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.

39 Books: 1991

One the first books I found in a bookshop* upon moving to Brighton was Rosalind Belben's novel Is Beauty Good. I had seen it two years earlier chosen in a newspaper books of the year listing alongside Jacques Roubaud's Le Grand Incendie de Londres and Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters. Those were the days.

I'd not read a book like Is Beauty Good before, and haven't since, and while its unique qualities are suggested by its form – there are 30 chapters in 111 pages – describing it further threatens to sidetrack me from what I'd like to say. The cover painting by Sigmar Polke is helpful here: we see a figure, we see colours, shapes and lines. Each is there to see; it's not abstract, yet also not distinct in part or as a whole; there are individual elements, merging, each apparently on the way to full clarity, a state impending at all times and yet one we know can never fully arrive. And so the novel's various voices, anecdotes, observations, questions and exclamations.

Two of the book's blurbs use the word 'beautiful'. David Plante says "I can't think of anyone writing in English (with the possible exception of Beckett) whose prose is as beautiful." (The novel was published in the months before Beckett's death in December 1989.) What distinguishes the prose for me is the use of commas chopping up sentences like the oblique slant dividing lines of poetry in quotation. This is enhanced by the publisher Serpent's Tail using a denser, more upright typeface. The effect is curiously similar to taking a bath in one of Proust's sentences: it expands one's consciousness in fleeting exposures to the outside.

The use of the word 'beautiful' has some irony given the title and the refrain inside in which a guard on the Berlin Wall asks whether it is good that the corollary to our attraction to the beautiful is our disgust at what enables it. To where does it lead to call something beautiful? The recent reissue of Rosalind Belben's 1974 novel The Limit reveals a persistent concern for the question, as discussed by Kirsty Gunn in her review. I hope the NYRB reissues some more, including and especially Is Beauty Good.

*Wax Factor on Trafalgar Street. It has now stopped selling books. End times.

39 Books: 1990

The first book I read in the 39 years of this series was a genre thriller, and I've read only two more since. The second one came along this year. In 1989, I got a temporary job in the archives of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum where I met Carl Erlewyn-Lajeunesse, an anti-authoritarian Canadian Saul Bellow-lookalike with a conspiritorial laugh. Our job was to enter into a computer database the careers of submarine officers from 1901 up to and including the Second World War, researching the details in handwritten ledgers, small notecards and plump hardbacks called The Navy List. Carl decided that instead of merely entering dates, names of ships and boats (submarines are 'boats', never 'subs') we would write short narratives for each officer. I remember one early submariner who took his pet rat on patrol. It was called Ratto and lived up his sleeve. And I don't forget what happened to the crew of HMS C16 off Harwich in 1917. The boat became trapped on the seabed and an attempt was made to fire a crew member through the torpedo tube, with a note to rescuers tied to his body, but he got stuck and drowned. Then they tried to open the hatch, which wouldn't open fully but then wouldn't close, making escape impossible. The boat began to fill up. One crew member left a note to his family asking them to inform "my girl" of his fate and ended with the words "thought of you till last moments".

Perhaps to counter the darkness of such stories, Carl also decided we should insert a fake career into the database. We had great fun inventing the details. His name was Rear-Admiral Sir Geraint Fairbairn-Bentinck, a bachelor sailor who liked especially to mentor handsome young midshipmen and was renowned for his prolific torpedoing of merchant ships – a feat distinguished because it was done completely outside of wartime. By astonishing coincidence, each ship happened to be carrying the cargo of competitors to the family business.

It turned out that Carl had published a crime thriller in 1981. He also wrote issues of a comic called Commando (I found this page only yesterday searching for photos of the novel), and he knew what he was writing about as he'd served as a paratrooper in the Korean War, later half-seriously expressing regret that he hadn't fought on the North Korean side. He didn't have a copy of Dead Man Running, as he had lent his last copy to someone many years previously and they hadn't returned it. With remarkable good fortune, I found a copy for sale in the local library. I read it and then presented it to him on his birthday. Many years later it was displayed at his wake.

I owe Carl a great deal. He encouraged me to work towards a place at university, something that at the time was as remote to me as walking on the moon. Nobody in my large extended family had ever been to one. Chance meetings that change the course of a life become clearer with age, and more vertiginous.

39 Books: 1989

Nowadays I would be put off reading a book labelled controversial and exciting gossipy attention on TV and in newspapers, but in 1989 I read Alexander Stuart's The War Zone that did exactly that. It was later made into a controversial film.

The only thing I remember of the novel is the comparison to Martin Amis made by the reviews, which may have been why I picked it up, and I mention it here only because, a few years later when I was studying at the University of Sussex and living in Brighton, my friend and fellow student Sean happened to be living in the house in which the novel had been written. We climbed the steep stairs to the attic room and there was the desk on which it was written, bathed in sunlight from a steeply sloping window. That was it. 

