Billiards at Half Past Nine

The adjective usually assigned to Boll is "ironic."  But his novels about post-WWII Germany remain relevant today even if the irony is lost on today's readers. But the word "grim" also comes to mind, perhaps almost gothic. Of course the novels I have are English translations from the original German, it's difficult to imagine passages like this one from Billiards at Half Past Nine have changed much:

"Why didn't you kill him? With a bullet though the head. Firecrackers don't kill, my boy. You should have come to me. Death's made of metal. Copper cartridges, lead, cast iron, shrapnel—they bring death, whining and wailing, raining on the roof at night and rattling on the pergola."

Boll probably peaked in either 1967 with his Georg Buchner Prize or in 1972 with his noble prize. In the US at least, his popularity has been on the wane for decades. I actually discovered his work in a discount bin at the exterior of a books shop.

Who is Bouraba?

Bouraba was an Algerian novelist who ended up homeless in Paris. From Algiers, he wrote seven novels, all in Arabic. Today Bouraba is a common Arab surname in both Algeria and France, but is sometimes also a first name. Frankly, more is written about the tertiary character Bouraba in the Pamela Travers version Sleeping Beauty (1975). I know of two references and a third derivative of the other two.

One reference is found in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg:

"I can't fathom—anyway door knock, just turned away Arab acquaintance Bouraba, wrote 7 novels in Arabic, from Algiers, sensitive Arabic even Bill thinks is good intentioned, one maybe translated I dunno in French— wanders around Paris no place to sleep slept here last nite—I wanted to be alone with Coke Jack- said I was typing. He showed me his wet shoulders from rain and said 'mas in tout cas mieux que vous travillez sans distraction' I said 'pardon c'est vrai - a bientot'."

Another reference can be found in a quote in the Book The Beat Hotel:

"That fucking Arab woke me up at three A.M., and at eight A.M. somebody came around looking for 'friends from Oxford'. . .” The “fucking Arab was Bouraba, an Algerian who had written seven novels and who wandered around Paris, staying wherever he could, often sleeping rough. Allen had sometimes let him stay on the floor of his room if the weather was bad."

Barry Miles didn't have much to add about Bouraba that you can't glean from that single sentence in Ginsberg's letter. But the two letters are written by different people at different times. There is no doubt that Bouraba existed. But we learn nothing of his works, or of him as a person. Even not, half a century later, so little Algerian writing has been translated into French or English it may not be possible to identify him.

Gene Lees

Lees was a Canadian music critic, biographer, lyricist, and above all a journalist. His writing, even when ostensibly about music, had the gravitas of anthology. He was writing about human history, and his insight connected everything in the background to everything in the foreground up to and including a protagonist.

In the book You Can't Steal A Gift, published in 2001 he connected broadly the post WWII American rural diaspora and the effect of brutal racism on the careers of Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Jackson and Nat King Cole. Effectively it's one of the finest histories of bebop you will ever read. The book spans two decades of history but never becomes impersonal for his subjects or himself. His words have a certain economy. He dedicated the first chapter to his own roots in both music, and journalism. He visited Paris and realized the magnitude of WWII; he wrote:

"At last it became real to me that men really did from time to time dress alike , go out and, on the orders from someone unseen, obediently kill each other."

Lees died in 2010 obscure to most popular fiction readers but well-known among jazz heads.

Piece Of My Heart

The book is a fine read, even in the company of other rock n' roll history books. But the cover is strikingly gaudy. The photo is iconic but low resolution and the conflict between the low-contrast gray image and the pink and yellow spine and borders remains genuinely unpleasant. But the price was right as they say.

David Dalton was a founding editor of Rolling Stone and perhaps more in a position to rick rock history than many others. But even among Rolling Stone alumni he stands alone for his real journalistic accomplishments. He won the Columbia School of Journalism Award and the Ralph J. Gleason Best Rock Book of the Year. (Though neither was for this book) But he's written 24 books, you can't win an award every time.

