. It's a closed universe, terrifying to contemplate as a whole, but this rarely comes out in Jerry's thinking. It's the day-to-day contact with colleagues that takes front stage. Hilarious and awkward by turns. This Scotsman has trouble reconciling his unreconstructed masculinity with the new age. His inclination to assert himself physically if necessary, his attraction to females, and irrepressible sociability all get him into tight spots. His garrulousness will entertain and astound you - unless it makes you feel like the shadowy CIA-level ops who commandeer his office late one night. After ssshhh-ing several times, they shut him up with an expert slap across the nose.

It's an implicit irony that Jerry, the born underdog, is part of the security apparatus. To others further down the scale he is part of the machinery of oppression.

This is a huge endlessly inventive, ever-questioning, bubbling-over brilliant novel that mixes the Kafkesque with political warning, the information age with hard-man blues, all done in the vernacular. It's not just the USA: has the modern world become too alien a place for the ordinary man, Scottish or not?

The Secret Scripture

Roseanne McNulty, nigh on a hundred years old, has been incarcerated for decades in a Roscomon mental hospital. She records the story of how she got there in notes she keeps hidden under the floorboards. It's a turbulent tale that encapsulates the early years of the independent Catholic state. She is not and was never insane: she was locked away for having a child out of wedlock.

But times are changing and such 'patients' are now being released to the community. The psychologist Dr Grene is there to review her case. He keeps a diary which is about half concerned with his on-going interaction with Roseanne, and half his private life, which forms a kind of sub-plot.

These parallel secret narratives form the basic structure of the novel. We see Roseanne as she is today - and Barry has set himself a difficult task to breathe life into a portrait of an ancient, almost bed-ridden, woman. He succeeds very well, and Dr Grene too gradually takes form. The prose is quite formal and reserved, an old person's prose that slowly constructs the story.

Therein lies the problem. While there is much to admire in the novel, the scenes from Roseanne's youth don't come alive. There's too much dust and drizzle in them. Her boyfriend Tom for example has studied law at Trinity, plays in a band, has a brother who has been in Africa, a cousin who runs a newspaper. He's a mover and a shaker by all accounts. That's the way he's described, but in actual interactions his dialogue always comes out flat and dead. He talks about what "the mother" said or might say. His manner of speaking is basically interchangeable with any of the major characters. Then his behaviour in the subsequent crisis should imply he has a heart of stone, but the reader is led to believe that he is just a product of the times. Roseanne says that he is "the decentest man". But the priest and "the mother" exercise a stifling power: nobody escapes. It's like Barry creates characters only to have them behave precisely as the stock version of history would have them behave. The illustration of history takes precedence.

Part of my frustration with the novel is surely annoyance at the characters. There is a thin line between lack of imagination in the characters and a lack in the author's depiction. But I thought Barry was at his best in this when depicting the layered thoughts of the patient and doctor when in their advanced years.

How The Light Gets In

It's been a couple of years since I got as engrossed in a novel as I was in this one. I had great empathy for the 16-year old Lou. I didn't read it thinking "that's exactly how a teenager might think" but on a closer level of connection.

We meet Lou flying to the USA on a year-long exchange programme for talented school kids. She doesn't want the piece of chicken in the airline food tray, and offers it to a fellow passenger. "Oh no," says the woman, disgusted. This miniature vignette shows us a familiar middle-class obsession (fear of germs) and Lou's ignorance of these standards of behaviour.

She comes from a mediocre background in Australia. Her family are tough and cynical, but loving in their own way. Yet, in a ruthless streak that shows itself again and again, Lou does not miss them, and it is her great plan to escape from her family and stay on in America. She is prudish where her sisters are crude, disgusted by their manners, frustrated with her parent's limitations. This emerges in her frequent flashbacks to life back in Australia.

For a while I thought it might turn out she sees the hyocrisy of the suburban middle-class host family she is staying with, and comes to an insight that she loves her family for all their faults. But no, Lou is made of harder stuff.

There's a strange sense of disengagement going on with Lou. Partly it's because she's in a sort of pretend-situation - acting as a member of family with people who she will leave after a year. Partly it's her nature. She recognises it herself, and at one point says she wishes she could miss people. Later she fantasises about someone - no particular person in mind - she hasn't seen for years walking through the doors, "so that we could have a heartbreaking reunion." But then she realises she doesn't feel that way about anyone. She wonders if there is a sub-species of the human race that is capable of that joy. (Significantly, she is too healthy-minded to think that there is something inhuman about herself.)

There is the constant sense of a keen thinker who is in a continual process of deciding what kind of person to be. Such concerns are heightened in a teenager - if the author chose an older protagonist it would be a more philosophical novel. Lurking in the hectic events of the story is the dangerous idea that everyone starts as an actor and grows into the part. Lou is on a path to find - not herself - but the self most likely to be successful.

Gertie, the old woman at the offender's hostel, gives her practical advice: "Lou, you have to pretend to be somebody else for long enough to get yourself out of his mess."

Lou reads Russian authors extensively and has scored in the top 1% of SATs. However in her private musings she never shows much trace of this intellect. My guess is that this is an authorial decision in order to keep the book marketable. It is not acceptable for the modern reader to be exposed to such reflections. Imagine the marketing manager's reaction: slows the plot ... heavy-handed ... show us what she does, don't tell us what she thinks ... makes her sound pretentious.

I value it most for the irreducible insights. At one point Lou sees a mother in a mall beating a child. She walks towards the mother to intervene; but her host-parents hold her back. "There's nothing we can do."

The book plays it by the rules as regards pruned sentences, short paragraphs, snappy dialogue, new crisis every couple of chapters, keeping flashbacks short, ending sections with a pregnant sentence. It's not this writing ability that impresses me and makes me love this story.

Triumph of the Spider Monkey

This is a 79-page avant-garde piece of 20 chapters. It purports to be an account by Bobbie Gotteson of events from his near and distant past, culminating in his trial for murder. "You can't beat human nature, Inside or Out", he says. These and other references imply Gotteson is on a different side of sanity to everyone else. "I can play sane, like you. Like everyone."

"The Maniac" Gotteson relates several scattered memories. Sometimes these are so impressionistic it's hard to guess what's really happening. Other parts, particularly the court scenes, are more realistic, but even so are not reliable. The judge or witnesses are apt to use a mixture of legalese and obscenities that clearly has emerged from Gotteson's own head.

One of the most transparent chapters, Unrehearsed Interview, starts off sounding like a plausible interview with a therapist. The psychologist soon begins a tirade against the "monkey-ugly sub-human". Maybe this is indeed what the psychologist is really thinking; maybe Bobbie sees the truth behind appearances. The other chapters are murkier with flashes of recognition glinting through: a girl in a skirt giggling and struggling to free herself of her clothes starts screaming "I have a son your age," and the reader realises she's not a girl, and she's not giggling.

The reality that can be inferred is this: He is a small, hairy man of about 30 who has grown up in several foster families and been though prisons and mental institutions from an early age. He plays guitar and seems to have a certain charisma. He heads out west with his "old man" Danny, who may or may not be his real father, and there plays gigs, and mixes with people on the fringes of fame. He maintains that he took part in test screenings, that his songs were plagiarised by other bands, that he was offered a part in a television show.

There are influences from the Charlie Manson story here. The obsession with appearing on television, famous names, the abandonment of reason and crossing over to the other side. Gotteson goes all the way, and that's what makes the book difficult. It's difficult to picture Gotteson being able to chat with people at a party. He seems too far out all the time.

Some of the individual chapters however are amazing. His intense engagements with the world about him are unsettling on many levels. In one he watches a small child playing with a doll and feels the immense power he has to destroy her. The feeling swells up, a lorry rumbles past, she turns to look at him and in that heartbeat the feeling brims over into love.

