39 Books: 1999

I've always preferred the Serpent's Tail edition of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet over the others published around the same time, such as from Quartet Encounters and Carcanet, the latter with a fussy variant on the title: The Book of Disquietude. But this one is the most pleasurable to hold and read. It's curious how the production values of a book can affect one's experience of its content, or at least the perception of the experience. Isn't the first translation of a poem one reads always the one held deep within despite knowing better?

By the time I read this edition I had completed an MA in (what else?) Modern European Literature and was working full-time after abandoning a PhD. But fascination with the subject would never leave me and while I wrote a few essays and reviews for one of the early ezines, my reading was a desultory drift in spare time. In 100 Days, which partly inspired this 39 Books series, Gabriel Josipovici says he didn't feel cut out for writing the PhD he had begun, but much of the ideas for it were later incorporated into his first book of criticism The World and the Book. It would take a few years before I found my equivalent, albeit paltry in comparison. (Referring to Josipovici is relevant to The Book of Disquiet, as you'll see.)

Despite my preference for this edition, I cannot find the passage that opens the one edited by Richard Zenith and which Pessoa had marked 'opening passage':

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why.

Replace 'God' with 'Literature' and the condition I found myself in between abandoning working towards recognised and socially valuable qualifications and casting around during the evenings and weekends begins to make sense. Did I read such books without knowing why? Yes, indeed, as the agitated partisanship of my early work displays. The self-conscious despair and self-pity of Bernardo Soares would then have naturally appealed, dovetailing with a distracted, haphazard intellectual life. 

Against the universal acclaim it has received, Gabriel Josipovici is a dissenting voice on The Book of Disquiet. In his TLS review of the Penguin edition in 2001, he says "while I recognize Pessoa's greatness as a poet" and despite The Book of Disquiet displaying all of the themes of his greatest poetry – "a concern with solitude, with anonymity, with boredom, with the dreamlike nature of life" – all we find here is "Pessoa the solitary and depressive individual".

Unfinished works, or works whose authors felt would have to be released into the world despite their failure to find an adequate form for them, abound in Romantic and post-Romantic literature, from Keats's Hyperion to Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, from Kafka's Castle to Wittgenstein's Investigations. All are fascinating and magnificent works, in spite or perhaps because of their lack of completion. So what is it that makes The Book of Disquiet so unlike these works?

One answer, he believes, is the book's lack of shape. The works such as those mentioned above "have always given the readers the sense that their incompleteness was their shape, that the struggle to build a mighty cathedral, followed by the acceptance that all we had was a ruin, was somehow what they were about" while Pessoa/Soares "seems curiously satisfied with its fragmentary status, curiously uninterested in reaching out for more".

In his book-length study, Thomas Cousineau's also compares the book to other fragmentary or unfinished greats by using one of Pessoa's poems, as written by one of his famous heteronyms, in which a vase lies shattered on the ground:

What is most striking [in the poem] is the way that an initial impression of loss...coexists with the implication that the dropping of the vase has led not only to loss but also to a reshaping of space into a pattern. [...] What had hitherto been just an ordinary vase has now—thanks to its being “smashed into more pieces than there was china in the vase”—become the scattered parts of a sheltering pattern. [...] We may think of The Book itself as also having resulted from a comparable kind of shattering.

But he then notes that Pessoa "frequently stressed the fundamental importance of construction to the value of a literary work. He claimed, for example, that the structure of the Pindaric Ode is not merely a literary convention, but, rather, an axiom of the human spirit". We might see doubts about the book's incompletion more generally in the very number of editions with their own selections and organisations, culminating in 2017 with the sumptuous The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition, also published by Serpent's Tail, with its handsome cover and cloth bookmark. Without knowing why, we still value the intact vase above all.

39 Books: 1998

I said I'd come back to "not writing". 

A few months ago I watched Unstuck in Time, a long but captivating documentary on the life of Kurt Vonnegut and his friendship with the film's maker, Robert Weide. In his final years, Vonnegut moved to the country and stopped writing. His neighbour was the novelist John Irving who said first thing in the morning he'd often find Vonnegut sat on his porch. He claimed to have been there for only a few minutes, but numerous dog-ends on the slats at his feet suggested otherwise. Weide asks: "What happens when a writer stops writing?"

The question had been on my mind long before I heard it asked, prompted by wondering what Maurice Blanchot did when he stopped writing, at least stopped writing for publication. He died in 2003 after living quietly in this location, as discovered by the poet David Wheatley.

For a writer who was heavily involved in Parisian journalism before the war, then writing for many years in solitude and isolation in a stone cottage in the medieval village of Èze, and in the late fifties back in Paris to oppose the rule of Charles de Gaulle, becoming an anonymous force in the May '68 revolt, it seems unlikely that he would stop. But if he wrote anything new and unpublished, it wasn't found after he died among the manuscripts of previous works "salvaged from a rubbish bin" after his death. 