But this book stands out because he write it twice and the result is more pancake than pastiche to paraphrase Adam Sternbergh. In 1972 Dalton published Janis, a mishmash of transcribed interview fragments, photographs, sheet music, lyrics, prose, and Dalton's own Rolling Stone Clippings... Piece Of My Heart takes that core and remixes it with additional content including some of his other writings on Joplin and some bits he nicked from Antonin Artaud. The resulting text is a bit bloated and even less coherent than the original. But oddly Dalton's occasional self-indulgent florid phrases function well in their context, and are not diminished the the scale and scope of the book. In particular...

"There are some for whom the night holds no terrors. Among them all these figures―criminals, insomniacs, whores, alcoholics, the inconsolable, the dreamers, and lovers―Janis was the queen."

It serves to remind us that greats like Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Nick Tosches once wrote for that once iconic and now hopelessly out of touch magazine.

The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien around 1940. It was published posthumously in 1967. Reams of criticism have been written about it's religious symbolism, its debatable status as the first "post-modern" novel. (I really don't care for that phrase. Everything currently novel is post-modern until it's passé.)  

Regardless, the circular timeline wooed critics then and it remains influential now. This status, overshadows O'Nolan's clever use of language, which is what remains more notable about his actual writing when you're done being impressed at how clever he is.

The protagonist dies early in the book. But withholding that information is key to the end of the book. In Chapter 2, to avoid being his own plot spoiler, he deftly describes death as below:

"It was some change that came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous. ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation."

Douglas Copeland

Ultimately, Douglas Copeland's seminal book Generation X lives up to it's hype. It popularized the terms "McJob" and "Generation X" among others and broke ground with it's powerful biting and ironic tone which became definitional for a generation of new writers. It's influence is blatant in works by Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk.

Whether he likes it or not, that pedigree makes Copeland godfather to the Fight Club franchise... and all the works it influenced as well. But far from a hipster himself, Copeland was a genuine craftsman of the English language.

"You see, when  you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile all sadnesses go unpitied. And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees."

A Stricken Field

Typically Martha Gellhorn gets second billing to her ex-husband Ernest Hemingway. I was pleased that this Virago Modern Classics edition didn't even mention him in her bio. Instead the focused on her record as a war reporter. In that category she was a trail-blazer. She covered five wars: Spain, Finland, China, WWII and Java. If you're not familiar with all those Google it.

"A train whistle blew and a little procession of people straggled and stumbled through the crowd, herded by soldiers. The soldiers were not shoving them—but they were keeping them moving. All the faces looked stupid with exhaustion; the eyes searching around the room, for nothing, were empty even of questions or of fear. They were like old bundles of gray cloth. They had no tickets; the soldiers herded them down a platform and they were lost in the smoke, and the crowd closed behind them."

But it's a bit vexing that her style is so similar to Hemingway. They both embraced that spare, and understated style. The passage above is one of a few where she ran long enough to use a semicolon. But while they may have influenced each other (a topic neither author's biographers want to entertain) it is just as likely they were equally influenced by their mutual experience as news-writers. regardless she remains under-appreciated.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller was science fiction writer. The genre remains the last frontier of hacks, frauds and innovators and Miller was one of the finest. Before A Canticle for Leibowitz, he had published only short stories, and it was the only novel he published in his own lifetime. So you can see that style built into the often dense language burning up all that momentum with the feeling it will be spent in 10 or 15 pages.

"They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, if was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness it could believe in perfection, and yearn for it."

He originally wrote it as three novelettes, and then seeing the theme, re-wrote and combined them into one book with three sections. The book is loaded with religious metaphors and Latinate phrases which add gravitas to certain sections, but also dignify some of the unavoidable gothic overtones that come with post-apocalyptic literature.

There are reams of analysis you can read on the text if you wish to pursue it, or just read it.  Either way I see no need to delve into that redundantly here.

Quintes

In 1962, The Selves of Quinte was dismissed as an "experimental novel", it's protagonist as a "paranoid-schizophrenic" but author Marcel Moreau went on to have a long writing career. He published his 40th book in 1998 and he's still among us. Sadly many of his works have never been translated into English.

The English edition was published by George Braziller in 1965. The text is excruciatingly dense, alternating between lengthly internal dialogue and brief external dialogues. But the setting is Brussels in the Jazz age and writers, prostitutes and poets move from club to club, from salon to bar. And when they turn on the radio that wailing "dissonant" sound emanates. I find it under-rated as a document of that beatnik era. When viewed in that light, Quintes' philosophical restlessness finds a context.