Gotteson plainly and simply is not human. This is what makes the work uncompromising and tinges it with genius. At times he has a sixties' psychedelic sensibility: he talks about his soul, telepathic connections to others, he quotes his own poetry. But he is beyond guilt or pity. The killings are a bonding in the realm of the spirit, a moment when they join him on his side.

The flyleaf poem is amazing.

slowly we are overrunning the earth
spidermonkeys twittering climbing leaping leering
on broken banjos

the Jukebox of the 40's could not cage us in
stunned, the arm of the mechanism pauses
paralyzed

when the Spider Monkeys inside
open soul-doors to us spidermonkeys skinned alive
the magic of My Passage on Earth
will be just another headline

Schopenhauer's Telescope

A town in a state of war. A field. The baker digs a hole. The teacher, whom he recognises after a short while, stands above him smoking and checking his watch. Bored soldiers look on from a distance.

The central conceit of the work means that the roles of the two men in that field are kept secret until the end. It is presumably a grave that is being dug. One of the men is perhaps the overseer, or collaborator, the other about to be shot. But we don't know which, and can't tell from the conversation. This means the interaction between them maintains a sometimes artificial ambiguity. Slowly the previous history of the men is revealed in their conversation. But even then, it is in unsatisfactory generalities.

I understand the premise is to have an unspecified European country, an unspecified war. I love the idea in fact. But the way Donovan implements it doesn't grab me. There is too much artifical vagueness. The author is not taking his subject seriously enough. The idea that ordinary people can be implicated in mass murder fascinates him, but doesn't bother him unduly. Ideas and situations from history are introduced, but it's all lacking in passion.

Both are educated men (the Baker an autodidact) and willing to take on theatrical roles. They create mini-dramas, news reports from history, an engmatic fairy tale. It's not very plausible, but it could be claimed the novel is straying far from realistic fiction. Every 40 pages or so there is another hint of impending violence to keep up the tension.

Philosophers are mentioned, but there is nothing which might suggest that there are things beyond the comprehension of the reader. It's all easily digestible. The chapters too are often one or two pages. The titles are quirkily cryptic: What The Baker Knows. The Evidence According to John Locke. Types of Wind and their Effects on the Human Condition. There is great consideration of the reader's limited intelligence in this work, while skillfully giving the impression that he/she is encountering big thoughts. One shouldn't blame the author too much for this. It's what has to be done to get by the barrier and get it published.

The work is unusual and ambitious enough to make it a worthwhile read. It's courageous enough to veer far from realism. I think of all the agents' readers: "What, he mentions Hume and Schopenhauer? Too pretentious!"

I would like to like it more. Perhaps the tricks and contrivances to give it tension and make it palatable are too obvious. Maybe the blurbs have had a contrasuggestible effect on me.

This story would work best the same length as one of Kafka's tales, not as a 300 page novel.

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

This is the way it usually goes: the young man puts pen to paper in the belief that the word is mighty. He has read and read, but no text seem to touch directly on the living centre of life as it is lived now. The books are artifacts, contrived with an aim in mind. Often successful in achieving the aim, often perfect craftsmanship, but nothing to do with the thin edge of the new age as experienced through this one 'I'.

So he writes in an ecstacy, pouring words onto the page, feeling the equal of Goethe and Augustine, Camus or Kierkegaard. Not worrying about getting published; looking on such concerns as ignoble.

This state may continue for many years. Then comes the fall. It may be initiated by success in getting published. His view of himself as a writer shifts fundamentally. Writing must be for other people, not a narcissistic emanantion. There must be real characters (not transparant copies of the writer), plot, development. He begins to see his stacks of juvenilia as trails left from his thought-flow. A useful practice, an exercise in expressing oneself. But something to be embarrassed about if it should get out. Time to turn to the work of telling a story, close obversation, the arts of evoking particular feelings in the reader. Those who persist in believing that they have something to say are deluded. Their self-importance is laughable. All that 'what you say' is encompassed in how you say it.

You will have to take my word for it that I believed the world would never be the same, Saroyan writes of his first book. Most of the stories in this book purport to be directly autobiographical. "I am a young man in an old city. It is morning and I am in a small room." Another story is a complete synopsis of a film starring Tom Garner, from the viewpoint of Saroyan's seat in the theatre.

Now that I have been sullied by trying to get published, I find it hard to look at writing in the same way. Questions intrude: What type of man is this? How did he come to be? How did this get published? How does it fit in to other writing of that decade? What strands of the zeitgeist does he weave together?

And I always remember, I am reading this not because Saroyan wrote it, but because it was published. And no matter how much it may have the appearance of a diary, it is an act of communication. The confidence is there. His voice is worth listening to. Where did he get his self-image from, one young man walking through a city of millions? He doesn't tell us in his writings. "I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language things they already know."

Yeah, just who do you think you are?

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates - or her publishers/agent rather - have had great success in smuggling her work out to the public as entertainment. Her collection The Female of the Species comes with a blurb beginning "With wicked insight JCO demonstrates why the females of the species are by nature more deadly than the males." The review in The Irish Times was in a section headed THRILLERS. A review in the New York Times by Hillary Frey says "Mystery and horror fans are most likely to relish this collection, which works best as a source of cheap thrills." "Oates's best form is still the novel. Yet stories don't have to be great to be addictive; they just need a trick - and Oates has nailed that."

It seems Frey believed what the cover was telling her: this is cheap genre fiction for the masses.

The final story Angel of Mercy tells the tales of two nurses, one born forty years earlier than the other. What connects them is that they worked in the same neuropsychiatric ward, though the one was long dead before the younger started in 1998. The title refers to how the older nurse saw herself as she administered mercy to the terminallly ill patients. Joyce paints the physival and mental degradation of a slow death. This will be disturbing reading for anyone with an elderly relative. The doctors are able to keep their distance, but the nurse "Always I had their best interests at heart not like the doctors keeping them alive like vegetable for the $" she writes in her secret diary, which was only discovered after her suicide. Through her whole life her 'mission' remained undetected.

The younger nurse next to nothing of the "Angel". But she becomes effected by the atmosphere of what they call with black humour "The City of the Damned". Though she starts out as a pretty peroxide blonde, over the course of ten years she gives up the idea of boyfriends and marriage. "Now she knew too much, there could be no more romance of the body. All that was behind her, disdained." And so, this entirely different person goes down the same path to become deliver her own sort of mercy.

The story is uncompromising - the issues of euthanasia it raises, the way in which modern medicine prolongs death to absurd lengths.

From an article on the mercy-killing nurse Cullen: "we might also note that a nurse who ends terminal patients' lives because of a belief that the patients are experiencing unnecessary pain may differ in some respects from a "serial killer" who simply stalks and kills healthy individuals. Without condoning illegal or unethical conduct, and recognizing that no health care worker has the right to make life-ending decisions based solely on her own sense of morality, we hope that the press will in such cases bring to light all potentially relevant factors. "

The marketing bio at the publishers feels it significant to mention she was picked for an Oprah book and reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, 'the first time any of her books reached the spot, though most have been critically acclaimed.'

I have some editions of JCO's early works. By the North Gate and With Shuddering Fall. The blurbs are:

JCO is a fine writer ... powerful examples of what the short story can be in the hands of a good writer ... she uncovers the universal core within a unique happening ... superb fiction by a national book award winner ... rich poetic hard and tender ... A masterpiece ... a rich and burgeoning talent ...

Compare with the blurbs in 2006: "JCO is a genius." "One of the female front runners for the title of Great American Novelist" "JCO can sweep the reader away" and the subtitle Tales of Mystery and Suspense. Funny how the word 'genius' serves to mean witty, clever, and accessible to all.

In fact there were perceptive newspapers reviews of Female of the Species. But they are not chosen to be blurbs. And the promotional website finds it preferable to menion Oprah (Oprah Winfrey, as every reader will know) and the bestseller list.

White Noise

I've been a long-time fan of J.G. Ballard and know his ability to detect the madness of the modern. DeLillo has the same sensors om alert in this book, but in a more light-hearted way. He doesn't have to search as hard to convince us of the strangeness of the era.

The narrator, Jack, is chairman of the department of Hitler studies at a small university. He has a warm-hearted wife and some 5 or 6 children about the house, most from previous marriages. There is nothing weird about Jack himself; the weirdness is of an everyday kind in the world about him. In an early scene they take a trip to see "the most photographed barn in America". It's just an ordinary barn, notable only for being the most photographed. A fairly obvious swipe at the notion of celebrities being famous for being famous, but the novel was written in 1984. Nowadays we accept such situations as being a foible of human nature; irony seems pointessly harsh.

On almost every page there is some event or image which could only below to the post-everything last quarter of the twentieth century. DeLillo himself may not always be aware of this: he's part of the age like a fish in water. For instance the children speak like adults and are treated like adults in a way which is becoming familiar. Little Steffie wonders if she should visit her mother. "You saw her last year, you liked her," says Jack.

When I spotted Denise I blew the horn and she came ovr. This was the first time I'd ever picked her up at school and she gave me a wary and hard-eyed look as she passed in front of the car - a look that indicated she was in no mood for news of a seperation or divorce.

If Jack is in fact very faithful to Babette, and a dedicated father, it is only because it is in his nature. The family as a whole manages quite well without any principles, religion or core values.

B.R. Myers in an article in the Atlantic attacks the pretentiousness of current literary prose. White Noise is one of his prime targets; the author is indirectly referred to as 'a novelist of limited gifts.' The novel's depictions of contented consumers grazing around a mall, children mesmerised by advertising etc are described as "patronising" and "exaggerated".

True, DeLillo's main ideas are not new. But Myers is wrong to think there are no real people like this. The shopping mall and television are the environment in which whole swathes of people spend their lives. I have seen them. They are real. The opening of a new shopping center in this city was headline news for weeks. The new IKEA centre is attracting similar attention. It frightens me. For many of the people on reality/talent shows, seeing themselves on television is a magic so powerful their lives can never be the same again. For better or for worse.

Maybe this phase will pass soon, but at the moment it seems every irony is overtaken by reality.

The novel shows signs of being quickly-written, poorly-edited and aimed at the mass market. If DeLillo thinks a particular verbal trick is good, he'll have no problem with repeating it, even three times. So who is it trying to persuade Myers this is great literature? Why is he getting on his box like he's seen through the emperor's clothes?

The problem may be this: the college-educated critic reads a novel he likes. He wants to praise it, yet all he can talk about is "the writing". This is not the 19th century - he cannot talk about the truth expressed in the novel, or ennobling insights, or the artistic soul. So the novel gets misdirected praise for its prose and "craft".

This novel is great not because of the prose, but because the sensors are on maximum receptivity and taking in what's all around.

When Jack meets his fellow-academic Murray, one grips the other by the elbow and they walk across the campus "like a pair of European senior citizens, heads bowed in conversation". It's a throwaway comparison, but implications ooze from it.

It's so good he repeats it a chapter later.

Passion Play

Violent games of polo and kinky sex form recurring scenes in this novel. This is not normally why I pick up a book. But Kosinski was recommended to me by my students in Poland. I had heard the elements of his life story from them.

Little Jerzy was brought up in Poland in a place and time that brought out the worst in human kind. He inhabited a world where the authorities would make him into either a slave or a corpse. "Kosinski appears to be obsessed with finding evil everywhere," said Ellie Wiesel in confusion and consternation some thirty years later.

At university in Lódz he forged an invitation to an academic conference in the USA. Indeed he forged whole departments and professors, both in Poland and in the USA. The authorities granted him a visa and an aeroplane ticket. He arrived at the airport with a poison ampoule in his pocket in case the scheme failed at the last moment.

Fabian, the book's hero, is a loner and seducer who plays by his own rules.

Closing in on youth - a young woman, a girl - Fabian could not resist its spell; he was compelled, his instinct honed by anguish. He would fix with an intensity almost clinical, bordering on obsession, on the sheen of a girl's eyes, the deep colour that washed pupil and iris, each filament of hair that streamed from her head ...

Was bedeutet das alles?

A short introduction to philosophy.

Our brave new world of simulated reality, mind-altering drugs, scans which predict what decision we make before we are conscious of making it, suicide commando atrocity chique, direct control of mechanism via brain waves, AI friends for the elderly, quantum cats, chemical castration, ethical arguments from sociobiology, Dubai city ... bring philosophical problems from the realm of musing to an intense interface with reality.

This little book makes only limited appeal to the richer possibilities of illustrating philosophical questions. For example the average reader will at least have heard of quantum mechanics. Why does a discussion of consciousness / free will still posit a mechanistic world operating to deterministic rules? Modern physics begins with observables, not with little billiard balls colliding with each other. "Physical reality" is a non-starter.

The chapter on Right and Wrong was most interesting to me. He picks apart the different possibilities of founding morals. The judging of others' actions as right or wrong is unavoidable by humans, consistency demands some reason for a person to do the right thing. These questions never much interested me before. Nagel's simple steps forward lead quickly into quagmires of thought.

There is no suggestion that anything other than diligence and pedestrian commonsense are needed to approach these questions. That's not bad as a methodology, but it's not true.

The Female of the Species

Some things to note about this collection of short stories:

• Each story previously appeared in some periodical, from Ellery Queen Mystery mag to the Kenyon Review. All are American. On this side of the Atlantic there are not sufficient outlets for a writer to do this.
• In a review I recall seeing many months ago in some Irish paper, the book appeared under the rubric Thrillers.
• Unlike her other recent books, the usual bio is omitted, at least on my edition: "JCO is on the faculty of Princeton University" etc.
• Cover blurbs are from the Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, and Sunday Times.

My favourite stories here were So Help Me God, The Haunting, and Angel of Wrath. I'll put down a few notes on The Haunting.

This story reads like something inspired by a song that drums in & out of mind. A female child wakes up from at night hearing rabbits crying, in this strange place, their new home, where they have moved since daddy died.

Daddy is dead. Dead Daddy. Daddy-dead.
Daddydeaddead. Deaaaaaaddaddy.

If you say it enough times faster and faster you start giggling. Calvin shows me.

Calvin is in fourth grade, her older brother.

The rhythmical prose is partly like a rock song lyrics, partly a child's chant, and partly the studied naiveness of My First Storybook. The place they move to is Cuyahoga - Cuy-a -- hoga -- which brings to mind the insistent refrain of a Talking Heads song. The "Daddy-dead" line above could be the Violent Femmes. The mother takes up singing in a bar: it's worth while doing a google on the songs/lyrics mentioned, they're part of the story. (though lost on this reader) Beyond the backyard the railroad provides another insistent beat.

The story is steeped in rhythm: Like Mommy says, it gets into your blood, says the girl child.

And when she asks where Daddy is now, these are the words a 5-year old cannot possibly understand, but will remember for ever and for ever.

He has gone to hell to be with his own cruel kin.

Say it aloud 10 times. Say it under your breath.

Taking influence from scraps of songs knocking about in your head is something a 21-year-old writer would do. Deuce to Oates for this story that draws straight from the well-springs. And for those hard nuggets of insight that sparkle in the text: "But now Daddy is gone, it's Mommy whose eyes are like a cat's eyes jumping at us. It's Mommy whose fingers twitch like they want to be fists." "the man from the sheriff's office, calling us Cavin, Marybeth, like a trick to make us think he knew us"

dead as dooornails

Cronin relates his encounters with the Dublin literary characters of the period. He too was part of that milieu, but with a kind of modesty - the bad kind - he says little about himself.

This is not my story. If it were I would describe the effect a first introduction to that great and gracious land (Italy) has on the traveller.

It became clear to me that he is relating the adventures with Brendan Behan not because these were so interesting in themselves, nor because he, Cronin, belatedly recognizes Behan as a writer of genius. They are related because some 12 or more years later it was Behan out of the motley company who became famous. Other characters get short shrift - a quick portrait of a barman called John is an exception.

Cronin conveys the impression that the character he sees in the pub is the writer. Admittedly he has set himself the restriction of relating only what he personally witnessed, but there's too much wallowing in pub scandals. Celebrity gossip from the man-about-town. A different narrator would perhaps have recalled different scenes, might have recalled some events involving less well-known but interesting characters.

"People are the same wherever you go." But are they? Maybe in some periods or places they are more snide, hypocritical, cynical. The denizen's of Cronin's 1950's pub scene for example. Unbounded generosity appears, but usually in the form of rounds of drink. I would have run a mile from McDaid's den. Run a thousand in fact, to America or further. God, I'm glad the 1950's are over. I'm glad I'm not a writer.

The damage due to an excess of alcohol and distortion of sexual relations comes across with no need of authorial comment. Many of the festering loyalities and petty begrudgery are typical of the alcoholic. Cronin however seems to acquiesce in what the man sitting at the bar will tell you; you're not an alcoholic as long as you're drinking Guinness.

Kavanagh drank stout in those days as a staple and was seldom drunk, or at least no drunker than the rest of us. . . . in later years whiskey had become the master and was cracking the whip.

At the time, personal affection, the intoxication of the daily company of genius and, I might add, the zest for combat, concealed much from me . . .

Had to laugh when I came across this bit later (concerning two Scottish artists):

And there was one strange circumstance: in those days they did not drink. They were not teetotallers; they took a glass of wine or two; but the serious drinking was to come later.

I was glad to finish this book. It was a surprise how I could come to dislike so much an author who has gone to some effort to efface himself from the narrative.

Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse

In the wealthy West there are always second chances. Every decision can be reversed - career, job, marriage - so in the end there are no crucial life decisions.

The story As I Sink Down perfectly captures a turning point in a man's life. He has dropped out of college, his girlfriend gets pregnant, decides to have an abortion. This is related in a deadpan first-person, getting the facts across. He takes on a temporary job as a miner, but already he can see this is to be his life from now on. Back-breaking work, little sleep, until the mind closes in. He must acquire what is generally called "maturity", so that he will work without complaint, without excessive recourse to alcohol. Like his father his only joy will be to see his nephews and nieces grow up. Although he may listen to the same rock'n roll, and see the same computers in the department stores, it's a world away from what's familiar here where I write.

I thought of how I had never known my father, and all the men he worked alongside, until I had descended into a mine myself.
I understood how it was them against the whole world. Nobody else mattered, nobody else knew.
Next day I worked. It was better than having time on my hands. I was no longer afraid. I worked well.

Those things he would have scorned as a rebellious student - a small clean apartment, a lazy, a pretty wife room now become unattainably distant.
We need reminding that failure exists - not the spectacular failure of a drug addict or criminal, but the stoic acceptance of a man who faces the prospect of slavish labour for the rest of his life. The common fate of the mass of humanity through history.

There's something odd going on in Honey. The story is about a retired couple who have settled in a large air-conditioned house in Phoenix, Arizona. They are the sort of people who hold very certain views on all topics. They know that they have worked hard to earn this big house, and that other people who have not achieved the same have obviously done things the wrong way.
The story is related from the viewpoint of the woman. Old Bob is made to look obstinate and ridiculous at a couple of points. "He would never realise, she understood, that his own wife could see him as something comical and ultimately futile, as in that moment when he cursed and stamped about a machine that refused to move."

At the end of the story he falls off a ladder. Hs wife rushes to help him.

When he opened his eyes there was an old woman standing over him.
Her stricken face . . . reminded him more of some grotesque insect than of his wife. He waited. It was coming.
'Honey! Are! You! All right?'
In a rage of agony, searing words like caustic bile rose to his mouth. He would not be responsible for what he said next.
But the pain in his body was so great he could only gasp one word.
'Honey!'

This is like a brief glimpse into the furnaces of hell. Nothing in the story prepares for it, least of all the title. That's what makes it great.

Another great story is An Evening of Love. It achieves a kind of perfection. (Not to turn this into a barbed compliment, but perfection only has meaning when there is a recognised standard.) Like many of the other stories, the viewpoint is entirely that of the unreflecting driven young man. There is intensity, there is coherence, like a sharp light shining outwards, delineating the harsh edges of the world. O'Ceallaigh writes about such men with as much insight as Kafka wrote about angst-ridden Jewish sons.

It's hard to determine a writers' intention. O'Ceallaigh seems to be presenting this material not for entertainment, nor to evoke sympathy for lower income groups, or change the world, but because it is real.

The piece A Performance stands out as a comment on how his work will be received. The performer undoes sutures and pulls aside his ribcage to expose his beating heart. The audience has its moment of catharsis. Simple as that, the author is brave indeed to throw down this successor to Kafka's Hungerkuenstler.

There are a couple of pieces near the end, including Gone Fishing, that seem autobiographical. Perhaps because of their incidental nature they've been tacked on at the end. I am glad they were included.

Disgrace

I read this over the course of a couple of flights and a train journey across Poland.

There I encounter old friends, and failures. "You Westerners", she said, "everything is so easy for you. You don't know the meaning of failure."

Gilead

Reverend John Ames married a second time late in life, and pens this long letter to his young son knowing he will not live to see him reach adulthood. The year is 1956, but the story winds in and out among tales of his father and grandfathers, advice to his son, and a diary of events as they unfold.

The viewpoint is unwaveringly that of the reverend. But it is more than a viewpoint - it is the coherent Christian perspective, one that was the base of European civilisation for a thousand years. No shadow of irony is cast, no hint of absurdity, no sentimentality. Ames seems to have borrowed much from St. Augustine's Confessions, intertwining personal worries with biblical verses, following reason up to a point and then yielding to the mystery of faith.

I walked up to the church in the dark, as I said. There was a very bright moon. It's strange how you never quite get used to the world at night. I have seen moonlight strong enough to cast shadows any number of times. And the wind is the same wind, rustling the same leaves, night or day. When I was a young boy I used to get up before every dawn of the world to fetch water and firewood. It was a very different life then. I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings. I always felt like an intruder then, and I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out my door.

The above section gives a good impression of the whole book. In a couple of places he broods at a more theological level, bringing in Feuerbach and sundry authors he has read.

The madness of the modern is far distant in this story. It is a shock that the mythological conception of the universe is so close and yet so extinct. The calm piety of the narrator is placed in the last decade in which it was possible - any later and such belief begins to reek of reactionary fundamentalism, a willful turning away from science and modern thought.

The medium is the message. This book could have been an elderly parishioner's accolade to his lineage of pastors. It could be the editied diaries of a preacher. But no, it is a piece of literary fiction, a novel for the international market. Winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award, blurbs of praise from all the large newspapers. The author seems to have drawn a lot of Jesus-nostalgia out into the open. Even so, I'm baffled.

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

So, you can write. You've got the sense of pacing, the skill to juggle styles, a keen eye, the nuts and bolts of grammar too. So, what are you going to do next? Employ these skills to uncover new truths about human nature? Show us what real people are and how they behave?

Will Self (surely not his real name) has got the control of language and the pyrotechnics. He's smart enough to know that there's nothing he can teach that anyone wants to learn. And as for authentic characters, there may be a good stock of those left in poorer countries, but none among his intended audience. There are whole schools of philosophy to tell us there's nothing real to write about. Inevitably the stories he chooses are whimsical pastiches: i.e. brilliant and irreverent.

I changed my mind though when I reached Caring, Sharing, a classic speculative (that's the word that replaces science fiction) tale of a world where people have 14-foot tall 'emotos' to hug them. A world where we can all be children in the arms of the dim-witted (but emotional 140+ IQ) cuddly giants.

This story skips the authorial wink "look at what I'm doing now" - like in the story Flytopia where there's a town called Inwardleigh (inwardly - get it?). In this story too - to take just one example - a character wears a foulard tie. If it was a blue and red striped tie I'd think 'Hmm, why is that significant?" But a foulard tie tells me I'm not as clever as Will Self. By the time a character stops off to buy pork sausages I'm thinking, what? No coarse-cut Cumberlands with thyme?

He's great for abartig moments of perception - the crows in a park are described as:

In their greasy, feathercapes of grey and black, they might be avine impersonators, hustling a sexual practice founded on fluttering and paid for in peanuts.

Love it or hate it, Will is a meister at glossarial overkill:

Well past its fashionable sell-by date, the hotel's décor retailed a series of dazzlingly crass decadences, which Travis knew provided salience for his own sepia image.

Deuce to him for throwing out stories based on on some juvenile speculative premise. I too would love to write a story about bluebottles taking over the world, the mind of a two-year-old being swapped with that of a businessman, a twist in the universe so suddenly everybody's name is Dave. Sounds like nineteen fifties sci-fi fun. But it's not that way with Will. The plot seems secondary to the linguistic special effects, the show of bravado, a coke-turboed ad-lib exhibition.

Here's a few new words I learned:

moue    ultramontanism    rentier    bias cut    orchidaceous    with dispatch    obloquy    purlieus    louring    electrolier    foulard    empyrean    as well as plenty that I did understand, (amn't I clever) like adipose, agglutinative, Besserwessi, idiolect, ziggurat, velveteen, liveried, bodice, wisteria, eidetic, deliquesce, amniocentesis.

Now to read some reviews on google . . . seems like his name is genuine. What an advantage in life to have.

Philosophy is for Everyman

Despite the title this is not an exposition of a philosophical view. It is a series of essays based on televised lectures Jaspers presented in the 60's. He speaks of political freedom, the individual in a mass society, the roles of sociology and psychology, the ineluctable nature of ideology, man as an animal.

Faced with the highest human images we say in self-defence "I don't want to be like that, I want to be like everyone else."

The overwhelming majority of peoples and nations testify against freedom.

Marx and Freud have created a ruinous conception of man. . . . they were men of hate, who, like prophets, inspired faith.

Philosophy of Existence,

I read Jaspers because Sartre waffles and I can't understand Heidegger. This book was first presented as a series of lectures in Frankfurt in 1937, soon after he had been dismissed from his professorship by the new regime. Nowadays the ideas he presented are labelled existentionalism™ and discussed exclusively in universities. The word itself becomes just another "ism' along with the now more fashionable post-modernism, deconstructionism, structuralism. I only mention these latter - I don't know what they mean.

™   I remember someone (a college teacher actually) asking me if I adhered to the existentionalist philosophy. Whenever I go to write "existentialism" now I feel a chuckle coming on. A few days after I wrote the above I noticed his infectious legacy.

Any bullet-point summary I might make of Jasper's thinking would make him sound like a new-age holistic guru more concerned with making the world a warm fuzzy place than with truth. I get impatient with any modern day criticisms which oppose an intuitive or artistic way of knowing (emotional intelligence and the like) to the exact sciences.

When reading his ideas on freedom I assumed he had read Camus's work - Jaspers postulates a man who cannot accept the transcendence of freedom. On checking dates it was a shock to learn this book was published two years before Camus' Myth of Sisyphus.

"Either I sink into the bottomless of the infinite: I stand in Nothingness, in the face of which I am what I can be through myself alone." . . . "If nothing comes to meet me, if I do not love, if what is does not come to me through my love and I do not become myself in it, then I remain in the end as an existence that can be used only like raw material. "

(Jaspers would not claim that there is an error in Camus' thinking.) Jaspers, like all the Germans, is big into talking about Being with a capital B. This used to annoy me until I realised the word does not come loaded with preconceptions. I think of it as all that is or can be spoken of, or thought, or felt. The word itself however does tend to lead to questions such as "what is the Being of "belief"?" - avenues which Sartre goes down ad nauseum. What Jaspers points out is that Being is not and cannot be restricted to only determinate objects. Being has at times in history variously been interpreted as purely objects, or purely subjectivity, or matter, or energy, or mathematical law, or God, or illusion, or spirit. By understanding these attempts to grasp being I can approach Jasper's thought that it is something else, and even saying "is" here is already deceptive. He uses the word "the encompassing" to encompass the reality that yields both objects and the subjectivity that encounters them. The word already presumes some kind of unity - a more analytic person will insist on sticking with things that can be known and will be forced into taking one mode of being for all of being and dismissing other thoughtpaths as worthless. (This 'dismissal' is often more brave and honest than the alternative.)

It is strange to me to think that Jasper's ideas are discussed in philosophy departments in universities. I can't imagine students sitting around talking about these things. Sometimes I take a sentence at random from this book just to feel how gnomic it sounds out of context. His thought is not well-argued; it is precise, not vague, lucid, always lucid.

"we make our existence into an object for ourselves, acting upon it and manipulating it."

Here is the wiki page of quotations from Jaspers. Mark them well. Here are some more.

BBC website

'Altruistic' Brain Region Found   Scientists say they have found the part of the brain that predicts whether a person will be selfish or an altruist. Altruism - the tendency to help others without obvious benefit to oneself - appears to be linked to an area called the posterior superior temporal sulcus. Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person's real-life unselfish behaviour.

"Although understanding the function of this brain region may not necessarily identify what drives people like Mother Theresa, it may give clues to the origins of important social behaviours like altruism."

When I was small I used to read science books which explained all our actions are the result of genes and brain cells. I wondered what would happen if the common ignorant people came to believe this.

We are seeing it happen now, for those who have eyes to see.

Collected Stories

The only story of Babel I had read before I bought this collection (two years ago now) was The Story of my Dovecote. I did however come across a reference to him in a travelogue by Danish writer Carsten Jensen. It prompted me to track down more of Babel's work. I read the stories, was fascinated by the displacement of emphasis, the tangle and clash of names and details interspersed with visionary flashes. These are some of the tricks in his repertoire: jumping into a dialogue with the context delayed by a few paragraphs or not given at all, scrawny bearded characters who rant for a moment and disappear, elements of grotesque folk tales. It made me question again my own puritanical view, my unwillingness to use artifice.

It is hard for us - me - to imagine the conditions under which Babel lived. Russia has had a thousand year history since the days of his boyhood. The words on the page are in a style that still comes across as edgy, modern, but if you were to go to his native village it is fairly certain there would be no-one to remember his family name, the house where he grew up (though I am sure some university has put up a plaque), the shops and theatre houses Babel describes. The war in Poland in which he fought does not feature highly in folk memory there, being displaced by other sufferings. It is referred to as the 1920 war, to distinguish it from the others.

I rooted out Jensen's book from my cardboard box. There are three and a half pages on Babel's work; surely unique for a travel book on the far east.

Babel was one of the seminal writers of the twentieth century and his style - almost reportage in its immediacy, ice-cold, but not without lyrical intensity in its matter-of-fact rendering of detail - was destined to found an entire literary school. Babel gives the impression of being sublimely indifferent to the events that take place under his nose. He makes no judgements, does not interpret these events, seems barely to comprehend them, and it is this distance which in a subtle indirect way accords his writing style its pathos. But it would be wrong to imagine that this pathos springs from the presence of death on the battlefield, the sufferings of men, their recklessness and self-sacrifice. Rather it is the pathos of self-refutation. So writes an intellectual who longs with all his might to free himself of his spiritual baggage, to escape the moral labyrinths of soul-searching and surrender instead to an elemtary man's world of action and intoxicating freedom. The pathos of this style is not the pathos of the warrior, but the pathos of intellectual suicide, the pathos of self-loathing and spiritual flagellation.

. . .

When an intellectual writes like this, he does so because he is doing violence to his self, his empathy, his right to doubt. He longs to break out into a more simplified reality, into the spring that will release him from the autumn in his heart and the spectacles on his nose. It is a style that would like to be viewed as a salute to a new reality and it is as such that it comes to create a school in the twentieth century, as an expression of the intellectual's fascination with anti-intellectualism

"You four-eyed lot," one of the Cossacks says to Babel. There they are again, the glasses, in a version reminiscent of the phrase "to speak with a forked tongue," to be a liar and a crook. Seeing with two pairs of eyes amounts to the same thing. You can't trust an intellectual. He is the outsider, able to atone for his position only by removing his glasses and becoming one with the people, that company of noble savages. Which is what Babel does: he atones and becomes one of them, by trading the kingdom of the intellectual for a Cossack horse.

Jensen's book was a present someone gave me when I lived in Poland. I just noticed the dedication: Let us always stay in touch. I have had no contact with that person for over six years now.

Consilience

This whole book is a reassertion of rationality and the power of science. It starts with an overview of the Enlightenment, and the soul-comfort a scientific world-view brought to brave thinkers in those times. The Ionian Enchantment, he calls it. He well captures the intellectual excitement of the era, the freedom from superstition science brings. And for good reason; in a short autobiographical insight not repeated elsewhere in the book he writes:

I had been raised a Southern Baptist, laid backward under the water on the sturdy arm of a pastor, been born again. I knew the healing power of redemption. Faith, hope, and charity were in my bones, and with millions of others I knew that my saviour Jesus Christ would grant me eternal life.

This was in 1940's Alabama. Young Wilson chose to study biology. He saw how the theory of evolution, and later genetics and cognitive science, undermined the beliefs of his community. And these sciences continue to undermine people's naive beliefs concerning human nature. Here are a few recent news items:

• Gene for shyness has been isolated
• Damage to the frontal lobes in childhood impairs social behaviour without impairing intelligence
• Personality change due to freak accident
• Good-looking people have a more attractive body smell
• A mutation involving outbursts of aggressive behaviour has been isolated on the X chromesome

Everyone is familiar with the idea of the human body as a machine developed by evolution for the purpose of surviving long enough to propogate. Since Darwin's time it has been abundantly clear where the theory of evolution would lead: human behaviour, our values, our altruism, our tribalism and our arts are rooted in our biological nature. For some familiarity breeds contempt, and they continue their lives unaffected by such scientific results, and furthermore they dismiss them as irrelevant to ordinary life. For others the constant awareness that they are determined and bound creatures can shrink their self-image, narrow the circle of responsibility. Let me not speak in generalities here: a teacher friend had a pupil present him with a doctor's note. The boy had been diagnosed with a behavioural problem that made him lie compulsively.

Wilson does not emphasise the destructive side of such knowledge. He is in thrall to the Ionian Enchantment. Currently sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, ethics, and art criticism each have rules specific to their domain. Each of these subjects is characterised by divisions into schools of followers. They also often involve close study of the works of the founder, unlike the hard sciences where almost nobody studies, e.g. Einstein's original papers. Wilson wants to show how the humanities can and must be based on the hard sciences - this is what he terms consilience. In effect he wants to make the soft sciences turn hard. It is a pleasure to read this unashamed and robust argument for the unity of all knowledge. There are some great passages on the evolution of mind and culture. He lists the universals of culture, whch include joking, sports, and dream interpretation. In the future be able to ground such behaviours in genetics and epigentic rules. In other parts he looks at mother-child bonding, incest taboos, colour vocabularies, etc, and shows how how the first steps are been made at explaining these on the level of genetics and evolutionary biology.

"The search for human nature can be regarded as the archaeology of epigenetic rules" he writes. Is human nature to be discovered by investigating the hundreds of societies that exist on earth, or is it to be discovered by introspection by the individual? Wilson is clear that it is the former. His work is a triumphant yea-saying to the march of the consilient (reductionist if you prefer) point of view. But at length it will undermine its own impetus.

In discussing the distinguishing features of human thought:

intuitive and dogmatic, bound up with specific emotional relationships rather than physical casuality, preoccupied with essences and metamorphosis, prone to use language for social interaction rather than as a conceptual tool . . .

. . . the same preliterate traits are commonplace in citizens of modern industrial societies. Systematic logico-deductive thought, which is very much a specialised product of Western culture, comes hard on the other hand, and is very rare.

There you have it - the crack that reveal both the strengths and weakness of the whole. For if this is human nature, then whence is the imperative to study science? Whence the imperative towards knowing the truth? The justification for imposing science on thousands of schoolchildren?

The fundamental explanation of mind is an empirical rather than a philosophical quest.

In a chapter on ethics he makes the claim that a true science of ethics would seek to form a code which best reflects the intuitive principles that are part of our heritage. A code which accords best with human nature. Similar principles would be applied to political science and practical politics.

This is frightening stuff. Yet where is the alternative source of guidance? If ought is not is, then what is? pleads Wilson. I don't have the answers, I'm just pointing out that Wilson is inconsistent, and digs the ground from under himself.

He is lead at last to the fantastically evocative statement:

In other words it is human nature to be disatisfied with human nature. This is pretty much the starting point of existentialism:

Man is a power to be, an impulsion, a bounding-leap, a being in advance of hmself. But for Jaspers the human being tends to extend beyond human existence; for Heidegger there is nothing else but the world of man, thrust outside of himself and in front of himself . . . the human is always something more than what he is (immediately) even though he is not yet what he shall be.

This is from a standard book on existentialism - I do not provide references.

The book ends with a discussion of some environmental issues, and the future of mankind over the next century. It's the best general science book I've read for a decade - dump Dawkins in the bin and put Penrose's new book at the end of the shelf (it will be too difficult for you anyway), this work will equip you to better understand the untethered world we now inhabit.

The Unconsoled,

As a child I used to read the novels of Dostoyevski, J. P. Hartley and Henry James. The characters were full of emotional complexity, bursting with motivations and sensitivities. The people among whom I grew up were simple-minded, half-animalistic by comparison.

For a long time I held the idea that the people in those times and places were more real, and that mankind had degenerated since into superficial, babbling creatures, without thoughts inside their heads.

What does this have to do with Ishiguro's novel?

Mr Ryder, a famous musician, has arrived in a provincial city to give a concert. The citizens are worried about the direction musical taste has taken in their city over the past couple of decades. There is a lot of anxiety between them over obscure points of musical interpretation. They are concerned to give the right impression, to provide appropriate care for Ryder's elderly parents, to ensure his stay among them is comfortable. This extreme sensitivity extends to other parts of life. The porter lectures Mr Ryder over four pages on the honour and discipline of his job, and the decline in the porter's craft over recent years. He invites Mr Ryder to see the 'Porter's Dance' - just one of many traditions surrounding the trade.

The hotel proprietor at one point relates to Mr Ryder a series of events trivial in themselves, but which under his interpretation portend the negation of his life's work and a future split between him and his wife. There is no bottom to the depth of interpretation in this novel. The characters have a complexity which opens inward to an infinite space.

