On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle

The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a November. The nineteenth never appears. On the 121st iteration of the same day she begins to write by describing the sounds made by her husband Thomas as he moves around upstairs. The same moves, the same noises every day. A simple premise and very promising, but very difficult to turn into a compelling narrative. If everything she sees and hears is going to be the same from one day to the next, variation or resolution can only undermine the conceit, making the novel the diary of an anecdote, essentially a ghost story,¹ but if there is no variation or resolution, boredom and impatience are inevitable. And the novel is indeed fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, as the premise gives the reader an existential thrill imagining what such a condition might entail while also wondering how the constraint on the story will develop, and perhaps even resolve, but frustrating because there are only so many meditations on a regular day one can read.

The novel is filled out with Tara's precise observations of her surroundings and descriptions of the events leading up to the "rift in time", a level-headed attention suggested by the title, all of which may be interesting in context, but not otherwise. However, any longueurs are mitigated when, longing for a world in which time passes, she tries to reach the nineteenth. She interrupts Thomas' routine and explains the situation in the hope that he will be able to lead her into the next day, but by morning he has to be told all over again. However, this does have its unique joys:

We woke in the morning, we went for walks, we sat down and had coffee somewhere on the eighteenth of November. For most of the day as intimately aware of one another as couples in the first flush of love or nearsighted creatures. We made the horizon vanish. We sought this giddy feeling. The distance between us was dispelled in the fog. We made the giddiness a part of our day. Created a bright space out of dazed, gray confusion.

The reader nevertheless is impatient for a resolution and spins the hands of the clock forward enabled by the smooth translation of Balle's uncluttered prose, only to discover on closing the book that there is a serenity in the stability of Tara's infinite crisis, and now that serenity is gone. This may be why there are several more volumes ahead, just as there is always another day ahead.

Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland

Part one of On the Calculation of Volume has been reviewed widely and made the International Booker Prize shortlist and came top of the Shadow Panel's vote.² While many of the reviews place the novel within a generic tradition and cite one of the most famous novels about time as a literary predecessor, not one review that I've found recognises the significance of the apparently random date chosen for Tara to explore. Had they wondered why a Danish author chose to write a multi-volume novel about time from the perspective of a French woman, they may have discovered that the eighteenth of November is the day in 1922 on which the author of À la recherche du temps perdu died.³ There are other parallels, albeit travelling in the opposite direction: Tara's experience at the beginning of the rift is a neat inversion of Proust's narrator at the beginning of that novel: each morning he wakes in uncertainty to reconstruct reality from forgetful sleep, while she wakes to a sense of peace as the normality of another morning appears, only for its normality to dissolve. And when she tells Thomas everything and they stay awake all night hoping the nineteenth will appear in an entirely new dawn, a sudden imperceptible loss of concentration leads to him losing the memory of the day, a moment that reverses Proust's famous instants.

Perhaps then this is a novel written from the end of time, from the blank space of death or, less morbidly, from eternity. For Nietzsche, eternity is precisely the revelation of time. This is Tara's revelation. In the face of relentless change, the serene stability of the novel is the ideal form to enable an experience of time in relation to the horizon of eternity. This may explain why the rise of the novel coincided with the decline of faith and the disenchantment of the world. If poetry is the gift of eternity and the novel the gift of time, the novels of Proust and Solvej Balle seek to merge both in the flow of imagination and reality.⁴

 

^Notes 

1. David Lowery's movie A Ghost Story springs to mind here. A dead husband haunts the house he shared with his wife and watches from afar.↩

2. See the Booker Prize website and the Shadow Panel's Substack report. The latter tends to more reliable in purely literary terms as it's not driven by corporate demands.↩

3. A letter to the TLS mentions it in response to a review, but most is behind the paywall so I can't credit the correspondent for also being a clever clogs.↩

4. There is another connection, not film or book related. In the thinking of the experience of the same day and the fog obscuring the movement from one day to the next, I remembered seeing J Mascis and the Fog perform the song Sameday live in Brighton many years ago. The Fog that night featured Mike Watt of Minutemen (and later the underrated fIREHOSE) and Ron Asheton of The Stooges.

   ↩

No safe landing

A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici

 

Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a novelist he is radical. The second claim may not be controversial but the first will come as a surprise to those who remember what he said about the big-name contemporary novelists in What Ever Happened to Modernism?. This novel and non-fiction combination offers an opportunity to experience the two in close proximity – two sides of an LP, as Nick Lezard put it. 

Side one is a study of the eight months Franz Kafka spent in the Bohemian countryside after a diagnosis of TB and in particular the collection of notes he wrote there known as the Zürau Aphorisms. On the other side, Partita is a novel written mostly in dialogue following Michael Penderecki on the run after a death threat in which he spends most of this time chasing a lover who herself keeps running away. The threat of death and the promise of escape are two links between the sides that otherwise seem to have little in common. Josipovici's two claims, however, provides another.

Before he left for Zürau, Kafka told Max Brod he intended to use the time to "become clear about ultimate things". Josipovici follows him through each day as recorded in the collection known as The Blue Octavo Notebooks. At first the entries include short stories, regular first-person diary entries and legalistic and theological speculations, the latter of which Josipovici is impatient as they lead Kafka into uncharacteristically "clunking" prose. But then the first aphorism appears:

The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.

Every edition dedicated to the aphorisms begins here but, Josipovici claims, this is deceptive. On that day in October 1917, Kafka writes a long and indeed clunking paragraph before interrupting himself with the line translated as "I digress". He then writes the aphorism. Every edition deletes this line. Reiner Stach's recent The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka is the exception but relegates it to an aside in his commentary, with the rest discussing the rope motif. Josipovici points out the original German is "Ich irre ab", which he translates as "I'm on the wrong track", backed up when I checked using Google Translate which has "I'm going astray". This he says marks a decisive change and relates directly to the form of the rope entry, which he describes as "the melding of fiction and discursive prose in extremely compact pieces". 

"Ich irre ab" is thereby closer to Dante's "I had lost the path that does not stray" before he begins his journey and gives the first aphorism a similarly salvific imperative. The difference is that Kafka has no Virgil or Beatrice to guide him; belief in God has gone and the means of salvation uncertain, and the word possibly meaningless. By removing the line, the editors place the existential peril at a safe distance from which a critical apparatus can flourish. The generic distinction of 'aphorisms' is therefore inappropriate as Kafka's notes are not the witty or pithy sayings of a wise man but "the anxious jottings of a man under sentence of death". Kafka's digression was not then playing with genre for the sake of it or to show off his talent as a writer but, as he said, to "become clear about ultimate things". 

The rope motif stands for Kafka's ambivalence about writing and Josipovici is rare in Kafka studies by bringing it into the foreground. Kafka recognised the grace it affords when in his diary he describes writing as "a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being", but then he wonders "what kind of surplus is it?". In a letter to Brod, the doubts are expressed even more succinctly: "Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life?" – a life in which he felt distant, a spectator unable to enjoy join in, as he described in a passage in his diary. Josipovici also shows how doubts about writing are dramatised in his stories. The officer in In the Penal Colony tells the traveller to read the sentence the machine has written on the body of the condemned man but he sees only "a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other". The machine takes twelve hours to kill so the engraving of the sentence has to be embellished to fill the time:

In so doing it brings out the paradox of the machine: meant to make the accused feel in his own body the justice of the punishment, it only helps to bring out that language can never be 'true' or 'just', that it will always contain flourishes.

