Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels

It worries me when a new book about the Holocaust comes out. Not with history books, but fiction, particularly with books like Martin Amis' Time's Arrow or here with Fugitive Pieces, because the authors generally haven't lived through that period of time, so it seems odd they think that they'd do justice to it. Then again, Time's Arrow (which I haven't read) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Fugitive Pieces was critically acclaimed (and rightly so) when it came out, so I'm not sure why I'm worrying. I guess I'm not very good at this sort of thing.

The point is, Fugitive Pieces is a very, very good book, and obviously written by an excellent writer. Rather than dealing with the Holocaust itself, it details the life of Jakob Beaer, who escaped from his house after his family was killed and was saved by a Greek geologist, Athos. The Holocaust hangs over Jakob, mentioned in detailed, shocking asides, and provokes a feeling of guilt in him even though he was, in a sense, one of its victims. The 'Fugitive Pieces' of the title refer not only to the diaries and documents hidden underground, and Jakob's and Athos' notebooks, but also what their lives have become, as after such a traumatising experience it is only until the end of the first part that Jakob is able to find any closure. The chronology of the novel is fractured and fragmented. It is almost like looking at a bombed building - when looking at it, you can tell where each room was, more or less, but the details of the room, such as furniture or even where the walls once were, are mixed up together and hard to make out.

I wish I had liked the book more. It deserved it. Yet I only managed to get into the book in the last sixty pages or so. I suppose part of the reason is because Michaels presents a real life. There are no sudden reappearances, or coincidences; instead, it is how Jakob, and many others, tried to have normal lives afterwards. However, in doing so the book felt uneventful and quite dull rather than being a riveting psychological drama. Also, the characters didn't feel like they had different voices, and there seems to be no difference in the perspective of the character in part one and the character in part two.

But I think the main problem was me - that is, it wasn't my kind of book. It certainly had a large effect on a lot of people, and it is obvious from turning to any page that Anne Michaels knows exactly what she is writing, how she is writing it, the effect of it all. It's hard to write a book dealing with this era of history, alongside books like If This Is a Man and Anne Frank's Diary, but Michaels has written something which is original as well as respectful. I don't know whether it'll be remembered with Anne Frank and Primo Levi, or even whether it should. Even though I said above I worry when new books on this subject come out, I think books on this subject need to be written, especially now when we're dangerously near a time when no-one living remembers it, no-one has first hand experiences of it. The First World War has been lost. It's only a matter of time.

Fugitive Pieces can be bought here

Sock 5: Three Skins Without Men, David Firth

I've been a huge fan of David Firth ever since watching the original Salad Fingers videos (particularly 'Shore Leave). His animations could be described as Lynchian, but without the pretentiousness that usually comes with the label. It's a shame to see his YouTube videos filled with comments which just say 'wtf', because although that's a pretty accurate first impression, it implies these videos have been made purely to shock rather than having any real depth to them.

I only found out about the 'Sock' series (which 'explore[s] narratives that flow like dreams') a few days ago, and Finnegans Wake immediately sprung to mind. Finnegans Wake (Joyce's last work) is generally believed to be the drunken sleep of an Irishman, and the language in it is designed to reflect the vagueness of dreams. If this is true, then the main problem (except that it's almost completely unreadable without annotations, etc.) is that dreams are primarily visual. They are almost like films that someone else has written - you are a character who can only watch as your actions and those of others happen and you generally can't do much about it - yet you can still understand what's happening. I've yet to find a book which combines the ambiguity of dreams whilst still being readable and knowing what's going on, and I reckon it's because the only way you can truly explore dreams in this sense is through a medium such as film - to present the film as you see and hear it.

Sock 5 is the best episode of the sock series so far. One reason for this is the change in animation style. It's been over five years since the last episode, and Firth has changed from using drawn animations to manipulated photographs. This style is reminiscent of surrealism, hyperrealistic sculptors like Ron Mueck and Duane Hanson, as well as other YouTube animators such as Cyriak. Trees and grass wobble in the background rather than fluttering in the breeze, people walk sideways like crabs, and body parts frequently part from their owners and fly out of shot, never to return. It is these visuals which retain the dubiety of dreams whilst still allowing the viewer to understand the events shown.

However, the main reason why it is the best episode so far is because it's just incredible to watch. I realise at least some of the people watching the video have tried to come up with some hidden meaning of symbolism buried in the work, but it is this sort of analysis Sock 5 avoids.