When Philip Roth announced that he would write no more, I felt that partly explained why I never valued his work, as it suggests a literary professional at work rather than those I valued who wrote as an existential necessity: "as long as I live I live writing" as Thomas Bernhard said. No doubt this is an overly romantic demand. The book for this year reveals that the opposite – the need not to write – can also be an imperative.

After Jorge Semprun was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp he stopped working on the book he was trying to write because "the two things I had thought would bind me to life – writing, pleasure – were instead what estranged me from it, day after day, constantly returning me to the memory of death". To remain alive, he had to stop: "while writing depends on memory, staying alive can depend on forgetting."

Written much later, Ecriture ou la vie is the narrative describing his liberation, which would be more faithfully translated as Writing or Life. It crashes forward like waves crawling up a beach only to be drawn back by the undertow of terrible memories. 

One of the happier ones comes soon after liberation when he bonds with an American soldier over their shared love of German literature who then uses his authority to insist on a private tour of the Goethehaus in nearby Weimar. The elderly guardian is very unhappy with their presence and talks proudly of showing the Führer around the building. The soldier shoves him up against a wall and locks him out so they can continue in peace. Going back to my entry for 1989, I wonder if the old man was the father of Grete Kirchner, Kafka's brief infatuation 33 years before. It's a remarkable possibility.

Of course, Kafka is another example of someone who felt an existential need to write but who also questioned its value. Unlike Vonnegut and Roth, however, he never stopped writing. So, to ask again: "What happens when a writer stops writing?". The question hangs before us like fog over the edge of a cliff. The writer is the one who runs.

39 Books: 1997

I found this ghastly 60-page Grove Press hardback edition in a second-hand bookshop, its large typeface and generous spacing very similar to Beckett's late works (Barbara Bray, Beckett's translator, also translated this). Such productions are rare now, and perhaps were when it was published in 1986. Fitzcarraldo's edition of Jon Fosse's A Shining and Carcanet's edition of Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes, both under 60 pages, are notable exceptions.

With such short works the reader is naturally suspicious, naturally perceiving a lack, as if the weight of pages and density of typeface promise a fulfilment these spare productions proleptically withdraw. It may then be appropriate that the story of The Malady of Death is that of a man, an unidentified 'you' addressed by the narration, seeking to end a lack by paying an unidentified woman (declared not to be a sex worker) to sleep in a bed in his presence.

You say you want to try, for several days perhaps.
Perhaps for several weeks.
Perhaps even for your whole life.
Try what? she asks.
Loving, you answer.

The narration proceeds from there, in a circle, around the bed. This is a cold echo of the Albertine Asleep passage in The Captive in which Marcel watches his mistress in bed and in that state realises the possibility of love as he no longer needed to live on the surface of himself. In Duras's novel, the woman says love for him is an impossibility. He asks why she accepted his deal. She says it's because she saw he was suffering from the malady of death. 

You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's likely to die without any life to die to, and without even knowing that's what he's doing.

I recognised that the inability to feel even the deprivation of life also follows another famous work, though it was only later through Maurice Blanchot's chapter on the novel in The Unavowable Community that I learned Duras had translated and staged the story, Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle. John Marcher tells May Bartram that the deepest thing within him was "the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible", which turns out to be standing over May's grave. The escape from the beast would have been to love her: "No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant."

We read these three stories, so very different from one another in form and style, in the same way, from afar. It would be straightforward to stand back further and write essays about sexual politics, of repression and otherness using these works as examples, and The Malady of Death in particular given its overt focus on sexuality, and yet in its anonymity, the univeralism of the address to 'you', each one of us is implicated, removed from passion, seeking what is outside of us in the work. As readers each one of us is the one "to whom nothing on earth was to have happened". We are all Marcherites now.

39 Books: 1996

It's a commonplace that in reading novels one can escape the ravages of time. In 1994, I borrowed my student housemate's innocent-looking hardback edition of Nicholson Baker's The Fermata in which Arno Strine writes about how he can actually stop time. The title refers to the sign in music scores, as seen on the cover, indicating "a pause of unspecified length on a note or rest".

What he does with the superpower divided critical opinion, with Victoria Glendinning calling it "a repellent book" and another an "unlikely masterpiece" (I side with the latter). Adam Mars-Jones was his usual considered self with his criticism of the treatment of Baker's theme, which he says is "the innocence of male sexual desire", which must be the reason for my housemate's purchase, as he has made a significant career out of the psychology of mating. 