In Zürau among simple farmers and labourers, Kafka saw no flourishes. He observed the centuries-old traditions embedded in daily life of the villagers governed by the seasons and centred on the church and recognised he was living the consequences of a society wrenched from such roots. Tradition had to be there already and could not be back-engineered. The best he could do as a writer was to distance himself from literary flourishes, to get as close to what Josipovici describes as "the unthinking life-activity that produces the works of Homer", in effect to disappear as a writer and for writing to disappear as a means of constructing ideas about the world. This was a common theme in the writers of the time. Josipovici cites Eliot's Prufrock and Wallace Stevens's snowman:

What they are all searching for in their art – and in their lives, actually – is a kind of perfect anonymity, something that is the opposite of the image of the entrepreneur, the figure of Progress, linked to capitalism in society and, in art, to fictions with beginnings, middles and a nice resolution at the end.

Blanchot calls this a "combat of passivity, combat which reduces itself to naught". Of course, that naught is still not disappearance as it is a combat for literature, an irony one aphorism melding fiction and discursive prose recognises:

Like a path in autumn: scarcely has it been swept clear than it is once more covered with dry leaves.

Josipovici notes how odd it is not to be told what is the path is like and admits that he's not sure why but the line "would be much weaker if it started with: 'I feel like' or 'My life is like a path in autumn'". The question of why it would be weaker is fascinating and maddening. Josipovici says "this is what Kafka’s best fictions and images do to you: in a few plain and simple words they set your imagination going and refuse to provide it with a safe landing". This is the gift of Kafka's quest to become clear about ultimate things, "a gift we do not receive" as Blanchot says in the same passage. The gift of A Winter in Zürau is that it makes us aware of the distance between us and Kafka, a distance between us and awareness of distance, a distance from the loss of tradition, a distance between us and ultimate things, and so a distance from the deep roots of fiction, as one of Kafka's melded commentaries on myth describes:

There are four legends about Prometheus. According to the first, because he betrayed the gods to men he was chained to a rock in the Caucasus and the gods sent eagles that devoured his liver, which always grew again. According to the second, Prometheus in his agony, as the beaks hacked into him, pressed deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third, in the course of thousands of years his treachery was forgotten, the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot. According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of what had become meaningless. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily. What remained was the inexplicable range of mountains.

The great books by the great writers is an inexplicable mountain range we admire only from a distance. We hurry to name contemporary equivalents but we know something is missing. For Kafka, the horror and the undivine comedy of modern life was close enough in time to contrast with village life to sense what was lost so there remained a tension: "From the true antagonist boundless courage flows into you" he wrote in Zürau, a single sentence that many of us would pass over without pause but for the close attention Josipovici provides: "the agon or trial of strength was the fulcrum on which Kafka’s imagination turned" and cites the father in The Judgment, but then adds a crucial note: "The question is whether for modern man such an antagonist exists." Side two of this edition offers an answer.

While Partita's features an Englishman with a Polish name on the run across Europe to escape a threat of death and then pursuing an unpredictable lover in variously dark, comic and surreal episodes, the title points away from the content just as music points away from itself. It has a non-musical meaning too: in Italian verb 'partire' means to leave, to go away, and the noun in the feminine describing someone who has left is 'la partita'. There are seven chapters each named after parts of the musical form; variations on a theme. In the Praeambulum, music is in the foreground when Michael Penderecki's host insists on playing Yves Montand singing Les feuilles mortes (Autumn Leaves) on his fancy record player:

A quiet voice of great beauty begins to tell a story. It tells of memory and of those happy days when the sun always shone, days when we were friends; it tells of the dead leaves of autumn swept up into piles, like our memories and regrets.

The dead leaves echo the fate of Kafka's true way, in this case one cleared by feet running into the future soon covered again as it becomes the past. The song recurs throughout the novel; a literary earworm reminding us that what ever joy we have, what ever hope we maintain, goes away. Everything passes. Perhaps this is modern man's only potential antagonist, the one we confront in every waking moment while music and dreams are the ineffable reminders of escape, the promise and impossibility of escape that we seek anyway in flight from death and in pursuit of love; poles of the same earth. We exalt both with all kinds of rationales from the purely subjective to the purely technical, except music is heard and love felt differently to how we spell it out. In the novel it has a comic equivalence in Michael Penderecki's surname: his name may be spelled Penderecki but he irritates people by telling them it is pronounced Penderetzky. And with two otherwise incompatible books, we have two versions of the name. A Winter in Zürau spells out Josipovici's advocacy of formal adventure in writing as he follows Kafka sounding out the losses and paradoxes that haunt its necessity, while in Partita the antagonist can only be experienced in its pronunciation; it is experienced as it leaves us, forever there and forever out of reach. In this sense, Josipovici is radical as a critic and conservative as a novelist.

The disaster of writing: My Weil by Lars Iyer

"When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring" says the blurb to her recent book subtitled Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster, and goes on to report rapturous praise from critics and common readers alike, that it became a Sunday Times bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and was chosen as a book of the year by The Telegraph and New Statesman. Disaster is good for business.

It's also good news for academic departments assailed by reform in the public sector, as studying disasters provides an ideal opportunity to supply measurable outputs demanded by university management. The journal Disaster Studies for example publishes papers "that examine how disasters are anticipated, experienced, governed, and understood". The range of events listed suggests a disaster can be more than atom bombs and asteroids, leaving room for all kinds of events requiring examination. In Lars Iyer's latest novel, the Philosophy department of a Manchester university has been rebranded as The Centre for Disaster Studies to surf the neoliberal Tsunami. For its PhD students, this is fine.

The new title has the double advantage of more accurately describing philosophy not as a love of knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom but recognition that the stars have fallen (the etymology of 'disaster'), and also of concealing the abyss between Philosophy and Business Studies, the pseudo-academic discipline gradually replacing the Humanities, allowing the students to remain hidden within the system despite their opposition. Indeed, two of them are called Marcie and Valentine, hinting at a Gnostic hope of another world, a better world, an intellectual equivalent of Lucy Easthope's practical redemption. While their studies may lead nowhere but back into Manchester's destitute working-class districts, it is resistance to the demonic world embodied by Business Studies. They look at its students – keen, smartly dressed, actually writing their theses – and ask: "Where’s their doom? Where’s their crushedness? Their diseases of the soul? There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with them."

Readers of Lars Iyer's two previous novels Wittgenstein Jr and Nietzsche and the Burbs will relish the familiar chorused voice of hyperbole as the students seek to distinguish their studies from the banality of their everyday lives, as well as recognise the passive sentences describing the students' location – The Ees. A clearing. A long-sunken basin. Water, ankle deep. – situating the students as italicised observers of a world indifferent to their hysterics. The Ees is a swampy wasteland in the city used as a dump by locals but has a mystical aura for the students: "You come to the Ees to lose yourself. To be forgotten."

Also as in the previous two novels, an intellectual doppelgänger of a long dead philosopher enters to shake things up. In this case it's a new student calling herself Simone Weil, a convert to Christianity, challenging the students' incipient paganism. "Isn't God dead?" the students ask, and she says, yes, the "God of the philosophers is dead". Instead, God withdrew from the world in order to create it and evil, the very thing that appears to prove his non-existence, is "the very thing that reveals him in his truth". God's goodness shows himself through what we do, so rather than reject the world, we should seek to do good in the world, as she does by giving money to the homeless, speaking calmly to the madman on the bus, and praying for the addicts and the drunks. 

Such selflessness, however, a giving oneself over to something unknown, something outside, is also the promise of the Ees. In this way the novel appears to set up a debate about the best way to deal with what's missing from our lives and from the world – indulgent escape or self-sacrifice? – and it would have taken place if My Weil was not itself subject to disaster. What's missing from our lives and the world is precisely what the novel as a genre seeks to provide: a space filled with presence that is also, like a literary equivalent of Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit illusion, saturated in absence. We cannot see one without the other. The anxiety this provokes is everywhere in novels, the blurbs of novels and the review pages promising all kinds of events ("an act of shocking violence") and special information contained within a novel to mitigate absence, which must go without saying. 