That isn't to say the video is completely random - there is a definite structure to the vignettes we are presented with. One part of the video, 'Three Men Without Skins', is a spot-on parody of sharp gangster film dialogue as perfected by Tarantino, whilst the gun shop scene ('Brilg & Spowegg') is exquisitely tense in itself.

Sock 5 creates in ten minutes what other filmmakers can't in over two hours. It presents us with a world which is disturbing, surreal, yet horribly relatable.

Click here to watch Sock 5

Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis

Everything's a lie. That's what we learn in the opening pages of Ellis' Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to his first (insanely popular) novel, Less Than Zero. However, although the former book was from Clay's perspective, it actually wasn't. Rather, the months in which it was set were lived through the eyes of another teenage friend (presumably Ellis himself) who conveniently painted himself out of the picture and used Clay to present it all. In the first few sections, the real and fictional collide, as the characters from Less Than Zero attend the very real, and almost completely unrelated, film in 1987. Now, in 2010, they are all older and successful within the film industry - they are trapped within the world which lied about their lives.

But we have to ask, why is Clay writing about his life now rather than at twenty, or thirty? Is this Clay we're hearing, or is it the former friend who wrote the last book? How can we trust a word which is said?

These questions are never answered, but the opening is an effective way of introducing us to a world which has moved on for Clay whilst he has not. Sure, he may have become noticeably more angry and sadistic, but underneath he's still the same apathetic teenager as they all were. Meanwhile, his loose connection to the city he grew up in and the people he used to know means that now he's finally return, it has all become tangled in an increasingly complex conspiracy, a theme he also looked at in Glamorama. The pages are drenched with paranoia, and a mystery just out of reach.

But, compared to Less Than Zero, I found this book to be a bit of a disappointment. Firstly was his use of violence and sex (which I know is like criticising minimalist music for being repetitive, but bear with me). I realise Ellis was using transgression to dispel the nostalgia which has settled around Less Than Zero, and I'd be all for it. The problem is that the violence just feels phoned in. It's incredibly gory, sadistic, yada yada yada, but it doesn't shock or even cause a particularly strong reaction.

Compare this to his early, apparently sentimentalised Less Than Zero, where this violence we expect in every novel of his only comes through near the end of the novel. It isn't as gory, but still brutal, violent, etc. The difference is, it shocked. The pace of the novel and the almost virtuosic placing of this scene made it truly difficult to read. This was the sort of effect Imperial Bedrooms would have benefited from.

Before reading the book, I had heard a lot about how Ellis' uses his now-infamous style to portray the 21st century, and I was looking forward to seeing his Douglas Coupland-esque spin on his characters. Instead, the references to iPhones seemed crowbarred in. Most of the time characters were checking their text messages, true, but that was around in the late '90s as well. The iPhone is used about twice, to look up videos and to check emails, but even then (considering how important it's become in society) it felt vastly underused.

Also, websites have become widespread in popular culture, with 'googling' already a verb and 'facebooking' and 'tweeting' soon on the way. But Facebook wasn't mentioned once in the book, which seems very unlikely for a culture-dominated society in 2010. Apparently Clay uses a YouTube application to watch a snuff film, but the word YouTube isn't used. The closest we get to this is when he IMDbs an actress. I understand that copyright issues might block using these names, but this didn't seem to stop the pages filled with lists of brands in American Psycho. It felt like the book belonged in the past.

If you've read Less Than Zero, and you find a copy of Imperial Bedrooms around somewhere, I'd still recommend it just to find out what happened to the teenagers of the '80s. Just don't expect it to be as hard-hitting as his other books.

EDIT 25/09/12: Regarding the lack of shock in the novel, I recently found an animation with a voice-over from the part of the book I was talking about, and it's much more effective than when I read it originally. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ff3V0bHrBs (Totally NSFW). 

Imperial Bedrooms can be bought here

Ulysses, James Joyce

After over a year and a half, I have finally managed to finish Ulysses. Ulysses, Joyce’s infamous magnum opus. Some think it 'a masterpiece', whereas some (including one of my English teachers) believe that 'life is too short for that book' (same difference, perhaps). Last night I could finally close the covers and put it on the shelf and feel quite smug and proud of myself.