Two years later, I bought a second-hand paperback with the cover quote "The funniest book about sex ever written". While this is the obvious 'about', I did wonder why nobody had noted that it was also a metafiction on the ethics of fiction as an artefact of the imagination.* Freud said the imagination doesn't know 'no' and, in the 'fold', neither does Arno Strine. We tend to think of fiction as 'exploring' a subject and ethics arises as  as immanent to fiction: the questioning of Paul West's choice in The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg to describe the execution of those who plotted to assassinate Hitler, as discussed in JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, or Karl Ove Knausgaard violating the privacy of his family in his autofictional series. But what The Fermata does is something very different: the imagination is embodied in a plot device and becomes real without being realistic; it is beyond realism. This would explain why Adam Mars-Jones complains that is a "protracted refusal to engage with sexual consequence" and why "Baker almost takes pride in elaborating his theme more or less indefinitely, without actually exploring it". The book is the embodiment of the theme and we inhabit it.

Twenty-eight years later, writing this series means I don't have time to read again all 303 pages of The Fermata, and while that may appear to be a cop-out, I am reminded of the fuss I make about titles – see the entries for 1985 and 1986 – and how we often remember the titles of novels without remembering much of the detail and instead hold in our memory not a detail but the idea of the work, its unexposed kernal, promised by the overt content.

* Incidentally, I had a similarly solitary reaction to Robert Altman's 1993 film Short Cuts, which I remember talking about as we walked out of the Duke of York's in Brighton, going through each separate 'cut' noting the evidence of how they were all underlined by the same theme, and yet never heard the same analysis anywhere else.

39 Books: 1995

Looking over the list of books read over a decade, it becomes clear that each book came too early or too late, or not at all; unless, of course, not yet. Untimely medications. Of the first, Robert Pinget's Be Brave applies. Again, lightness rather than heaviness, when there was hope, the illusion thereof. All too early.

Pinget was a friend of Beckett's who, in their correspondence, told him "Don't lose heart, plug yourself into despair and sing it for us". Be Brave was published in French soon after Beckett's death, and then a few years later in a translation by Barbara Wright by Red Dust of New York alongside Théo or the New Era. Together they add up to 62 pages. Be Brave is divided into 138 numbered entries in a notebook kept by Monsieur Songe (Mr Dream) as a commentary on his struggles with writing something substantial. The book exists on the threshold before its birth:

33

Possible development.
No more table, no more bed, no more house.
A street corner. Deserted. It's Sunday.
He's sitting on the ground, huddled up against a wall.
Someone passes by and gives him a couple of sous.
A conversation starts up.
A conversation starts up...
Come on, be brave...

Kafka said he life was a hesitation before birth, which in The Judgement becomes a death. Monsieur  Songe and his creator is aware of the paradox.

117

In the end he himself will become the worm that feeds on his carcass.
Could be said more elegantly, but elegance in this case...

Things improve when he remembers previous 'deaths' in the echoes of the plot of The Inquistory, Pinget's 400-page, punctuation-free question and answer novel (a paperback I own but have read only part because, again, it was too soon, too late, or perhaps, at least I hope, not yet. But what does it mean for a book to be on time? How do we know why, or even if, a book has any meaning or worth for us, and if that meaning or worth is not merely an epiphenomenon determined by the fleeting circumstances of our self-absorbed day that we project back onto the book?).

There is despair in Be Brave, but also singing. But that is said too soon; this is not clutching public approval from the jaws of private grief. Perhaps singing depends on despair, and so despair is released into the world within the Trojan Horse of singing, and silence would therefore be ideal. "Could there be a muse of silence?" Monsieur Songe wonders. If there is, he realises, it is a game lost in advance.

39 Books: 1994

Given that my undergraduate degree was in Philosophy, it may seem odd that this the first book of philosophy in the series. Many will say it is not a book of philosophy at all. That would explain why I gorged on Nick Land's The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism because it was the polar opposite to the guidebook on the syllabus, which we had to buy for an excruciating £13. Looking into Jonathan Dancy's Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (I'm hesitant to call it reading) I knew philosophy wasn't for me.

Things were made more difficult because the associated literary modules suggested to me that I had no real interest in Literature either, apart from one anyway. Rereading the book thirty years on has been painfully instructive even if I still revel in the fevered departure from the po-faced poise of academic prose. As Nick Land says of critical distance: "it is remarkable how degraded a discourse can become when it is marked by the obsessive reiteration of the abstract ego, mixing arrogance with pallid humility."

There is not a single sentence [in this book] which is other than a gratuitousness and a confusion; a cry at least half lamed and smothered in irony. Each appeal that is made to the name ‘Bataille’ shudders between a pretension and a joke. Bataille. I know nothing about him. His obsessions disturb me, his ignorances numb me, I find his thought incomprehensible, the abrasion of his writing shears uselessly across my inarticulacy. In response I mumble, as a resistance to anxiety, maddening myself with words. Locked in a cell with my own hollow ravings…but at least it is not that…(and even now I lie)…

The echoes of Dostoevsky's underground man are unmistakable (and I wrote about other echoes of Dostoevsky's underground man in contemporary literature only recently). The pain comes from recognising the dilettantism of my reading then and how I missed the direction I could have taken much earlier had I followed the clues.