For James Joyce, said Beckett, "there was no difference between the fall of a bomb and the fall of a leaf”. For us, too, in reading. The intensity of My Weil's bombing campaign of ideas and expression is matched only by its leaf-like lightness, the futility of which we cannot ignore even as we lose ourselves in its comedy. The effect is to open a space, a clearing like the Ees, for the presence of the black and empty sky to be raised in a novel. 

The word 'clearing' has to be noted as an allusion to the translation of Lichtung, the word used by Heidegger as he sought to return philosophy to its beginnings in ancient Greece. It is in those beginnings, however, that he also saw the end of philosophy as the sciences that developed "within the field that philosophy opened up" turned philosophy into "the empirical science of man" governed by systems of method, what he calls cybernetics:

This science corresponds to the determination of man as an acting social being. For it is the theory of the regulation of the possible planning and arrangement of human labor. Cybernetics transforms language into an exchange of news. The arts become regulated-regulating instruments of information.

It has led to a culture in which its "technological-scientific-industrial character" has become "the sole criterion of man's world sojourn". A clearing for such a return would be the equivalent of a dead end of a forest path apparently leading nowhere that opens into the light where trees have been removed. But, Heidegger says, "philosophy knows nothing of the clearing", hence his turn towards poetry as the potential for such light.

We may see here discussion of the death of the novel in a similar context rather than one of quality and cultural relevance, as the contemporary literary novel has little more to offer than an exchange of news by other means, while the popular genres offer a happy escape into the repetition of storytelling. The end of literature follows the end of philosophy as it is usurped by the unendlicher Verkehr of information. 

In a dark night in the Ees, Valentine announces that "Only French prose-poetry philosophy can save us now" and so they read aloud from Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster, a book whose own blurb sells it relevance to modern literature "haunted by world wars, concentration camps, [and] Hiroshima", the familiar examples of disaster, and that a new academic study applies to a reading of recent novels because in them "an understanding of critical events – death, ecological catastrophe, pandemics – is possible", but what the students read suggests something else entirely:

Between the disaster and the other there would be the
contact, the disjunction of absent meaning—friendship.

Marcie, reading (just able to make out the words):

It is in friendship that I can respond . . . a friendship
un . . . un . . . shared . . . without reciprocity . . . friendship
for that which has passed leaving no trace . . .

The relation to the other is disastrous: that’s what this book argues,
Ismail says. It’s a break with what we know. With earthly order.
Like Simone . . . , I say.
Is Simone disastrous? we wonder.
She dresses disastrously, Gita says. Those nun-shoes . . .

The novel is in this sense the disaster for us, as Simone is for the group, and as Wittgenstein and Nietzsche were before, and as is indeed the bathos of Gita's remark; for a brief time there is a loosening of the ties that bind us not only to the earthly order and that of the stars, the cosmic order, but also to the order of philosophy and literature. But what follows? The lost soul of the group, Johnny, seeks to push friendship into something more with Gita, which she says is not a wise idea. "Why not? I say. Why—really—not? Don’t you see—this might be a chance. A chance for what? Gita asks."

For the same not to be the same, I say. For one day not to follow another. For the inevitable not to be inevitable. For cog not to be locked into cog . . . Wouldn’t you like to think that we’re on the brink of something? That something’s about to happen?

A phone, ringing.

Wall by Jen Craig

“This novel gives the reader one of the best depictions of thinking in fiction that I have read in a long time” – Talking Big

"... combines exactitude and vagueness, immediacy and distance, to approximate how scatty, worm-like human thought might be represented on the page" – The Saturday Paper

“the skeletal frames of [Craig’s] narrative plots are barely visible beneath the roving stream of consciousness that encases them” – Sydney Review of Books

"Craig’s work constructs an idiosyncratic monologue …. that traces the thoughts of a London-based artist whose father, a hoarder, has died in Sydney" – Sydney Morning Herald

Such appreciations of Jen Craig's third novel testify to a distinctive remove from the default facility of the anglophone novel, with an incremental intensification of the narrative form taken in Since the Accident and Panthers and the Museum of Fire. However, I'm doubtful of the reviews' characterisation of Wall as a relocation of thought from mind to page, not only because the novel is presented as a letter, but also because it ignores the tension generated by inheritance that constitutes the novel in its basic plot content: between daughter and parents, anorexia and hoarding, the artist and the art world, and its form: the inheritance from literature, in which thought is already writing.

The reviews also testify to their own concern for inheritance. While the foreground purpose of comparing Jen Craig's prose style to that of David Foster Wallace, Henry James, Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, Gerald Murnane, László Krasznahorkai, Jon Fosse and Mathias Énard and, most commonly, WG Sebald, who voiced his own anxiety about literary inheritance, is to situate an author in a market bustling with reading choices, the background noise, made clear in the excess of the list, is anxiety about the value and meaning of art going forward, perhaps in the hope that the future of the novel lies in its past. It's no coincidence that a similar anxiety generates the narration of Wall. The purpose of the letter is to announce that its writer, an installation artist, has given up on making a version of Song Dong's installation (about hoarding) which had promised art-world success and thereby relief from the impossibility of completing an original installation (about anorexia) in recognition that, rather than in opposition, one is the correlate of the other. Without explicit awareness, we realise we are reading in a space outside of such possibility and impossibility; a space set aside from the ambition and despair, from success and failure, from value and meaning, from going forward; a space often shared by Thomas Bernhard's narrators, such as the two brothers in On the Ortler, recently translated in The Rest is Slander, which also takes the form of a letter. While the names listed are valid comparisons, this may be Wall's most significant inheritance, one in which the will contains the unthinkable.

The Lascaux Notebooks by Jean-Luc Champerret

Lascaux, a placename standing for the abyssal revelation of the cave paintings discovered there after millennia in darkness, and Notebooks, suggesting a private endeavour, preparation, a work to come. While neither is secret as such, neither was meant for the light. Two intrigues then for the price of one. 

Of the notebooks, Philip Terry explains that he was offered a dusty crate found in a chateau under renovation that contained the disintegrating papers of an obscure French poet who had scouted the Lascaux caves as a possible hideout for his wartime Resistance cell in which he worked as a codebreaker (a cell that included “a tall wiry Irishman”). The poems found among the papers are Terry's translations from the French of Champerret's translation into contemporary poetic forms of the signs and symbols painted or carved alongside the famous paintings of animals. 

According to The First Signs by the paleoarchaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger, there has been little attention given to the meaning and significance of the signs and, while she doesn't offer a translation herself, she does say they could be humanity's first writing system. This gives retrospective mitigation to Champerret and he uses the freedom to gradually augment their spartan form to create the atmospherics of a domestic Ice Age scene. There are numerous others: descriptions of mountainous landscapes, the killing and butchery of prey, burial rituals, and ceremonies performed by shaman. As the poems follow the seventy signs listed in the back of the collection, the vocabulary is limited and over 380 pages this can be a monotonous read, enlivened by occasional use of prose and the patterning Mallarmé used in Un coup de dés. Even so, in the movement of each poem we sense from a state of deathless being in the world to one of displacement and distance – storytelling – stimulating in the reader an awareness of the profoundest moment in human evolution, which one cannot say of most other books of poetry.

"Movement" and "evolution" may be deceptive words here because everything changed as the first sign was simultaneously carved and read. A space opened in that instant, differing from the animal paintings because they are recognisable as representations of animals, whereas what the signs represent retreats behind their appearance, opening a beyond to their purely communicative value. Yes, the scholars say that the signs must have meant something to those who created them except, in such an act, a world apart was exposed. This is the great secret of the signs; an open secret which nevertheless remains.