So, is it a masterpiece? Well, yes. James Joyce was a polymath, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature, music, etc. and every page of Ulysses is testament to this. Merely glancing at the 200+ pages of notes at the back of the Oxford World's Classics (1922 text) edition will show you the depth the book holds. Not a page goes past without some reference to a folk song, or a (sometimes not-so-) obscure book title, or something similar. The entire novel is almost an exercise in intertextuality.

That's not to say the book is a hollow copy-and-paste of other people's work. I haven't got enough time to explain how detailed and extraordinary the book really is, in the detailed characterisation of the main characters through their own thoughts and feelings; the experimenting, particularly in the second half of the book, with what a narrator or a novel really is; even the progress and lives of Dubliners we never meet, but glimpse a few times making their own odyssey around the city. Any description of the book that would do it justice would be as long as the book itself.

Now all we need is for this book (written as a comic novel) to be absolutely hilarious, and it'll be the greatest thing ever written.

...ah.

I think I laughed out loud whilst reading Ulysses around seven times. Seven times in 732 pages. That is on average one laugh every 104.57 pages (to two decimal places), or 0.0096 laughs per page. That's not just a big problem, that's a problem you could astroturf and call a football stadium. 

And it's not because I completely missed the jokes, either. Believe me, I had three annotated versions and I was checking every single one of them. The problem is, the majority of jokes in the book are either incredibly scholarly, spread either end over about 300 pages (for example, we only find out later that the 'dragon' wound in Oxen of the Sun is a bee sting), or in some way have to be explained. As many people know from experience, when you have to explain a joke, nobody will laugh.

Maybe I'm the wrong sort of reader for a book like this. Of course, with notes available you don't really need a broad knowledge of Shakespeare or the history of English Literature or astronomy or geography or Irish political history in order to understand the book, but perhaps people who do will find the book funniest.

Let me compare it, however, with my favourite comic novel (and probably my favourite novel altogether), Joseph Heller's Catch-22. When reading it, you can scarcely say that it isn't literary. The book's form and language have been experimented with to reflect the madness of the military, and (as far as literary ancestors are concerned) Yossarian is described thusly:

... he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. 

However, not only is it experimental (although not nearly as experimental as Ulysses), Catch-22 is funny. I mean, it's hilarious. Except for the final few brilliantly dark chapters, not a page goes by without a laugh, and proper laughs too, belly laughs and giggles and the lot of them.  For me, although it may not be the 'greatest' book (whatever that means), as a pure comic novel it is miles above Ulysses.

Another problem I had with Ulysses was the length. Roddy Doyle once said 'Ulysses could have done with a good editor' and I'm inclined to agree with him. Particularly in the second half of the book where episodes spread to about sixty - seventy pages on average as opposed to the thirty page episodes near the beginning, I found the general pattern was that I loved the first thirty to forty pages, and then read the rest of it as quickly as possible to get it over with, usually without the same pleasure I had before. Yes, every page is testament to Joyce's intelligence. But there are a lot of pages, and sooner or later you'll probably wish he'd just get on with it rather than dazzling us further with his ability to parody Thomas Malory. 

After all of that, the chances are you've decided the book probably isn't worth bothering with. It is. It really, really is. It was probably unfair of me to criticise the book for not being laugh-out-loud funny, considering this is just one side of an incredibly dense, multi-faceted piece of writing. Even when read as a dramatic novel, or even an anti-novel, it is immensely enjoyable. However, some advice:

1. Buy an annotated edition (preferably the Oxford World's Classics 1922 text) and Cliff Notes (even if just for its character list). Even if you don't use them, they're useful to have just in case.
2. Give yourself breaks. I once read an article on Ulysses which suggested you could read the book in under a month if you read two episodes a day. Whilst this is technically true, it's very draining and sometimes I found I needed time to let the book sink in. All I'd say is give the last episode, Penelope, some time, not because it needs to be read in one sitting but because it's quite difficult to find a place to take a pause.
3. Read other books whilst you do it. Particularly easy to read books. Even paperback holiday lightweight stuff would do it, just to remind you that reading isn't just a chore.
4. Know when to stop. If you've spent the last few episodes wishing the damn book would end (as many critics I've read of have), it's not worth the effort. No masterpiece should be suffered through.
5. Read Catch-22 first. It's more fun.

The Oxford World's Classics 1922 Text can be bought here