The heart of literature is the death of God, the violent absence of the good, and thus of everything that protects, consolidates, or guarantees the interests of the individual personality. The death of God is the ultimate transgression, the release of humanity from itself, back into the blind infernal extravagance of the sun.

The book also raises the issue of secondary literature. The distinction between genres is clear: there is literature and there are books about literature. But where is the border between one and the other? How does one cross it, or, perhaps instead, how does one not cross it?

39 Books: 1993

I've written about Gert Hofmann's novels a few times, most recently Veilchenfeld (Our Philosopher in the US edition), but not his short stories. In the year Hofmann died aged only 62, I bought and read Balzac's Horse and other stories in the wonderful Minerva paperback imprint. They confused and disappointed me. Later, I lost the book along with many others.

On a whim last year I searched for a replacement copy and found the Secker & Warburg hardback was cheaper than the paperback. As soon as I read the first few lines the confusion and disappointment was turned on myself; how could I have been so wrong, so ignorant? The reason I felt so differently in 1993 is the same reason for my confusion and disappointment seven years earlier reading other Faber-published novels that didn't have the weight and philosophical perspective of the one that instigated this deep dive into reading: Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. I was looking for heaviness and Hofmann is lightness; "limpid, neutral, hyperrealist" in Ian Bamford's words. The second story in the collection – 'Casanova and the Extra' – is a Burlesque companion to The Judgement.

An advert for Minerva paperbacks from 1990. Hofmann's Parable of the Blind at bottom left, Peter Handke's great novel Repetition on the row above. Those were the days.

Even after a stroke at aged 57, brought on, his son Michael says, by writing a novel each year for ten years, Hofmann didn't stop writing. He was unable to read and edited his final novel verbally, responding to drafts read aloud by his wife. 

Not writing is the condition of the two writers in 'Arno', the fifth story in Balzac's Horse. The title character has given up writing "from inside" and turned to writing an obituary of his new neighbour, an elderly poet, Herr Quasener, and imagines him sitting in the dark at the back of his room with his life's work, which, according to the local librarian, is no longer in demand: "Nobody here...still buys literary works or thinks about them, everyone despises them or ignores them." 

The story ends with Arno and his mother peering into the darkness of the neighbour's room wondering if Herr Quasener has died, in effect delaying the end of 'literary works' with the obituary waiting in Arno's bottom drawer and the story suggesting otherwise by its mere existence. Wallace Stevens observed a similar thing: "Yet the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined." As did Maurice Blanchot: "Not to write—what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point, and it is never sure." And, already cited, Franz Kafka: "I am a writer, which is actually true even when I am not writing."

I will come back to "not writing".

39 Books: 1992

Poetry is a notable absence in my book lists. I assumed at this time that because novels excited my attention, poetry should do too. Under this assumption I bought and read Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems in this chunky Faber edition, adding an ugly plastic cover.*

Many of Stevens' lines still go around my head like song lyrics – slogans from an inert revolution – and there are many I reread in the glorious Collected Poetry & Prose edition published by the Library of America, but poetry is a foreign language I read without the inwardness of a native. A sign of this appeared when, in my student years, I detected something Heideggerian in Stevens' poetry and was smug when subsequently I discovered Frank Kermode's essay Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut.

Always this movement away. I am drawn to what others write about poetry – Geoffrey Hartman's essay on Wordsworth was a highlight last year – just as I like reading art criticism without having a great interest in looking at the paintings themselves. Perhaps it is the longue durée of narrative that I miss, which would explain why Dante is a major exception. This year was also the first time I read the whole of the Divine Comedy, as I took a course studying it after we'd read through the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.** 

A preference for long-form narrative would not explain why Paul Celan's poetry is also an exception. Except I think there is a connection between Dante's expansion and Celan's compression. It is not novels I am drawn to but those works that push literature to its limits, and not merely for the sake of it, as I suspect many Anglophone so-called experimental novelists do, in which length and complexity are assumed to be an unquestionable good, but those that subject writing to what is outside its generic boundaries. My distance from poetry is then an intolerance of generic safety; that old story. This may also explain why I am drawn to metafiction, itself an intolerable genre.

* My father did his engineering apprenticeship at a company that built steam engines. It was called Wallis & Steevens. No doubt he made notes towards a supreme traction...

** Alongside me in this tutorial group was someone who later became very famous in the UK and in his first TV appearance mentioned reading classical poetry. Unfortunately, I can't find the clip.