What is also an open secret is that there was no Jean-Luc Champerret, no crate of papers, no poems in French. It’s curious then that of the four reviews of that I’ve found of The Lascaux Notebooks only one of them is aware that the author and his poems are inventions. Despite this, two reviewers take on face value Terry’s origin story, which one might think too literary to be true, with the hint of Champerret's connection to Beckett removing the benefit of the doubt. Of course, one cannot expect a reviewer to know an author's previous publications but one might hope they would look up Terry's name and discover that he edited The Penguin Book of Oulipo as well as works by the most renowned Oulipean of all, if not also notice that the blurb for his 2021 novel Bone announces that it was written without “letters with descenders (g, j, p, q, y)”. This prison narrative is in the spirit of the linguistic exercises by which the uninvented Dr Edith Bone maintained her sanity while solitary confinement for seven years; a literary embodiment of the prison-house of language and the unexpected spaces confinement might open, marvellously independent of authorial intention, all of which may have led reviewers to hear the echo of “Sham Perec” in Jean-Luc’s surname. [Update: I now understand one of the reviews didn't mention it in order not to spoil the effect.]

Missing this is perhaps an insignificant detail, a mere point of order, as is the fact that the story of the discovery of the Lascaux cave is itself an invention. Melvyn Bragg's introduction to the recent BBC's In Our Time episode on cave art repeats it and goes uncorrected by his expert guests. In a lecture in 1955, Georges Bataille tells his audience that the story of a dog called Robot falling down a hole and whose rescue led to the discovery was either made up by a journalist or local gossip and that the true story is that a storm uprooted a pine tree and a woman decided to put her dead donkey in the hole that had opened up, telling a local boy she thought it may be the entrance to a tunnel rumoured to lead to a château. Later, the boy and a couple of wartime refugees decided to explore the hole when some other refugees they had arranged to meet in order to give them "a good thrashing" failed to appear. 

As I wrote, perhaps insignificant. But at the end of the In Our Time episode, one expert says there is still lots of learn about cave art and while "we're still in the dark to some extent" recent developments in radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology should help to illuminate what's left to learn. For the ancient people, descent into the Stygian darkness of the caves is where they discovered, invented, themselves, and us. Philip Terry's transformation of the signs into poetry and dissimulating its origin may in turn be the proper means to turn our eyes towards that darkness. As Bataille writes elsewhere in a book of poetry and in opposition to poetry:

Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the world of discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I entered a kind of grave where the infinity of the possible was born from the death of the logical world.

As it is, we're still in the light.

The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I began reading The Morning Star without any prior knowledge of the contents, just as I had begun reading every other book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s since receiving an ARC of the first volume of My Struggle long before he shone above us like the morning star in this novel. This time, however, after having read the most of the opening chapter, a friend happened to mention Knausgaard had claimed it is a horror novel, following the example of Stephen King’s The Stand in which multiple characters narrate their experience of an apocalyptic event. I was then resigned to expect drama to enter the familiar world of everyday Norwegian lives narrated here much like the everyday Norwegian life in My Struggle, which until then I was enjoying in the same way. 

 

However, now that I’ve read all 666 pages, I can say I continued to enjoy it in the same way, perhaps because no apocalypse occurs, at least in the sense we understand it. What drama appears is not vast destruction but closer to the Greek meaning of apokalypsis: disclosure in the everyday sense and revelation in the theological. In The Morning Star there are only uncanny events in the corner of each individual’s everyday narrative: from excessively warm weather and wild animals appearing in great number, to characters who are apparently alive when they're dead, and, of course, the appearance of a new star in the sky. So comparisons to the horror genre are deceptive, as The Morning Star more closely follows volumes one and two of My Struggle in which the apparent banality of a human life presents itself against a background of absent meaning which is nevertheless forever impending, never quite arriving, no matter how many events promise resolution of the questions they present, which is why it’s surprising that Sam Byers’ very negative review reckons Knausgaard has “enriched” the My Struggle project “with a new and welcome undertow: unnamed dread”. But Unnamed Dread could be My Struggle’s alternative title! It's unname is there in the face in the sea young Karl Ove sees in TV footage in volume one and the sky in Constable's painting in volume two over which he weeps in the realisation that it can be depicted, if not named.

Naming what is unnamed in the novel – attaching public meaning where private meaning lacks – is not only expected by the reader and demanded by the reviewer but inevitable, as a book is defined by its submission to unity, from its title and all the way down through its sentences to its final full stop. The book differs from an everyday human life because the latter's meaning becomes a question only when it becomes a narrative, when something happens: a great love, a break-up, an illness, a bereavement, the loss of a football match; when what happens becomes something outside oneself; a genre narrative. This is why applying labels such as autofiction and horror by writer, reader or reviewer is an avoidance tactic, as it provides a name for the outside where its meaning is otherwise withheld. Byers is inadvertently on the right track when he calls The Morning Star “a literary supernova", which he uses as a metaphor for "the entire Knausgårdian project entering spectacular, all-consuming heat death”.

This is not an idea that has fallen apart in the execution, it’s a novel that dreams of having an idea, a novel that, over hundreds of pages, seeks meaning in everything from the boiling of an egg to the passing of a soul into the afterlife, only to come back empty-handed.

Indeed, what comes back is not an idea but the uncanny presence of the novel itself, emphasised here by what Byers calls its "bloated and inconsequential" content. That is, the novel and the Novel (if there is really any difference), an object of obscure fascination, an obscurity named to obscure it; the novel as the morning star, appearing in our heavens where heaven had previously retreated, further brightening what was otherwise already bright but which we could not see until it appeared, under whose blaze we sweat because nothing dies, hence the multiplication of animals and characters who remain alive despite their death, and an artist character whose most distressing symptom of mental illness involves resisting this fact, and in the final chapter an essay "On death and the dead" which nevertheless turns into a ghost story, as if the novel seeks its own end in vain, becoming the ghost of itself.

In 1969, Maurice Blanchot observed that:

Essays, novels, poems seem only to be there, and to be written in order to allow the labor of literature … to accomplish itself, and through this labor to allow formulation of the question "What would be at stake in the fact that something like art or literature exists?" (Translated by Susan Hanson)

The question is unintelligible to us because it is one, Blanchot says, the "secular tradition of aestheticism has concealed, and continues to conceal". Perhaps if we pay closer attention to the relentless, indeed interminable, presentation and inevitable evasion of the question, which Karl Ove Knausgaard fails to evade better than most, we may begin to hear what the ghost has to say.

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere

Even before one begins reading Sam Riviere’s first novel there is despondency as one registers that the title is a duplication of the English translation of Nikolai Gogol’s Мёртвые души, the novel in which a character seeks to buy dead serfs from their owners but who have yet to be removed from property registers and are thereby still taxed. It suggests that Dead Souls is an already belated publication, posthumous even, perhaps following the fashion for novels with commonplace phrases for titles or as allusions to past glories; the incontrovertibility of the one winning credence for the other. 

As one begins to read, the suggestion is affirmed yet complicated by the repetitious and pedantic phrasing of the sentences, the italicised paradoxical reversals of sense, and the long speeches reported by the first-person narrator, which is an overt adoption of Thomas Bernhard’s prose in which pedantry and repetition form an intoxicating music, paradoxical reversals are commonplace, and telescoped narration displaces the narrative centre and the guarantee it provides. Concerns about belatedness are acknowledged as the subject reported by the narrator is a case of literary plagiarism by a poet called Solomon Weise, whose surname is a German word that can mean melody, the manner or fashion in which one acts, or wise – the Wisdom of Solomon of course – while other characters soon appear called Christian Buch and Christian Wort, surnames that mean book and word in the language of the country in which the Gutenberg Bible was first produced and whose religious establishment was challenged by words nailed to a door. 

