Category: Fiction

The Dark Arts

A short story by Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is a contemporary writer everyone should be reading. ‘The Dark Arts’, first published in the New Yorker in 2013, forms part of his latest book, the superb collection Leaving the Sea (published by Granta Books in the UK).

On a dark winter morning at the Müllerhaus men’s hostel, Julian Bledstein reached for his Dopp kit. At home, he could medicate himself blindfolded, but here, across the ocean, it wasn’t so easy. The room stank, and more than one young man was snoring. The beds in the old gymnasium were singles, which didn’t keep certain of the guests from coupling when the lights went out. Sometimes Julian could hear them going at it, fornicating as if with silencers on. He studied the sounds when he couldn’t sleep, picturing the worst: animals strapped to breathing machines, children smothered under blankets. In the morning he could never tell just who had been making love. The men dressed and left for the day, avoiding eye contact, mesmerized in the glow of their cell phones.

Julian held his breath and squeezed the syringe, draining untold dollars’ worth of questionable medicine into the flesh of his thigh. He clipped a bag holding the last of his money to the metal underside of his bed. His father’s hard-earned money. Not enough euros left. Not nearly enough. He’d have to make a call, poor-mouth into the phone until his father’s wallet spit out more bills.

He left the hostel and took the stone path down to nothing good. This morning he was on his way, yet again, to meet Hayley’s train. Sweet, sweet Hayley. She would fail to appear today, no doubt, as she had failed to appear every day for the past two weeks. It seemed more and more likely that his lovely, explosively angry girlfriend wouldn’t be joining him in Germany—even though they’d spent months planning the trip, Julian Googling deep into his unemployed afternoons back home, Hayley pinging him sexy links from work whenever she could. A food-truck map, day treks along the Königsallee. First they’d destroy England and France, lay waste to the Old World, then drop into freaking Düsseldorf for the last, broken leg of the journey.

It was meant to be a romantic medical-tourist getaway, a young invalid and his lady friend sampling the experimental medicine of the Rhine. But they’d fought in France, and he’d come to Düsseldorf ahead of her. Now he waited not so hopefully, not so patiently—dragging himself between the hostel, the train station, and the Internet café, checking vainly for messages from Hayley—while seeking treatment at the clinic up on the hill.

Treatment—well, that perhaps wasn’t the word for it. His was one of the incurable conditions. An allergy to his own blood, as he not so scientifically thought of it. An allergy to himself was more like it. His immune system was confused, fighting against the home team. Or his immune system knew exactly what it was doing. These days, autoimmune diseases were the most sophisticated way to undermine yourself, to be your own worst enemy.

Back home, he’d tried it all—the steroids, the nerve blocks, the premium plasma—and felt no different. He’d eaten only green food until it ran down his legs. Then for a long time he’d tried nothing. He’d tried school, then tried dropping out, living, in his mid-twenties, in his old room in his father’s house. Through it all, though, he had mostly tried Hayley, as in really, really tried her, and he could see how very tried she’d become.

It was Hayley who’d pushed for this trip, so that Julian could finally have a shot at the new medical approach they’d read so much about, a possible breakthrough with rare autoimmune disorders. In Germany, a shining outpost on the medical frontier, doctors tried what was forbidden or unconscionable elsewhere. And for a fee they’d try it on you. Massive doses of it. You could bathe in its miracle waters. You could practically get stem-cell Jell-O shooters at the bar on Thursday nights. So long as, you know, you waived—yes, waived—goodbye to your rights, your family, your life. It was not such a terrible trade.

On Julian’s first day, the clinic staff had brandished a very fine needle. It had gleamed in the cold fluorescent light of the guinea-pig room. From Julian’s wheezing torso, the doctors had drawn blood and marrow, his deep, private syrup—which they then boiled and spoon-fed back to him until he sizzled, until he just about glowed. Of course, the whole thing was more complicated than that, particularly the dark arts they conjured on his marrow once they’d smuggled it out of him. They spun it, purified it, damn near weaponized it, then sold it back to him for cash. Zero-sum medicine, since he’d grown it himself, in what Hayley, digging into his ribs, had called “the Julian Farm.” Except that the sum was a good deal larger than zero.