Maybe Ishiguro wanted to portray an alternative world of dignified, deep personalities. Or maybe he just loved setting up a sense of mystery. He could have done it in half the number of pages. Once we get the idea that, for example, the porter worries incessantly about the dignity of his craft, there is no need to see this pattern implemented with other characters. Obsessive contemplation recurs again and again, just a few times too many.

The novel is ultimately disappointing. It captures an atmosphere of repressed communication, of hearts churning beneath a white shirt and bow-tie. But it captures it repeatedly, and the ending just peters out.

It's a strange book however. It leaps back to the days before psychology, extermination, mass media and terror. It skips the whole 20th century and reclaims a sense of the diginity of the characters in this story. The drive of much modern fiction is that our motives are not as pure as we think. If a character in such a novel were to jump into life and read it, he would feel hollowed out, exploited and cast aside.

A character in Ishiguro's novel on the other hand would be likely to commend the author on his perceptiveness and point out a few instances of misinterpretation.

Once Upon a Number

The quotation from Hume with which he prefaces his book aptly sums up his own, optimistic, view of the connection between hard science and general life.

"I cannot but consider myself as a kind of resident or ambassador from the dominions of learning to those of conversation, and shall think it my constant duty to promote a good correspondence betwixt these two states, which have so great a dependence on each other."

Paulos speaks with the voice of the enlightenment, from an age when truth was worth striving for, and once achieved could be put to the service of humanity, to ennoble us, materially, intellectually, spiritually. He addresses the man-on-the-street, with a confidence that mathematics should be of interest to everybody. There is no condescension in his tone. He doesn't present absurdly simple mental exercises for the reader and then pat him on the back.

The book is in one aspect a collection of anecdotes about the application of maths to everyday life. The most obvious area is statistics and their use and abuse, but he finds many more fascinating examples.

• how our naive estimations of probability can be wide off the mark
• how stats can be abused
• Bible codes
• prejudices and how they can slant our interpretations
• extensional logic and the stock market
• emergence of order from randomness

One of the paradoxes he mentions is the lotto, say for example a 6 digit lotto. Every number has an equal chance of winning, right? Not true. Numbers which are in an easy-to-remember form like 234543 or that could be dates e.g. 140297 win the lotto more often. Put like that it's baffling. But think about how the lotto works. If the number drawn has not been chosen by anyone, another number is drawn. And so on until a number is drawn for which there is a winner. Many people choose their birthday etc as their number, and so these types are over-represented. Paradoxes like this can appear in covert ways when we apply maths to reality, and usually so as to reinforce the beliefs held by the person making the argument.

Paulos writes about the application of maths to court cases, and in particular to the infamous O.J. Simpson trial. He describes some of the twisting of statistics by the defence in that trial. It is implied that if the jury had been a little more aware they wouldn't have been as easily fooled. "We're so often cocksure of our decisions, actions and beliefs because we fail to look for counterexamples, pay no attention to alternative views and their consequences, and distort our memories and are seduced by our own explanatory schemes."

And we will become more and more so. The O.J. Simpson trial is only the beginning. The rule of reason is at an end. Reason is boring. An investigation into whether Clinton ejaculated on a dress, a car chase televised live: these are things that never happened on earth before. There will be more of them. Does anyone still believe that education is bringing us towards a better society, that the insights Paulos is bringing to the masses will improve them? At what point was it in the late twentieth century that insight and reasoning ceased to be something to strive for and became a lifestyle choice?

At certain points in the book it becomes clear that Paulos is aware of - what should we call it? The crisis of the modern? He writes: "We're content to pick up small bits of pattern if ever and wherever they might be found. Indeed this book's piecemeal, episodic structure is due to a similar impatience with lofty claims and simplistic theories." Yes, but your plea that we should have more reason in our lives is one of those lofty claims.

It's a strange universe we have arrived at, where a book on how a little analytic thinking can help us in our lives comes across as old-fashioned, willfully naive, out of place in this era.

I was wondering why he didn't have a brief account of another point of interface between mathematics and society that mathematicians like to talk about - the 2000 presidential election where Gore got the majority of votes but Bush got elected. The president is elected on the number of "electoral votes" he gains, and the number of electoral votes is only roughly proportional to the population of a state. The Bush campaign conserved resources by campaigning hard in the marginal states. That could be taken as an application of mathematical reasoning.

I looked at the inside cover and found it was published in 1998. It made me wonder if his faith in commonsense, (supported with a little mathematical insight) would be the same if it was written today. The call to listen to reason seems weaker now. Pointing out to readers the perversions in logic that sold the war to the common people would seem a necessary task, but one to be undertaken stoically, not in any hope that things will get better.

I examined the library slip pasted on the front leaf. The book has been borrowed 5 or 6 times a year for the past three years. That's about the maximum in fact, because people can renew online for up to two months.

The Limits of Vision

It was title that attracted me - I thought immediately of William Blake, who in fact makes an appearance in the book - that, and the recommendation by Jeanette Winterson on the cover. "A genuine and rare work of the imagination."

It's always exciting to read an uncompromising work that pays no heed to the populist notion of readability. The narrator, Marcia, can look at a crease on a bedsheet and go off on a convoluted chain of associations. It is more a compulsive burrowing downward than a flight of fancy. The white sheet becomes a snowy shore, there is a house at the edge of the snows; someone lies dying. It's an old woman in a strait-jacket. She has been stabbed by the man who does not dream. He treads backwards on snow-shoes, making his escape, until on the white horizon he sees the Queen of the Snows.

Marica spends some more time in this landscape, and ponders this question: geologists make great studies of creases in the earth's crust just because they are big and last long, but why shouldn't sheet folds be as important because they are small and here only briefly?

She goes downstairs to continue the day's cleaning. The old grey carpet only seems grey, down on hands and knees there are islands of wool on a lattice of threads, and even in the poor light the fibres are a riot of colours. Marica follows the course of a dustball across this ocean for three full pages until she reaches the fungus, who personifies the Empire of Decay. She talks with him until the doorbell rings, three times. It is her housewife friends, coming for the coffee morning.

Throughout the day her mind veers from bits of dirt to conversations with the likes of Darwin, Blake, and Teilhard DeChardin. The buzzing inside this housewife's head is utterly disproportionate to her mundane reality. We are told Marcia is a mathematics graduate, and now she stays at home cleaning all day while her husband goes to his office. However there is no real sense of the tragedy of a mind growing in on itself. It's all sophisticated entertainment. The intricate machinations are sometimes fascinating, often boring, and always with arbitrary twists.

My chief complaint is the narrator's vision is just not weird enough. I feel the author is only pretending; at heart he is comfortably in the same universe as Marcia's husband and the doctor in the white coat. He has given us only a fictional Marcia.

Best New American Voices 2003

It's a collection of short stories from Hodges Figgis bargain basement, though a sticker on it proclaims WATERSTONES. There are a number of such collections still down there awaiting release. The stories have been collected from creative writing programs and workshops around North America (which includes Canada I feel forced to add). I have always disliked the idea of writing courses, even before I knew they existed. But exist they do, and if any writer wants to meet people who know something about good writing and generally socialise with people who know how to read, then he/she will eventually join some programme. I can't really believe that their writing will become conformist because of this. What causes conformity is assuming that if a writer doesn't have an MACR then they are not polished enough to be published.

I've read three stories so far. They are in fact quite 'literary' in style, that is, they presume the reader has read a fair amount of modern writing and is familiar with the techniques. They are good, well worth reading, but so far they haven't said anything to me.

You Must Remember This

Middle-aged parents, a teenage daughter, first girlfriend. What is Aiden O'Reilly doing reading a novel devoted exclusively to these themes? Is it that old cliche, she sees into the universals of human nature? I don't think so. In a work by any other writer I would give up half way. But Oates is in control of strange magic. She involves this reader in the sin of caring more about her creations, as creations, than I do about the typical real people they are based on.