Weise had been ostracised by the poetry establishment because new technology has detected that his poetry is not original, and the bulk of the 320 pages are filled by the narrator reporting his monologue over drinks in a Travelodge bar describing the highways and byways of his life since being forced to withdraw from a poetry scene dominated by two sinister groups called the scolastici and the grammatici. The digressions, both perplexing and entertaining, are reminiscent of Tom McCarthy's Ballardian novels and which, to add to the despondency, Toby Litt says has much in common with the Contes Nocturnes of ETA Hoffmann. One narrates Weise’s retreat from London to the Norfolk town of Diss, an obvious allusion to the city of Dis, where Dante-like he encounters the damned souls of provincials, one of whom is an ex-prisoner of war who tells a story about becoming entranced by a fellow prisoner’s recitation of a poem in a foreign language, which later turns out to be not a poem at all but coordinates to an underground stash of riches which on being freed he can find and loot for himself. This is an obvious analogy of the various promises of poetry: an escape from the prison cell of the self it offers in the time of reading and, afterwards, the currency one can spend from one's fortress of cultural knowledge, and, perhaps most promising of all, access to mystic secrets concealed beneath the surface if only one can decode the poem, hence despondency for those who haven't read Gogol's novel, Hoffman's stories or know next to nothing about the manifold implications of the German Reformation, as they wonder if they shed light on the secrets of this novel and thereby of literature itself. All of which leads back to our initial unease with the belatedness and artificiality of its title and narration. 

As Solomon Weise ends his spoken-word Bildungsroman and parts company from the narrator, we no longer ask whether the allusions, analogies and the Bernhardian pastiche are clues and feel no need to go into search of the secret because we recognise it is a question and quest borne by the form and content of the novel itself and in the pleasure we take in following the highways and byways. The secrets of poetry or literature in general are nowhere to be found in publication, sales or recognition by the movements codifying the means of judgment (or in judgment at all), but in the perplexity of the reading experience itself, which appears to be too late, not an experience at all, or opposed to experience; posthumous, even.

Update: See a much better review by Huw Nesbitt.

Drowning is Fine by Darren Allen

For reasons unclear to me at the time I re-read several novels by Aharon Appelfeld, the author born in 1932 to a German-speaking Jewish family in what was also Paul Celan’s hometown, Czernowitz, then in Romania, now in Ukraine, and who wrote exclusively in Hebrew after he had escaped postwar Europe for Palestine. As you might expect, the novels are haunted by what happened in that time; only it is never in the foreground. Badenheim 1939 could be read as little more than a pantomime designed by Otto Dix but for the looming presence of the years to come, while the disfunctional family and unwelcoming title character in The Immortal Bartfuss could be a fraught domestic drama but for a past that refuses to be buried, and Theo’s long walk in For Every Sin would be a regular road movie but for where he was walking from:

When the war ended Theo resolved that he would make his way back home alone, in a straight lie, without twists or turns. The distance to his home was great, hundreds of miles. Nevertheless it seemed to him he could see the route clearly. He knew that this would separate him from people, and that he would have to remain in uninhabited places for many days, but he was firm in his resolve: only following a straight course, without deviation. Thus, without saying good-bye to anyone, he set out. [Tr. Jeffrey M. Green]

The background resonates in narrative reticence. There is only the road ahead: in terms of the story and each time for each reader when they open the book. The old world is a ghost and each sentence a step into a haunted waste land.

There are fortuitous reasons for Appelfeld’s style: not only did he struggle to learn the language, which meant he kept things simple, but also because, as he said, “Hebrew is a very precise language, you have to be very precise – no over-saying. This is because of our Bible tradition.” Moreover, in the newly formed state there was a demand to forget the past and make a new self, which meant playing down the drama. 

Then it occurred to me that it wasn’t a coincidence that I chose to read these novels alongside Darren Allen’s Drowning is Fine and then felt no need to read another once it was over. They provided a contrast to its high style and lack of reticence. There are reasons for the style here too.

Drowning is Fine is the first-person narrative of Daniel Hickman, an aspiring artist living a precarious existence in contemporary London, sharing a house with a colourful bunch of bohemians with whom he has little in common and working in a drudge office job alongside people with whom he has little in common. His desires have nowhere to go except into hyperbolic cries of despair: "I want to paint great things" he says. "I want to undo minds, I yearn to stretch into the abyss, to touch the living emptiness." If he sounds here like Tony Hancock in The Rebel, it only sharpens the bathetic edge of an existential crisis.

This is also what contrasts with Appelfeld: Daniel's situation is unremarkable. There is no Biblical tradition let alone the cowl of a catastrophe draped over his head. His background is more or less invisible but for an aside that his family came from "the self-replicating unplace of Borehamwood". He is, as his name suggests, a peasant in the lion's den, and so the novel is not so much an open road leading away from disaster as a cul de sac at the dog end of history.

In keeping with the condition, Hickman projects its innate disquiet onto his immediate surroundings. One of his bosses is Graham: 

he of the ball-bearing head and immaculate beard, who does his best to make everyone feel special and indispensable, but he only ever leaves the impression not so much of being special and indispensable, more of being a small, plastic, very much dispensable, pellet.

If such descriptions of Londoners, of which there are many, suggest a hysterical-realist novel documenting life in the neoliberal capital via the protagonist's schlubby travails, it wouldn't be inaccurate. Daniel is, as Terry Gilliam puts it in the blurb, a bit "arseholish": he uses a young woman who is attracted to him even as he fantasises an ideal love, and then, in a set-piece scene that is both moving and horrifying, he employs a Polish sex worker to enact such a love, reflecting to the reader their own displaced disquiet as they demand the real thing from an author they have paid to deceive them.

Except there is something else offered in what Daniel calls The Question.

It writhed belly-up at my bewilderment while I was in the garden, staring into the boughs of next door's fine oak tree. It burbled on in the background for a while then flashed intensely, salt-in-the-eye, for a shattering moment as I moon-walked on Geni's shiny parquet floor, enjoying another of those bone-comforts, those secret agreements with the most mundane and empty events. Hard to say what the question is, for it forms itself wordlessly, sliding in between my thoughts as I jog around the lake, or take another spoonful of yogurt.

As Drowning is Fine appears to be the first in a series, the answer could be what the overall title Things Unsaid refers to, which at first I thought might be sarcasm given the comparative excess of what things are said. Daniel's ambition to pursue the question would lead others to channel creativity in paid work in, say, graphical design, but, just as Theo prefers to walk alone rather than mix with other refugees, Daniel prefers "the dignity of being without a job". Nor is the galleried art scene his goal. On a date, he visits Bankside's "castle cubed of death" and stumbles upon an exhibition launch party:

It could be Weimar Germany, or the salon of Mme Geoffrin, or the 'wine and meat pool' of King Zhou, or some swanky Pyramid do in the Middle Kingdom. This party has been going on since the dawn of civilisation, and when the world is a charred husk these screaming, bellowing, bored swans will still be floating over the darkness in their gaudy bubble, talking about Miami Art Basel, tilapia and yurts.

But he had been impressed by the display of William Blake's death-mask, which gives a clue about how he will approach the question. Another takes the form of the title provided by Geni, his Tate Modern date, who says she wants to find a man she can die with, preferably by drowning. After the initial panic, she says "you have to give up, then you give up more completely than you'd ever imagined". If Daniel is shocked, he shouldn't have been, as throughout the novel he meets people who have given up without having yet gone under: two of his housemates, one in a care home, and many others passing him in the street. Allusions to Dante's Inferno and Eliot's Waste Land in which death has undone so many are thereby appropriate, but Daniel's London is also the decadent twin of Novilla, the drab and dry fictional city of JM Coetzee's Jesus trilogy, whose setting and society Robert Pippin says calls to mind the death of God, one in which everyone lives in exile from the highest values; an embodiment of Nietzsche's Letzter Mensch. Daniel corresponds to the two new arrivals in Novilla who live in a state of "profound homelessness", yet unable to join the lives of others in "forgetfulness and indifference".