"In a hollow voice she told him fantastic stories which were never quite about love nor quite about death, an astounding mixture of confused, flashing anecdotes from which the only constant that emerged was disgust with living."

His contemporary comparisons to Kafka were misleading. His character was paranoid, but Moreau was not. Time magazine panned it as "incoherent." But in 1962 his writing was praised by Raymond Queneau, and Simone de Beauvoir. But as an  existentialist philosopher it makes sense that she'd understand. She understood enough to publish it in serial form.

War & War & Lazlo Krasznahorkai

As a writer, Lazlo Krasznahorkai gets described as postmodern and dystopian. For me that's a plus. His use of language definitely departs from tradition. He's prone to extremely long sentences, meandering sentences, sentences so long they become self-aware and break into meta-text and taunt you. That's not hyperbole. He posted the website www.warandwar.com 5 years before his book was even available in English. And it makes no sense until you've read the first 250 pages of his book. Some of his sentences are epic on their own, beyond the confines of the book.  His break from traditional form is as iconoclastic as The Sound and the Fury but he's Hungarian.. so in the U.S. he remains obscure. I only know his works through translations.

"The whole ceiling was packed with fluorescent tubes, neon to neon, at least a hundred tubes from right to left, from left to right, as densely and hauntingly packed as the graves in a military cemetery without an inch of bare space, the whole fluorescent, every tube burning and not one gone out, not one dark, so that the whole buffet glowed, as did the man standing at the bar with his back to it all, a cigarette in his hand, staring fixedly at the edge of the bar and glowing beside him, his ditch-gray eyes fixed on the man, facing him, with these broken, painfully slow words proceeding from his mouth..."

The Jungle

 Everyone literate knows something about Upton Sinclairs' The Jungle. Maybe it's the tainted meat, or the poor working conditions, immigration or maybe even the socialism.  the book was first printed as a newspaper serial in the Appeal to Reason starting in February of 1905.  The book is in the public domain. You can download a copy at Gutenberg.org here, or as scans of the original newspaper serial courtesy of the NYU library here. The book has been continually in print for more than a century. Seesharp press recently printed a complete edition of the serial version. More here. (This got a bit of mixed press.) But the editions are substantially different and if your inner Lit professor is interested, it's probably worthwhile.

But in all of this historical hullabaloo it's been forgotten that Upton Sinclair was actually quite a good writer. I was reminded of this while flipping thorough a copy of the 1986 Penguin edition with yellow cracked pages.Allow me to quote:

"His notes are never true, and his fiddle buzzes on the low ones and squeaks and scratches on the high; but these things they heed no more than they heed the dirt and noise and squalor about them— it is out of this material that they have to build their lives, with it they have to utter their souls. And this is their utterance; merry and boisterous, or mournful and wailing, or passionate and rebellious, this is music is their music, music of home. It stretches out it's arms to them, they have only to give themselves up."

Alexandra Fuller

I rarely read best-sellers. Why have the same media experience as a million other people?  I don't see the appeal. Despite that I agreed to read Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness by Alexandra "Bobo" Fuller. Overall it wasn't bad. But I'd rather have my nose in something a tad more obscure. But I did fine a single sentence I found worthy of inclusion here.

"It would at least be fair warning and an honest admission: even a good war—if there is such a thing—will kill anyone old enough to die."

 It sounds more like something Robert Stone would have written. In the context of the book it stands out as Gothic even within the a short few stark paragraphs about war. Her prose is conversational, her writing-style mostly concerned about coloring in the characters and story craft... not about language. It's that lego-brick, pointillist quality to language that I really like in good literature. I found a tiny pebble of a gem here but I'll take it.

The First Man On The Sun

Richard Henry Wilde Dillard writing as R. H. W. Dillard, is better known as a poet than a novelist and it shows in his prose. Born in 1937, Dillard is still alive, actually published What Is Owed the Dead, only in 2011. But of the dozen books he's written, only two are prose. This book, The First Man On The Sun was published in 1983.

