New Voice

“to weigh and consider”, Francis Bacon (the essayist, not the painter)
“the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface”, Roland Barthes 

I cannot aspire to becoming one on whom nothing is lost but, by way of this diary I do hope to cease being one on whom almost everything is lost.  I will follow my fellow blogger Eugene in declaring my intention to make this a regular, perhaps weekly post, in an effort to shame myself out of idleness, and to catch hold of some of those impressions that flit by as I read my evenings away.     (continue reading…)

 ”Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson 

There is a great deal to go on in Don DeLillo’s taut, contemplative new novel (or novella) Point Omega, only some of which I will comment on here.  I have no wish to review the book, or summarise its contents.  In the opening pages the author, always an accommodating if often misjudged, guide, teaches us how the book should be read, and how much can be gleaned from its apparently slim leavings.  A lone figure in the cool darkness of a gallery space is focusing on the art installation 24-Hour-Psycho: “It was only the closest watching that yielded this perception.  He found himself undistracted for some minutes by the coming and going of others and he was able to look at the film with the degree of intensity that was required.  The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it.  The film’s merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded” (p5).  His stillness is contrasted with the other visitors “wandering … in a daze” (p3).  (continue reading…)

Towards the end of his follow-up to The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer Simon Gray mentions going to see a film called  Look at Me, “the idiotic title of the French film Comme une image”.  He goes on to describe this “freak of a film, full of intelligent and civilized people behaving to each other as such people frequently behave to each other, egocentrically, thoughtlessly, narcissistically, with mainly accidental but sometimes deliberate cruelty, all of them perfectly observed in their smallest reactions…”.  I’ve seen the film in question, and he’s right, and justly celebrates the “everyday sort of treachery” that forms the basis for a “marvellously painful moment” in the film.  (continue reading…)

“Our arms are canes of flesh with which the soul reaches and touches.” 
Joseph Joubert (The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert  p 30) 

“As spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories” 
David Lodge (Consciousness and the Novel p 15)   

Paul Auster considers himself first and foremost to be a storyteller.  He is concerned with stories: how they are made and what they are made of; the part they play in our lives; and the manner in which they inform, and even form, our sense of selves. 
 
There is in his work a complex interaction between memory and imagination, experience and desire.  Language is, of course the medium through which they come together. 

(continue reading…)

“But alas, the novel too is ravaged by the termites of reduction”
(Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p17) 

“a period of repetition in which the novel keeps duplicating its form, emptied of its spirit”
(Milan Kundera, p15) 

In his essay “The Uses of Desire”, Adam Phillips has the following to say about what psychoanalysts term “the antonym of desire” or “perversion”, but which he chooses to call “an anxious narrowing of the mind when it comes to pleasure”: 
“An intent knowingness – a determined and determining knowing what one wants – characterises so-called sexual perversions.  The person in a perverse state of mind has no conscious doubt about what will excite and satisfy him.” (Side Effects, 167)  (continue reading…)

What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record – not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer.  In his letters he is making himself up for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or for posterity.
(Sophie, Summertime, p 224)   

 What if we are all fictioneers…?  

What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives?
(p226)  (continue reading…)

 Switching on the internet last Satuday morning I was delighted to see Martin Amis reviewing John Updike’s final collection of stories on The Guardian website.  Now, Amis is no ordinary, jobbing critic, and this piece of work did not disappoint.  What followed was a thorough, engaged and beautifully attentive delineation of the frequent lapses in Updike’s prose.    (continue reading…)

Fiction and Reflection – Part 2

by David O’Connor

     There is great attention to detail in many of the shortest stories.  Often only a paragraph or a page or two in length, these offer meditations on the minutiae of daily life, slowing down lived experience, framing and isolating aspects of that experience.  This technique may be elucidated, perhaps, by looking at “The Mice”, in which the domestic scavengers of the title are unable to find food in the dirty kitchen as there is “something so out of proportion to their experience that they cannot deal with it.”  The mice are overwhelmed by overabundance, incapable of taking it all in, of finding their way amidst such plenitude, just as we cannot process all that surrounds us, the unassimilable superfluity of sensual, emotional and cultural material to which we are (over-) exposed.  (continue reading…)

Fiction and Reflection: Part 1

 by David O’Connor

Lydia Davis had been writing stories for magazines, periodicals and small presses since the mid 1970s when her first book for a major publishing house came out in 1986.  Break it Down comprised of new and less recent stories, and introduced a wider readership (in the USA anyway) to the style she would develop further in subsequent collections: Almost No Memory, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant and Varieties of Disturbance.  Ranging in length from a single line, through paragraph-long meditations, to 20-30 page narratives, these stories, as Dave Eggers put it, in McSweeney’s, “straddle a line between philosophy, poetry and fiction”, rendering such categories “meaningless because her stories just work.”  (continue reading…)

If we required proof of the scrawny parochialism of the Irish, and its slightly better fed parent, the British, publishling industries, we need look no further than the absence of the works of Lydia Davis from our bookshops. 

One of the most strenuous, inventive and celebrated of contemporary American writers, she is currently, it would seem, without a publisher on this side of the English-speaking world.  And we need her.  Her relentless probing into the human predicament, through innovative literary forms could only be welcomed by those of us growing tired of being subjected to the adoring praise showered on those accomplished advocates of the “good read”, now plying their trade so successfully in these islands.