Drowning is Fine draws to a close with Daniel literally homeless, dragging an art work through the streets with him as if clinging to the last relic of the highest values. This makes clear that what had impressed him in Tate Modern was the death-mask of possibility: of possibility in the personal, the political, the artistic and, one might add, the religious. For all his faults, Hickman is a modern-day Blakeian mystic in a culture where this can never mean anything outside the dubious romance of self-sabotage and self-destruction, hence why Daniel's arseholish nature rises to the surface in a novel whose conventional form only reanimates the ghost of the highest values.

The last of Aharon Appelfeld's novel I read alongside Drowning is Fine is an outlier in his work as it narrated by Katerina, a Christian Ruthenian, who comes to identify with the Jews for whom she works and who, later, she sees them from a distance disappearing in rail transports. In the austere and profound loneliness of the postwar years, she reflects that it is "too bad the dead are forbidden to speak", but this reminds us that the novel, as it dies, allows us to listen to their silence.

At home he’s a tourist: The Moment by Peter Holm Jensen

Such a modest, self-effacing title, barely relieved by the blanched map on the cover. In everyday speech, a word or two is usually added to supplement the weedy noun: people say “At this moment in time”, which is when I ask: can a moment be in anything else; a moment in lampposts perhaps? Their absence here suggests a wish to let the word’s delicacy remain unsupported, even at the risk of becoming its own camouflage in the literary landscape, a suggestion reaffirmed by its form as a journal of life in the marshy flatlands of rural Norfolk, with names reduced to initials. The form draws back from headlong narrative to pay attention to what passes without pause. Such a concern is not without precedent. 

 
For Peter Holm Jensen’s fellow Dane, Søren Kierkegaard, what comes into existence comes from the eternal, from outside of time and so, we can say, apart from narrative, concurring with Plato’s Parmenides which calls the moment “this strange entity” between one state and another that is “in no time at all”. St Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians says the state of being dead will become one of eternal life “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” with the second coming of Christ, while Meister Eckhart in his turn counselled “the traditional schools of knowledge” to remain silent and recognise themselves as unknowing before God’s light, which would arrive like “a powerful flash”. Again for Kierkegaard, whose journal was also written for publication and whose Works of Love is alluded to in this one, it is His incarnation that gives the moment access to eternity, but the eternal is not present in the moment because that remains in the future. Christ Himself is the moment of transition from past to future, from actuality to possibility, but Kierkegaard qualifies possibility as a duality offering “the possibility of advance or of retrogression, of rising or falling, of good or of evil”. So which will it be for our writer?

The answer is important for P. (there is good reason for following the book’s propriety and using the initial) as he admits to having spent years sunk in the sense of life’s pointlessness, aware without knowledge of “something neutral and indifferent that hovered over things and levelled all the events of life”. He wondered how those around him continued to endure tedious days in the office without ending it all in the evening. He would lie in bed thinking of ways to die, which may be read as a wish to submit to the neutral and indifferent, to what is outside of time. P. says he mistrusts writing because as he writes, he becomes his own double, watching on as the words remove themselves from the undifferentiated connection he desires. In seeking a way back, he finds “a strange hope” outside of writing when, sitting in a church as light streams through a stained-glass window, he senses “an overfacing power...something wholly other”. A strange hope manifest in the hesitant, open form of The Moment.

It is appropriate then that the novel begins in Spring, when flowers are blooming and animals give birth to new life. P.'s girlfriend S. asks the neighbouring farmer T. to wait while she picks the wildflowers before he can mow them down, and then to hand over the feral kittens he intends to drown. It’s even more appropriate because Spring is also the time of Easter, when what dies is resurrected: flowers in a vase, kittens from a bucket, and P. himself, resurrected in writing. His mistrust of writing then becomes entirely in keeping with exposure to the overfacing presence. How, he asks, can we live in the face of the impersonal? The strange hope takes form with that strange word, overfacing, uncommon in everyday English, which is ideal in suggesting the incommensurability of P.'s experience.

The same applies to his observations of the bucolic landscape and the people and wildlife in it. This should not appeal to the audience for nature writing, which tends towards coffee-table kitsch. Standing before the "dark cold coast" at Southwold – notable of course for featuring in WG Sebald's generically compromised novel The Rings of Saturn – P. resists any antropomorphic projection and regards it as "neither hostile nor benign".

If writing takes one closer only to one's impersonal doppelgänger and nature places the observer at an irreducible distance, it explains the publisher's definition of The Moment as a novel when otherwise it is P.’s straightforward private journal and commonplace book. If he’s not at home in writing, as a Dane raised in Canada, he’s also not at home in his England, in Norfolk, in his cottage, or even, because he works as a translator, in language, and so too not at home in this book. This reminds me of how Gabriel Josipovici responded when someone expressed surprise at how much he reveals about himself in writing: “I can ‘reveal’ precisely because it does not seem to be part of me, it seems to belong to someone else.” 

To ask again, how can we live in the face of the impersonal? This book is its own answer. If there is no advance or retrogression, no rise or fall, no good or evil here, by paying attention to the silence of its obscure presence, The Moment seeks a modest, self-effacing place within the intersection of time and eternity, between the low-rise marshy landscape overfaced by a giant, apparently empty sky. 

More and less: Veilchenfeld by Gert Hofmann

Gert Hofmann's Veilchenfeld is the latest of his novels to be published in English translation, and the first translated by Eric Mace-Tessler. Tom Conaghan at Review31 has given it an appreciative review, recognising that Hofmann's presentation of a civilisation's descent into barbarity is all the more powerful for being without the usual framing political context, without psychological comment, and without judgment. This is enabled by the child narrator, who is more or less innocent or incapable of all three. 

 
This is enough and I won't write another review but something more general instead.

Despite the quality of the review, there is no reference to any other of Hofmann's novels, which only emphasises the shame of their relative obscurity. Veilchenfeld is the eighth to be translated into English, and the first since Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl in 2004, also published by CB Editions. I don't know how many novels are left untranslated, as his Wikipedia page lists only Works. What the page does reveal, however, is that Hofmann began his career writing radio plays, which explains how the novels' disarming lightness and compression was developed.

Two other of the translated novels are narrated by a child: Our Conquest from 1991 and Luck from 2002, the latter being translated by his son, the poet Michael Hofmann, with whom he had an awkward relationship, as described in his 1986 collection Acrimony, which contains a poem describing how his father's career changed course:

After the age of fifty, a sudden flowering, half a dozen
                                                                                    novels
in as many years – dialogue by other means: his main
                                                                                    characters
maniacs, compulsive, virtuoso talkers, talkers for dear life,
talkers in soliloquies, notebooks, tape-recordings, last
                                                                                    wills

I'd add that many characters and/or narrators are also incapacitated in some way, setting them apart: as well as children lacking the knowledge and experience of adults, there is Lichtenberg, the hunchbacked intellectual dwarf, and the uneducated flower-selling girl, the blind men in The Parable of the Blind (a novel written in the first-person plural), the grandfather in The Film Explainer who has lost his beloved role because of the talkies, and perhaps also the bickering couples in The Spectacle at the Tower and Before the Rainy Season whose relationship issues are exposed when they are unable to escape each other as they tour a foreign land. Incapacity constrains the narrative and animates the various distances between characters, between narrators and their experience, and between words and their meaning. The blurb on the The Film Explainer best describes the effect: "makes you laugh and then burns holes in your head".

One reason for the novels' relative obscurity is that they don't conform to English-speaking assumptions about what German fiction should be like, and so are politely ignored, which I complained about in the golden age of blogging, first in 2006 and again in 2007. At the time, I was also frustrated by my own inability to explain why his novels are so atypically enjoyable. Tom Conaghan's review touches on the reason but, perhaps because he hasn't read the other novels (again, forgiveably so), focuses instead on the embedded moral lessons, whereas what stands out for me in his other novels is the experience of ambiguity; everything takes place in an indivisible, alarming now. Perhaps the simplest way to describe this is to present the opening sentence of Our Conquest, translated by Christopher Middleton, which is set during the collapse of the Third Reich:

One day our little town came to be conquered, or, as mother says, rolled up, from north to south, cut off from all surrounding towns and villages.

The fairy tale lightness of "one day our little town" and that curiously nonchalant phrase for what you’d assume is a threatening event, contains the whole, more or less. We ask, what does rolled up mean exactly? It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? As readers, we're immediately thrown into the wonder of the child narrator’s world, which is also its potential for horror. In the first of several set pieces, mother sends her boy and his friend on a mission to the town’s slaughterhouse to find some butterschmalz, which sounds like a rich treat for people on the brink of starvation but, we ask again, if it’s found in the slaughterhouse, can it be so pleasant? And won't that be a dangerous place to visit, especially as it may stand for the condition of the wider world at that time and place in history? Little mysteries like these pile up and, in any regular novel, we would expect explanations to be part of the story, only for them to end up constituting the novel.

If I were to write a normal review, I'd say Veilchenfeld, while it is full of the Hofmann's dark humour, suffers from the absence of what sets the other two child-narrated novels apart, and this is because everything is also contained in the opening sentence, more or less: "Our philosopher has died suddenly." This removes wonder and ambiguity and replaces it with the relentless pursuit of a foregone conclusion. Perhaps this is inevitable given the subject matter, as Prof. Veilchenfeld, though it's not stated explicitly, is Jewish, and his fate given the setting is a foregone conclusion, more or less, and his pre-mortem persecution can only distress and depress; there is no now, only then. The narrator says Veilchenfeld's house is owned by Frau Belling who is in an institution and will never leave, which his father knows because he bumped into the institution's doctor in Klemm's pastry shop. Father says the doctor says:

she can no longer hold her water, but that would not be so bad, if she did not also trickle away in the head, and no longer know who she is or who others are and in what year we are all living. (When she is asked, she simply says it is too late.)

This is why, at least in the context of the seven others, the novel disappoints.

The last novel

"(We are, it seems to remind us, always saying goodbye to our children.)"

John Self's aside in his review of JM Coetzee's The Death of Jesus captures the pervasive anxiety experienced while reading this novel better than even the most detailed plot summary, which is anyway likely to mislead the potential reader because it would highlight what, in the regular parts of his review, John calls the book's "unexplained developments, unrealistic dialogue and overcooked analogies". In fact, these features ease such anxiety as simply as any other workmanlike fiction might because judgments are set aside as one gets caught up in the drama, curious to see how it will resolve. And while this novel's drama does resolve with, as the title suggests, a definitive event, our anxiety doesn't fade, because of the title.

Coetzee may have enough control over the generic elements of novel writing for us either to overlook the unexplained, unrealistic and overcooked (or regard them as deformations of the medium) but we cannot overlook the title, which undoes all resolve.

Never has a title caused such consternation and speculation among professional reviewers. The setting of the story is convincing enough in its generic clarity but, for that very reason, everything appears out of nowhere, so everything can be read as random and hollow even as it builds a bustling world. Or, rather than appearing out of nowhere, everything appears out of literature, which for many is the same thing: this "bizarre allegorical trilogy" writes Alex Preston "never hits home, having no real-world corollary". If there is no real-world corollary, you might wonder if it's an allegory at all, or, if it is, you might wonder if it's an allegory of something other than the real world. But it's too late: "I’ve given up trying to force meaning into these novels", he declares, and is joined by Claire Lowdon, who writes "I will not be returning to these books to puzzle over them further", even if she does mention the obvious corollary, which anyway she suspects is a trick: "We try to map what we know of Jesus onto David’s story, but it doesn’t really fit. Nothing fits. There is no guide to life." It's fair enough not to puzzle on, as one could indeed spend an age speculating over the Biblical allusions and what Stuart Kelly calls the boy David's "pseudo-enigmatic utterances". Why not just enjoy the ride, as I did? After all, Lowdon admits that "the story as a whole slips along quite easily".


“I want to know why I am here”

Why not enjoy the ride? Because of the title. It is an undertow beneath the reader surfing back to shore; a tugging question that follows David's curiosity about how he came to be, which he tries to solve by asking his long-suffering guardian Simón: "How do you say aquì in other words?". He thinks an answer may arrive if another word for the Spanish for 'here' can be used. As readers, we too seek other words to understand what is going on here. James Womack is right when he says the reader sees a "story we recognise in the shadows of the story we are being told" but we can't quite make it out, and it is Womack who offers the reason why:

The trilogy is a work of speculative fiction, geared towards answering a particular question: what kind of Christ might grow from the Enlightenment?

The answer is given in the title of course: not grow at all. The world of the novel reflects a world with no place for an exception to the parched landscape of the setting in which science and reason have squeezed out speculative thought. Steven Poole gives the reason for David's alternative name:

“Jesus” is the label for a “wild creature” (as someone calls David) with a gentle contempt for the norms of civilisation; a disruptive force of ceaseless questioning that irrupts into ordinary domestic existence but not of it – as David insists.”

This too comes from literature, and not only from the New Testament. Coetzee has written elsewhere about Rilke's eighth Duino elegy in which the poet writes of 'das Offene', the open, a place outside the ordinary domestic existence in which animals live and children too until adults turn them towards conformity.

Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers
Antlitz allein; denn schon das frühe Kind
wenden wir um und zwingens, daß es rückwärts
Gestaltung sehe, nicht das Offne, das
im Tiergesicht so tief ist. Frei von Tod.

Which Coetzee transposes as: 

What is out there, we know it from the animal’s face alone; for even the young child we turn around and compel to look back, seeing form/formation, not the open, that in animal vision is so deep. Free from death.

For animals and children, the world is experienced as a "Nirgends ohne nicht", a nowhere without no. Death is unknown and the world is "a pure space into which flowers endlessly open". While the escapism of generic fiction may tease us with a return to this state for a time, 'no' is always provided by one's inner reviewer. Rilke says it is possible that a lover draws near to the condition for a time, while those nearing death no longer see death and stare ahead, merging life with death. In a letter, he explained in other words:

Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished from both. The true figure of life extends through both spheres, the blood of the mightiest circulation flows through both: there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the "angels", are at home. [Translated by Greene and Norton]

If we cannot return to childhood innocence of death, it must become part of our life. And it doesn't take a critical genius to see that the family dog, Bolívar, with whom David has a special affinity, is the animal and David both the child and the one facing death. So merely asking "Why am I here?" is disruptive to the settled world of the novel, even if it is answered easily by rational discourse and science. One may then ask: why is rational discourse and science here? Given that Simón and Inés are not David's biological father and mother, no science can explain why he is here, and while theology may answer, there is no theology in this world. It's why the trilogy has a monochrome clarity and why David appears to be a contrived presence: both are exaggerations of the condition of the reader's world in which the enchantment comes from works of imaginative fiction yet whose features are as predictable and as empty as pre-Enlightenment religious rituals that, when disturbed, cause howls of rage from the faithful. Every portentous statement David makes that frustrates Simón is also what frustrates the gatekeepers of literary fiction: they promise a revelation while only increasing the disruption of the generic conditions that are specifically in place to prevent revelation of any kind.

The question posed across the trilogy may be: what revelation is possible in genre fiction? Alex Preston sees a lack of answers as part of Coetzee's "elaborate joke" at the expense of his readers while Claire Lowdon thinks he's seeking a guarantee of posterity among academics (Purgatory after an Inferno of reviews), and yet they never question the assumption that there must be a clear intention and conclusive message, even though this would compel us to turn backwards to see the form/formation of the adult world. Despite his scepticism, Simón succumbs to this assumption by searching for the final message that David is supposed to have left before he died. The message, however, is there in David's apparent naivete and curiosity; a message embodied in his outrageous, inexplicable presence in the world, entering with no past and no future. It's no coincidence that, when David dies, Bolívar goes missing.

Our anxiety then is as much to do with saying goodbye to our children as saying goodbye to the novel.


“Like Don Quixote, this is a fiction about fiction.”

What's strange about the seven reviews I've read (some are behind paywalls) is that there are only nine brief references to the single other book to be mentioned throughout the trilogy, with only John Self noticing it as the most blatant hint of The Death of Jesus' inheritance. David has peculiar reverence for Don Quixote, the only book he's ever read, from which he learned to read and which he treats "not as a made-up story but as a veritable history", including the belief that Don Quixote is a real person in the world. Simón wants him to read other books because "reading means learning about the world – the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be”. But David is not interested. It's strange that it is passed over so readily in the reviews because the differences between David and Simón embody the modern reader's internal relation to fiction, which emerges so powerfully in the anxiety of the negative reviews: Simón loves his adopted son and believes he is special, even if he can't make sense of his enigmatic utterances and despairs over his resistance to reason.

Don Quixote is generally considered to be the first novel and a satire on idealism. The famous example of the Don jousting with a giant when there is only a windmill before him is enough to sum up its relevance: when people refer to someone "tilting at windmills" it indicates that we know better, that someone is comically deluded. And yet this is a novel, so the windmill is as ideal as the giant, and any knowing superiority we feel over the Don is possible only if we have succumbed to the same condition. The enchantment of fiction is a disruptive force because it offers the possibility of the opening of a world other than the one in which we are settled, while allowing us to pat ourselves on the back for knowing better than to believe that it is real. And yet, here we are, enthusiastically devouring novels and earnestly discussing them, expecting and indeed demanding something more than brief escapism. Our enthusiasm is usually understood as nothing more than this branch of consumer culture, often mitigated with virtuous recommendations that by reading a certain novel we can learn about another country, a particular time in history, a minority identity, or a news story dominating the newspapers. Reviewing always takes the upper hand by co-opting this mitigation as criteria for judgment, and is fiercely protective of its ground.

[Coetzee's] late novels are a scholar’s dream, precisely because of their opacity, their exponential proliferation of meanings. You can go symbol-hunting; you can read him as allegory; you can read him as anti-allegory. Everything that can be argued can be counter-argued in another journal article, another critical study. It’s a guaranteed route to posterity: if your file can’t be closed, then you’ll never really die.

Claire Lowdon's disdain is pure projection of the anxiety that reading and reviewing cannot accommodate the deeper reason why we read and feel the need to discuss novels. Still, it would be fair enough if the evidence didn't suggest Coetzee is attempting to close the file not on himself so much as on 'the novel'.

Coetzee is a curious case in contemporary review culture because his novels have always attracted mainstream attention for their relevance to current affairs without quite convincing reviewers that he's a state-of-the-nation type author, able to weigh in where journalism floats by, yet without being able to stick a permanent label on his work. Many lament a falling away from the greatness they have bestowed in the past or claim they had doubts from the start, while Martin Amis says Coetzee had "no talent" in the first place (a statement about which Steven Poole is brilliantly cutting). For example, Stuart Kelly begins his review by saying he:

admired works such as Waiting For The Barbarians, Life & Times Of Michael K, and Disgrace. But here’s the rub: I admired them but I never really enjoyed them. There is a frostiness to his work, an almost deliberate opacity. They hint at being profound, but are they?

All three novels – to which Foe and Age of Iron may be added – can be counted as novels ostensibly about racism and colonialism, and Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa in particular, which you wouldn't necessarily expect to be heart-warming, especially if they were written from within those brutal conditions. But what comes after Disgrace suggests anyway that Kelly's rhetorical question is disingenuous. Alex Preston notes how the allusions have changed since the early work:

It’s striking that the most powerful moments in Coetzee’s great earlier books were strongly allegorical and carried deep religious undertones: the washing of the feet of the “little bird-woman” in Waiting for the Barbarians; Lurie’s prostration in Disgrace; Michael K's journey to deliver his mother’s ashes. These work because, while they are clearly symbolic acts, they also propel the narrative of novels grounded in real human emotion. Now it feels as if all of the pleasures left to the reader of a Coetzee novel are pleasures of the head, not of the heart.

While damning Coetzee's later work to his newspaper's dilettantish, middlebrow audience, these apparently heartfelt allusions to a pre-Enlightenment tradition are purely novelistic gestures, grounded in generic law; enough for a worthy if sentimental response to the injustices and conditions described, but no more than that. Such Lazarus-like resurrections of a buried tradition have disappeared since at least Elizabeth Costello not only because they are part of "the genre of the oppressor" (as Leo Robson calls it in his New Statesman overview of Coetzee's career) thereby appropriating for itself the suffering of the victims of imperialism, but also because of the genre's oppression of the world, of the nowhere without no. With his veld-dry wit, the Jesus novels are clearly very different from Don Quixote, but the teasing, allusive, ungrounded content confirms the inheritance of an immanent critique of the novel. This has a background with which Coetzee is familiar.


"As a whole, [the Jesus novels] make you wonder what novels are even for" (Tim Smith-Laing)

Walter Benjamin's great essay The Storyteller argues that the rise of the novel was the product of a decline in everyday storytelling, which always contained something useful for the listener, whether that was a moral or practical: "In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers." Storytelling was a form of wisdom "woven into the fabric of real life" gradually removed by "the secular productive forces of history", one of which was the printing press, and what distinguishes the novel from storytelling is its dependence on the book. The novel is written by an author isolated in his room. He cannot give or receive counsel as it is no longer living speech. Benjamin says if the word 'counsel' has an old-fashioned ring, it's because "the communicability of experience is decreasing". It communicates something else instead:

To write a novel is to take to the extreme that which is incommensurable in the representation of human existence. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living. [Translated by Jephcott, Eiland and unnamed others]

Benjamin even cites "the first great book of the genre" as the prime example:

Don Quixote teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and contain not a scintilla of wisdom.

The reader of Coetzee's Jesus novels will recognise this perplexity, in themselves and the protagonists. What has replaced counsel in our time is information: "no event comes to us without already being shot through with explanations", something that these novels noticeably lack, while "half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation" because it allows the reader to absorb its counsel in their own way. In The Death of Jesus, David reads Don Quixote to an audience as if it was useful like this, but the audience, like a chattering of reviewers, only ask questions, needing information and explanation.

If this suggests an opposition between storytelling-fact and novel-fantasy, leading to the hope that 'creative non-fiction' may be the modern form of regaining counsel, we must remember this too remains a book. And, anyway, Benjamin confounds such expectations by linking the decline in the communicability of experience and the rise of the novel with the decline of the idea of eternity, taking us back to Rilke's Eighth Elegy:

All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience, as if on a ladder. A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds: this is the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock in every individual experience – death – constitutes no impediment or barrier.

The ladder into the clouds is the sign that the story is timeless and can continue beyond its telling, whereas the novel is confined to earth and burial, which follows from its rise in the decline of faith in transcendence. The reader of the novel is confronted with the question of the meaning of life without it ever being addressed, hence "the perplexity of the living".

The novel is significant...not because it presents someone else's fate to us...but because this stranger's fate, by virtue of the flame which consumes it, yields to us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.

What warmth is there from David's death? None, apparently; only unease, anxiety. What makes Coetzee unusual is that, while he has appealed as a writer of the earth, his later novels stare ahead, and from our perspective they are unsatisfactory because they reveal the inadequacy of the genre as a means of climbing into the clouds, which would explain the perplexed reception of the post-Disgrace novels, albeit directed at the author rather than the genre.

"It has been rightly said that all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one – that they are, in other words, special cases" writes Benjamin in his essay on In Search of Lost Time. JM Coetzee's Jesus trilogy may neither be great literature nor establish a new genre, but perhaps it does put an end to one, and is special for this reason: The Death of Jesus may be the last novel.