The prose races, carried along not by plot devices, but by the gathering crests of people's inner thoughts, or purely by the narrator's revelation of what is happening, released clause by clause, insight by insight. With Oates there is no end to what insights can be won into the most ordinary turn of events.

The novel is about a family in 50's New York State. Contemporary events make their appearance - the son is drafted to Korea and Mr Stevick gets reported to the police for appearing to know too much about Soviet Russia to a patriotic customer at his furniture shop. (Later, he invests a lot of money in building a nuclear shelter.) But mostly the story is about 15 year-old Enid, her attempted suicide and affair with her uncle. The plot goes into her uncle Felix's life - a boxer and man of action. The sections on her brother Warren could form a separate novella, but they are if anything more interesting than the main plot. In saying that the prose style and inner thoughts are more important than the plot I might give the wrong impression that this is a "literary" novel. The cover blurbs will correct this: This is a very sexy novel - a novel that will make you sweat, summer or not. Blurbs are by the Daily Telegraph, Cosmo, and Vanity Fair - but what publisher wouldn't try to smuggle out a work of great art as a thumping good beach read?

Oates is the goddess who can alight on any life and make it glow with significance.

Millenium People

I remember the shock I felt when I saw the vivid design and metallic cover of Cocaine Nights. Everything about it screamed blockbuster. I scanned through the blurbs and traced the line of white cocaine on the mirror-effect surface. There was nothing on the outside to remind me of the Ballard I had read all through my youth. The hype machine had reached him and transformed him to "a cultural icon".

But it had not transformed his writing. I found it hard to believe that the moguls could market him as a product for the masses. His writing has always been animated by ideas more so than plot, style is valued more than character development. His writing simply had nothing in common with popular literature.

But if I'd been more savvy about how the media operates I wouldn't have been surprised. The film Empire of the Sun had been a huge success, and Ballard was acquiring iconic status. The media does not care if your writing mercilessly probes the 20th century landscape of fame, media distortion, mass hysteria, shopping malls and emasculated lives. And so though even the most dim-witted of the publisher's advertising executives could see the irony of a recommendation from the Daily Mail being displayed proudly on the front cover, yet they still put it there.

Long-time fans of Ballard will let themselves be carried along by the neutral voice of the narrator, waiting for those moments when the text turns a corner into the bizarre and visionary. A Ballard character is a complex mechanism of drives and cogitations which reveals itself in cryptic sentences just a couple of times over the course of a novel. They are not plausible characters - but then the Michal Ryan's and Theodore Kaczynski's of this world are not plausible either. And it is these kinds of people that Ballard is probing.

Millenium People follows the narrator, David Markham, as he investigates the apparently motiveless bombing at Heathrow airport which killed his first wife. He is led into a world of middle-class rebellion and motive-less violence. Many of the ideas are similar to those explored in Running Wild - and if you can get your hands on that tiny gem of a novella then read it. I much prefer its minimalist style aand precise pacing. This latest novel seems to make too many concessions to the mass market in toning down the abstract prose, keeping to the 290 pages length, and keeping the plot skipping along with rather too many coincidental meetings.

Don't bother reading the blurbs though. They will only make you disappointed with the novel. Try to pretend it's something you picked up at a jumble sale, a work by an obscure author who served a short sentence for possession of cocaine.

The Captive Mind

This is a collection of essays from the 1950's by the Polish poet. He seeks analogies and historical precedences to try to understand the grip Communism took over Eastern Europe after the war. We are on the outside of that type of society, and can observe and delineate the forces at play. It is different in our own type of society. We are fish in water, and cannot describe the medium through which we move.

There is a sequence of four essays, originally published in Polish, on Polish writers whom he denotes Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. These would be fairly well-known figures to Poles at least. I don't think Czeslaw is trying to preserve anonymity, it's rather that he wants to dispel any preconceptions about them. It might also be a legal chicanery. Czeslaw writes about how each of these writers coped with the regime, to what extent they had to compromise, to what extent they became apologists. In the conditions in which they lived, writing could never be a merely artistic activity.

Reading it I get an enormous sense of the tragedy of lost idealism in this century. It seems salvation lies in discarding any kind of political idealism, apart from the very modest aim of making laws which facilitate business.

The first essay, Looking to the West, reminded me of Enzensberger's essays (below). It is exhilarating to see our western world seen at such a broad angle. Reading newspapers gives you the feeling that the world changes irrevocably every ten years. It seems the ideas and values of the eighties are already old hat, never mind the sixties. Reading these essays is like seeing our patch of the world from a great height. Things have changed indeed, but we are still in the same era. We have not yet come to terms.

The Street of Crocodiles

"He was small, unattractive and sickly, with a thin angular body and brown, deep-set eyes in a pale triangular face." Thus begins the translator's preface to this collection of Schulz's fiction. The stories spill over with blinding white sunlight, dust rising from the roads, the odour of ripe apricots, nooks, broken furniture, and all manner of kitchen utensils. Be warned: This is not a spare, understated style of writing. This is a hothouse of impressions.

Schulz came from a city you have never heard of, and few knew him as anything other than a schoolteacher in the local liceum on the day he was casually shot by a Gestapo officer.

His work has often been compared with Kafka's. (Schulz was the first to translate Kafka into Polish, but this was after Schulz's main works were completed.) Both created private works of the imagination which only indirectly reflect on the age in which they lived.

Read him and enjoy the cumulative sentences, the rich descriptions, and the odour of concealed corruption that permeates the street of crocodiles.

ROBOT

An account of an MIT researcher's life & work constructing AI creatures. His view is that to create useful electronic intelligence one should start by trying to mimic primitive creatures like flies or beetles. The practical applications he thinks up betray a severe lack of imagination: hoovers that seek out dirty spots on the carpet, a machine to fetch you a beer from the fridge. But it is not his technical accounts of progress in automata that fascinated me. It was this: I believe myself and my children to be mere machines . . . when I look at my children I can see that they are machines interacting with the world.

Mediocrity & Delusion

A short collection of essays by a German poet and thinker. Some date from the 70's. Enzensberger can say more about the modern world in four pages than others can in a whole book. I much prefer his confident, reasonable voice, addressed to the general interested reader (as if they still exist), than I do the voice of Derrida.

His short essays range over television, tabloid papers, the tenacity of literature, the World bank, international terrorism (in 1986). I like them because they are a critique coming from someone who is not immersed in the modern and has not accepted its premises. Also he is a poet himself, a creator, and never sinks to being a mere negation of all that's new.

Shadows on our Skin

Having lived abroad over half my adult life it's perhaps understandable that I have no allegiance to Irish writing. The author's being Irish has never influenced my choice until recently. Now I keep an eye on Irish writers old and new. Shadows is written in a very spare simple style. It's set in 70's Derry. But the violence remains in the background - at one point several shots are fired and two British soldiers are killed, but it takes place just out of sight around the corner. It's very readable and very real. Some might call it deceptively simple - I'd call it simply simple. I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

Homo faber

A 50 year-old Swiss engineer on his way to South America to work on some turbines. He has a belief in progress, education, rational relationships between people. He has limited tolerance for self-indulgence, over-emotional behaviour, religious faith. Art & music he can tolerate if it is classic - nothing 20th century, except of course the technology.

His world-view takes a battering several times and he is plunged into a confrontation with the irrational. The characters and situations are surprisingly modern - there are only a few points where you remember the year is 1957. This is partly because he leads a high-tech life, flying from New York to Paris on business, renting cars, using his skills to help develop poorer countries. He is the epitome of the international modern man.

One chapter is set in Cuba. It was interesting to catch this glimpse of life before the revolution there, and to realise that Max Frisch had no idea what drastic turn history would take there.