In June 1912, Kafka, accompanied by Max Brod, visited Weimar as a pilgrimage to Goethe's city. He records it in his travel diary:

Walked at night to the Goethehaus. Recognised it at once. All of it a yellowish-brown colour. Felt the whole of our previous life share in the immediate impression. The dark windows of the uninhabited rooms. The light-coloured bust of Juno. Touched the wall. White shades pulled part way down in all the rooms. Fourteen windows facing on the street. The chain on the door. No picture quite catches the whole of it. The uneven surface of the square, the fountain, the irregular alignment of the house along the rising slope of the square. The dark, rather tall windows in the midst of the brownish-yellow. Even without knowing it was the Goethehaus, the most impressive middle-class house in Weimar.

The next day, they go inside:

Reception rooms. Quick look into the study and bedroom. Sad, reminding one of dead grandfathers. The garden that had gone on growing since Goethe's death. The beech tree darkening his study. While we were still sitting below on the landing, she ran past us with her little sister.

She is Margarethe Kirchner, the teenage daughter of the Goethehaus' custodian, known as Grete. Kafka becomes infatuated, seeking out her company at every turn. She is polite but clearly not interested. The great writer and his house are relegated to a backdrop to his unhappiness:

Box bed. Slept. Parrot in the court calling Grete.

If a person could only pour sorrow out the window.

I choke up at the thought of having to leave. 

Two weeks later, he meets Felice Bauer. I have often wondered if the encounter at the Goethehaus was as significant as the one in Prague, momentous as that was, and was disappointed that Reiner Stach's biography lets it pass as a short diversion from the main story.

The only other writer's house I've visited, that is a writer who wasn't already a friend or indeed the house of the writer whose body I inhabit, was Goethe's, more aware of following in Kafka's footsteps, seeing what he saw. In particular, I wanted to find where Max Brod took this photo of Kafka and Grete in the garden and have my photo taken there too, but for some reason that day the garden was closed. Back home, I discovered the plastic tag I should have handed in before stepping onto the creaking floorboards.

It is clear from visiting a writer's house, you can't step into the same river, not even once.

39 Books: 1988

This is one of my most surprising discoveries in second-hand bookshop trawls in the far off days when they existed, especially because it was found in Portsmouth, not the most literary of cities despite Dickens and Conan-Doyle (or perhaps because of Dickens and Conan-Doyle).

The original title translated by the great Ralph Manheim is Seul comme Franz Kafka and comes from Janouch's conversations:

"Are you as lonely as that? I asked.
Kafka nodded.
"Like Kaspar Hauser?"
Kafka laughed.
"Much worse than Kaspar Hauser. I'm as lonely as ... as Franz Kafka."

Marthe Robert contends that Kafka's loneliness was due to his relationship to Judaism. "The son of a prosperous self-made businessman, he grew up in a family that was half-assimilated, half-Germanized, vaguely traditionalist, and more conformist than religious." From the start, "Kafka was torn between diametrically contrary currents." I liked in particular Robert's line that, as Kafka moved towards full assimilation, he came to realise "he was Jewish even in his way of not being Jewish".

Any relationship with faith wouldn't have meant much to me then, not only knowing nothing about Judaism but also nothing about the Catholic religion into which I had been born. This may explain why I have not reread it. However, because of my new reading habit, being torn between contrary currents was to become more familiar.

Guildhall Square, Portsmouth

Dickens' statue is a few yards away from Portsmouth Central Library which began to feed my new habit in 1987. I wrote about my discovery and the importance of libraries many years ago.

39 Books: 1987

From two books in the first year of reading and twenty-four in the second, I read eighty-six in the third, including a lot more non-fiction. This was due to cycling to libraries in adjacent towns where the selection was wider. One of them had my first non-novel choice: this edition of Chomsky's Turning the Tide.

Chomsky's name came to my attention when, in an interview with the NME, Robert Wyatt said he was reading him, which links back to my 1985 entry. The book helped me to become sensitive to how language is used by news media not only to set the agenda but to control thought and elicit particular responses. This was long before the Internet of course and nowadays it's easier to see: for example, Alan MacLeod uses his Instagram account in part to document the use of the passive voice in headlines, more common now as corporate media tries to play down overt war crimes in Gaza. I remember one example in particular: the BBC's evening news account of the Haditha massacre, carried out by the US Army: Nicholas Witchell said soldiers "entered a house ... and people died", pronouncing the final words as if an elderly dog had been put to sleep. This is what makes censorship from above unnecessary.

When I found Chomsky's book in the library, it was alongside a huge hardback entitled Peace of the Dead: The Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers, an attack on CND, a prominent movement in those days. Plus ça change: nowadays my town library has three books by Chomsky alongside multiple copies of the same two books by those intellectual titans Jordan Peterson and David Baddiel.