And after a few weeks, or so the idea was, you’d be better. In his wellness fantasies, Julian always pictured himself scrubbed clean, nicely dressed, suddenly funny and charming. Better in every goddam way. But, of course, throughout these treatments, as he’d discovered, the frowning doctors hedged and balked and shat caveats, until the promise of recovery was off the table, out of the room, nowhere near the building.

(…)

Karl Ove Knausgaard on becoming a cultural influence

Interview in Hazlitt

There’s a new English-language interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard in Hazlitt, in which he talks about becoming a cultural influence.

Also, there are so many pictures of him on the internet. He looks like he enjoys author pics.

My Struggle has now earned a certain stature in contemporary world literature, as it did in Norwegian culture upon its original publication. It’s spoken of as a necessary text for people to read, to contend with, in our contemporary moment. Do you think about the fact that you are now an influence? That you are a cultural influence, you’re not just documenting things.

Hmm, no. I don’t think about that. I remember, I didn’t read David Shields until I was done with these books because I knew there were some relations there. He was writing about much of the same things, but I read it afterwards and I liked it very much. I related to his views in many ways. But no, I can’t really think in those terms whatsoever, and it is, you know, it’s just some books. You have to be lucky for them to be translated in the first place, and then someone well-placed has to say, I like them, they are very good, and if you don’t have that then it’s too risky for people to go for the book. But James Woods said, I like it, this is an important book. Then you have some other people, well-placed, saying this is very good. Zadie Smith did. Then it just opens up and it’s established as a good book or an important book. But you could imagine, in a parallel universe, this wouldn’t happen and then it would just be a book, and it wouldn’t have any influence.

So it’s been very interesting to see that process, because it first happened in Norway and then in Scandinavia, and then in England and the U.S. I think maybe it just has something to do with the zeitgeist and being a contemporary, I don’t know. There was a Norwegian writer who said he really hated these books, and he hated the hysteria surrounding them, so he wrote a piece and said, Just wait until they’re translated and you’ll see how provincial they are. And in a way he could have been right, I don’t know. But I think everything this book has exists in other places. I think my books have a few catch lines in their 3,600 pages, and a title, and controversy, and that’s it. That’s the way I explain it, at least.

Krapp Hour

Anne Carson's literary talk-show in Granta

Excellent piece by Anne Carson in the penultimate issue of Granta:

Cast:   KRAPP, host
              guests, various

Set: a TV talk show, minimal lighting, blackouts where marked. Kitchen chair for KRAPP, couch for guests. Couch is not big enough for all guests, they gradually pile up. Guests are introduced by KRAPP briefly hoisting a placard from a pile under his chair.

(enter KRAPP, K, to brief theme music)

K: not much you have to know about me, I need very little space and I like very little attention. Funny to end up here you may think, in this line of work, did I back into it, well more or less, I guess I did, yes and no, never mind, more important is other people do (need space, like attention), they come here, their eyes are bright, I love the brightness of their eyes, it is ever a surprise to me. If I had a family (I don’t have a family) I cannot imagine they would look at me with such bright eyes. Admittedly there was a time I thought I would grow and flourish here, become happy and interesting and modern, well my old dad put paid to that notion the one time he came to the show – ‘unchanged for the worse’ he said and I believe I have adhered to that standard ever since.

(K holds up placard JACK KEROUAC AND HIS MOTHER GABRIELLE (GABE), enter GK and JK)

GK:       we’re going to Radio City after this
JK:        it’s her birthday
GK:       I’ll be sixty-four where does the time go
K:          where indeed
GK:       I wasn’t always this fat when I stopped wearing a girdle I        
                 went all over the place
JK:           say something in French Ma
GK:          qu’est-ce que tu veux savoir
JK:           you tutoyed him Ma, hear that she tutoyed you
K:             so she did
GK:          it’s like that afternoon the Filipino butler kept giving me drinks
K:             you’ve a butler
GK:          no Barney Rosset’s butler we went for dinner
JK:           had a big screaming dinner all talking French Gallimard         
                 was there you’re speaking pure eighteenth-century Norman
                 dialect he said to me
GK:          I played the piano then I went downstairs started kidding
                 the little butler I was having a ball
JK:           later we hit the bars did Fifth Avenue supposed to have an
                  interview with Holiday magazine never made it
GK:          Florida when we lived there he didn’t drink at all but over
                  here oh my
JK:           I can take it you know Li Po drank all those guys drank
                 dharma bums roaming China
K:             Buddhists I suppose
GK:          think I’d like a sandwich

(GK wanders off)

Picasso

A short story by César Aira

César Aira’s short story, ‘Picasso’ (trans. Chris Andrews), published in the New Yorker a few weeks back, is taken from The Musical Brain and Other Stories, a story collection forthcoming from New Directions in March 2015. New Directions publisher Barbara Epler’s short interview on discovering Aira‘s work is also worth a read for context.

(This is by the by but worth recounting: In 1997 César Aira wrote a novel, since published in English as The Literary Conference, in which a translator named César with aspirations to rule the world attends a literary conference so that he can be near the man whose clone he hopes will lead an army to victory: the world-renowned Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes. In response, Fuentes wrote Aira into his 2003 novel La Silla del Águila, predicting that he would become the first Argentine writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2020. The odds on that are probably quite good.)

It all began when the genie came out of the Magic Milk bottle and asked me what I would prefer: to have a Picasso or to be Picasso. He could grant me either wish but, he warned me, only one of the two. I had to think about it for quite a while—or, rather, he obliged me to think about it. Folklore and literature are so full of stories about greedy fools who are punished for their haste it makes you think those offers are all too good to be true. There are no records or reliable precedents on which to base a decision, because this sort of thing happens only in stories or jokes, so no one has ever really thought about it seriously; and in the stories there’s always a trick, otherwise it would be no fun and there would be no story. At some point, we’ve all secretly imagined this happening. I had it all worked out, but only for the classic “three wishes” scenario. The choice the genie had given me was so unexpected, and one of the options was so definitive, that I needed some time to weigh them up.

It was a strange choice but not inappropriate; in fact, it was particularly apt. I was leaving the Picasso Museum, in a state of rapture and boundless admiration, and at that moment I could not have been offered anything, or any two things, that would have tempted me more. I hadn’t actually left the museum yet. I was in the garden, sitting at one of the outdoor tables, having gone to the café and bought a little bottle of the Magic Milk that I’d seen tourists drinking everywhere. It was (it is) a perfect autumn afternoon: gentle light, mild air, and still a while to go before dusk. I took my notebook and pen from my pocket to make some notes, but in the end I didn’t write anything.

Emmanuel Carrère on writing Limonov

In the Paris Review

Emmanuel Carrère is a writer who doesn’t get enough attention. He is one of France’s best, a kind of Geoff Dyer-figure who blends fiction and non-fiction to great effect (although he is less comically inclined). The Adversary, in which the author recounts his attempts to write the true story of a pathological liar who ends up murdering his entire family to cover up his lies, is a good place to start. Limonov, his latest book published in English about the Russian dissident writer Eduard Limonov (pictured above), is also an excellent book. Carrère’s Paris Review interview, published last autumn, provides a good introduction to his work:

INTERVIEWER

We come to your last book, Limonov, which is again nonfiction. Who is Limonov?

CARRÈRE

Eduard Limonov is a Russian writer who is about seventy. I knew him in the eighties in Paris. The Soviet-era writers at the time were mostly dissidents with huge beards. Limonov was more of a punk. He was an underground prodigy under Brezhnev in Moscow. He had emigrated to the United States, been a bum and then a billionaire’s butler. He had a kind of Jack London life, which he wrote about in autobiographies that are actually very good, very simple and direct.

Then came the fall of the Soviet empire and things got strange. He went off to the Balkans and started fighting with the Serbs. He became a kind of crypto-fascist. It was a little like finding out a friend from high school had joined al-Qaeda. But time went by and I didn’t give it much thought. Then the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated, and I went to cover it. I was amazed to discover that in the little world of liberal democrats around Politkovskaya, Limonov was considered a fantastic guy. It was as if Bernard-Henri Lévy and Bernard Kouchner suddenly said, Marine Le Pen, now she’s great. I was so intrigued that, in 2007, I decided to go see Limonov. I spent two weeks with him trying to understand this strange political and personal trajectory.

INTERVIEWER

The mystery of fascism? Was that what intrigued you?

CARRÈRE

I remember the exact moment I decided to go from reporting to writing a book. Limonov had spent three years in a labor camp in the Volga, a kind of model prison, very modern, which is shown to visitors as a shining example of how penitentiaries have improved in Russia. Limonov told me that the sinks were the same ones he had seen in a super-hip hotel in New York, designed by Philippe Starck. He said to me, Nobody in that prison could possibly know that hotel in New York. And none of the hotel’s clients could possibly have any idea what this prison was like. How many people in the world have had such radically different experiences? He was really proud of that, and I don’t blame him. My socioeconomic experience is relatively narrow. I went from an intellectual bourgeois family in the 16th arrondissement to become a bourgeois bohemian in the 10th. So these trajectories of the little boy in the African village who becomes the UN secretary-general or the little girl from east bumfuck in Russia who becomes an international supermodel fill me with wonder. I have to admire that amplitude of experience, the ability to integrate completely different values and ways of thinking. Limonov’s story, from that point of view, is fabulous. It’s a picaresque novel that also allowed me to cover fifty years of history, the end of the Soviet era, and the mess that followed. I’m surprised that the book has received the unanimously warm reception of the last one.

Frankfurt Book Fair

From 7-10 October

Fitzcarraldo Editions is at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. Normal blog activities will resume on Monday, 11 October. In the meantime, here’s a link to Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville. 

The next morning came.

“Bartleby,” said I, gently calling to him behind his screen.

No reply.

“Bartleby,” said I, in a still gentler tone, “come here; I am not going to ask you to do any thing you would prefer not to do—I simply wish to speak to you.”

Upon this he noiselessly slid into view.

“Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?”

“I would prefer not to.”

“Will you tell me any thing about yourself?”

“I would prefer not to.”

“But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel friendly towards you.”

He did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed upon my bust of Cicero, which as I then sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above my head.

“What is your answer, Bartleby?” said I, after waiting a considerable time for a reply, during which his countenance remained immovable, only there was the faintest conceivable tremor of the white attenuated mouth.

“At present I prefer to give no answer,” he said, and retired into his hermitage.

Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel

The trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is out. Featuring Joaquin Phoenix as Doc Sportello and Josh Brolin as Bigfoot Bjornsen, it comes out in the UK on 30 January 2015 (according to IMDb). In case you haven’t read the book, this is from the New York Times:

Like the novel, the film is set in 1970 in the fictional Gordita Beach, Calif., among paranoid burnouts, white-supremacist bikers, black-power ex-cons, and hippies turned toothless heroin addicts. The “gum-sandal” detective Doc Sportello (a mutton-chopped, mumbly Mr. Phoenix) begins investigating a mystery at the behest of his free-spirited ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) and to the consternation of the corrupt cop Bigfoot Bjornsen, played by Mr. Brolin with a “flattop of Flintstone proportions,” as a character says in the film, and a malicious “twinkle in his eye that says ‘civil rights violations.’ ”

Along the way, Doc uncovers a conspiracy that touches the shady land developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) and a surf-rock saxophonist named Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), both of whom may either be dead or alive. Looming over them all is the specter of the Golden Fang, which may be a boat, an Indochinese heroin cartel, a rehab center, a syndicate of dentists — or something even more vast.

Watch the trailer here.

Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets

A short story by Zadie Smith

Originally published in the Spring 2014 issue of the Paris Review, this short story by Zadie Smith has just been re-published by the Daily Telegraph (since when do they publish fiction?), seemingly because it’s on the shortlist for the BBC National Short Story Award. Here’s the beginning:

John Jeremiah Sullivan on Donald Antrim

A profile in the New York Times magazine

One of the best essayists we have on one of the best writers of fiction we have in the New York Times Magazine:

Of the qualities that set Antrim apart from the group of writers he’s often casually lumped in with or excluded from — the Eugenides-­Franzen-Lethem-Means-Saunders-Wallace cluster of cerebral, white-male, Northern fiction makers born around 1960 — it may be this predilection for characters “not necessarily redeemed” that offers the neatest distinction. It’s not that those other writers don’t ever do evil characters or antiheroes or that they all write tidy, hopeful plots. It’s not even that Antrim’s­ characters are beyond the pale in their badness, in a Cormac McCarthy manner — they aren’t psychopathic (except insofar as being human may involve being a little bit psychopathic). It’s more the case that Antrim’s fictional universe is different. It doesn’t bend toward justice, not even the kind that knows there is none but sort of hopes art can provide absolution. His universe bends — it is defi­nitely bent — but always toward greater absurdity (in both funny and frightening guises).

Some critics have lamented over the years that his characters don’t really “change,” but they do; it’s just that they devolve, they go mad. Mr. Robinson, man and book, certainly does, in a closing passage that is both unprintable by this magazine and unwritable by any other novelist I’ve heard of, except maybe the Mississippi writer Barry Hannah in his early-1980s “Ray” period. That echo calls to mind another thing dividing Antrim from his better-known peers, that he doesn’t really come from the North, despite having made his whole career there, living in Brooklyn in a small apartment he calls “a good place to be for now for 22 years,” where he reportedly gives unforget­table dinner parties (great cooking, great stereo) throughout which everyone sits on the floor. He works in a spartan room with a plain, black desk and shelves of books, papers on the wall and a two-volume O.E.D. (the pretty one, with the little drawer for the magnifying glass).

The Gravity of Circumstances by Marianne Fritz

Translated by Adrian West

Asymptote features an extract from Adrian West’s translation of Marianne Fritz’s The Gravity of Circumstances, ‘a slim novelette about a woman impregnated during the Second World War by a music teacher who would be drafted and later die in battle’, published in 1978. As West explains in a critical essay accompanying his translation, Fritz is an important and controversial literary figure:

[Her] work is barely known outside her small circle of admirers. Praise, though scant, is neither tepid nor inconsiderable: from 1978, when she received the inaugural Robert Walser Prize for the unpublished manuscript of her first novel, to her winning the highly prestigious Franz Kafka Prize in 2001, her writing was repeatedly honored with awards and stipends. On Naturgemäß, Fritz’s unfinished magnum opus, Elfriede Jelinek commented, “It is a singular work, before which one can do nothing but stand, like a devout Muslim before the Ka’aba.” W.G. Sebald, meanwhile, dedicated to her a section of the late poem “In Alfernée.” Here the image of Fritz working through her exhaustion, “one hand on the keys of her machine,” recalls the passage in The Rings of Saturn on the melancholy of scholars and weavers, “harnessed to the machines we have created.”

A contrasting view was held by Thomas Bernhard, who addressed his esteemed publisher, Siegfried Unseld, with characteristic charm in 1986:

Before my departure I have had another glance at your recent publishing catastrophe: the 3,000 pages you have had printed and allowed to appear are the greatest embarrassment I have been acquainted with to this day. To print and bind over 3,000 pages of mindless proletarian trash with all the bombast of a centenary event belongs, quite frankly, in the record books: as a world record of stupidity. I am not speaking so much of the begetter of this idiocy, rather of the fact that the publisher has handicapped himself by releasing this fatuous vulgarity.

The extract is worth a read:

“… I WAS JUST DREAMING.”

Rudolf hung on the cross. Around him stood scattered groups of people, all of whom contemplated him with deprecating gazes. “Where’s my mother?” Rudolf cried down from the cross.

“Your mother is in her grave,” a faceless voice answered him from within the group of people, and Berta became conscious of herself, lying beneath the earth a few meters from the cross. She tried to dislodge the coffin lid and cry out with the force of her love:

“Rudolf! I’m still alive! I’m coming! Wait for me! Be patient! I’ll get you down from there! Rudolf!” The dreaming Berta observed the other Berta, as powerless, as voiceless as a corpse in her futile struggle.

“Where’s my mother?” Rudolf cried a second time and looked down onto the nearby hillock where there was no cross and no flowers, only shoveled-up earth, as on a molehill. A faceless figure, a torso on two legs, pulled away from the group and said: “There she lies. Let her rest. It will be over soon. You will understand when the sun has reached its zenith.”

 

 

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