His deep connection to verse is self-evident in his alternately clever and self-indulgent prose. Lines like "The dry hard land bursts all around into bloom; the bloom fades away."  Hemingway would have broken that into two sentences and called it good. But being that clever makes one want to be clever as well. Dense well used language is inspirational like that. But his indulgent prose has a similar appeal. If you ripped it out of the story it would double as verse:

"See and see and see. Trees blurred with a yellow green haze. Trees breaking into bud and bloom. Trees filling with wide green leaves. Trees swaying and snarling in the wind. Trees black and bleak in long steady rain. Trees ringing out with each new spring. Trees moving. Trees walking. Men and women walking, the way of man and of us all."

FOOD AND BOOKS

It's hard to say enough about a book store/restaurant. You get a free book with every entree and they give away about 100,000 books a year. You can see their sign from the side of I-91 in Connecticut. It reads simply "FOOD AND BOOKS." Two of the greatest things on earth in one place. More here, here and here.

Death of the Adversary

Hans Keilson is best known as a child psychologist. But he also wrote half a dozen books set in WWII which grippingly portray the era since he was there. His prose is usually minimalist. His books are primarily about story and not language.. but sometimes his metaphors are phenomenal.

"New antagonists will for ever arise and step into the arena, and piece after piece will crumble off our beautiful world, as though it were an ancient ruin, through whose decaying walls the wind and the rain will whistle. Every day another piece will crumble off, until nothing but a heap of stones marks the place where it once stood in better days. And we take part in the cruel game, under the illusion that we can bring it to a happy conclusion..."

Books and Pamphlets

Sometimes when you buy a box of books you find nothing but garbage. But sometimes a box of books contains retro subversive and lefty literature: Ernest Mandel, Fred Halstead, Peter Camejo, Leon Trotsky, George Novak, and James P. Cannon. It's a nice find.

The Assault

Harry Mulisch wrote The Assault in 1982, but across it's time line, it's largely set in post-WWII Netherlands.   The book's time line is brilliant, flashing backward through the memories of multiple characters piecing together the unseen opening event of the story. But the book is largely dialog, and in keeping the dialog realistic, laid back on the prose in much of the text.

"Everything is forgotten in the end. the shouting dies down, the waves subside, the streets empty, and all is silence once more... With a quick gesture he tosses his straight graying hair, dragging his feet a bit, as if each step raised clouds of ashes, although there are no ashes in sight."

Though there are absolutely glowing sections such as the above...

Bruce Pollock

In the book When Rock Was Young, author Bruce Pollock strings together magazine-type artist biographies into a historical narrative. Rock n' roll history is a well-tread topic but Pollack was among the best writers to cover it. Most of his prose here is pretty straight ahead but he has moments of true grandeur. This is one of them:

"Progenitors of the draft-dodging, pinko, student protestors, the pot-smoking, acid-swallowing, hippies yippies, and the free-love, back-to-nature, love-and-peace, organic, ban-the-bomb, dropout radicals, early folk singers could be found somewhere south of the Top 40 and east of Rock 'n' roll."

R.B. Cunninghame Graham

R.B. Cunninghame Graham was the first MP ever to be suspended from the House of Commons for swearing. He had uttered the word "damn." I use it a lot myself. Be was famous for his the "radical" politics and infamous for his ravels and adventures. He was also a damn fire writer. I recently read Rodeo, a collection of his works. He was a friend of Joseph Conrad, and nearly as good.


I like him best when he is either gothic and morbid or rambling in sociopolitical commentary. His works there reminds me oddly of David Milch.

"Your nine day's wonder is a sort of five-legged calf, or a two-headed nightingale, and of the nature of a calculating boy-a seven month's prodigy, born out of time to his own undoing  and a mere wonderment for gaping dullards who dislocate their jaws in ecstasy of admiration and then start out to seek more idols to adore."

Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia was written by George Orwell and published in 1938. It's difficult to imagine the time. It was in Spain, during it's civil war in the years leading up to WWII. It's a fascinating first-person historical account, but it's also Orwell so it's well written. The best sentence in the book is not about Spain but about England, written to describe it upon Orwell's return home.

"The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface."