The Book Sill - Under the Volcano

Michael Schmidt's introduction puts it this way: "Many readers find it hard to break into Under the Volcano. [...] it can take several attempts before one really gets going. [...] This is style as architecture [...]. It is 'vertical', balanced, stilled in time, not 'horizotal', in flow [...] the book makes the kind of sense that Lowry intends only on a third reading [...]. This is my second attempt at reading Lowry's novel and my first completion. I will keep the comments at that for now. Good luck to anyone who intends to undertake the same reading. It is probably worth it. I will provide my definitive answer in a couple of years.

Industrial Revolution, Working Class and British History Propaganda

The problem with economy, and the main reason why I don't like its literature, is that it advertises itself as an impartial, fact-based representation of the world and however fails to ever be neutral.

Researching the history of British economy, I quite naturally start with Wikipedia. The paragraph on the Napoleonic Wars enrages me as always – such is the blindness of British history when it comes to retelling the national fight against Napoleon:

“Critical to British success in confronting Napoleon was its superior economic situation”

Indeed, British economy was at the time a lot wealthier than the French. However, it is a hard-lived misconception that the British defeated Napoleon. In the twenty years when British troops fought Napoleon Bonaparte's armies, they registered only one victory of significance: Trafalgar. All other battles in which they engaged, they lost, or drew. It needs to be reminded that the British did nothing to win the battle of Waterloo. It was the Prussian troops who defeated the French army. In the two days that preceded their intervention, Wellington's forces had been taking a ferocious beating by the French. Wellington himself would confess to it in his memoirs, qualifying the battle of Waterloo as the narrowest of victories he ever had the honour to claim.

So. There you go. England was never the decisive power in defeating Napoleon. It took a whole European coalition to bring the Corsican general to his knees. If we need to give medals to each national army, Prussia would definitely take gold. Silver would go to Russia. England would only get a sympathetic bronze.

Apart from this falsehood, now so common that it has become the accepted truth, the Wikipedia article enshrines another gem of national propaganda:

"Long-term favourable impact[edit]

O’Brien examines the long-term economic impact of the wars, 1793-1815, and finds them generally favourable, except for damage to the working class. The economy was not damaged by the diversion of manpower to the army and navy; in terms of destruction and enforced transfer of national wealth, Britain came out ahead. British control of the oceans proved optimal in creating a liberal free-trade global economy, and helped Britain gain the lion’s share of the world's carrying trade and financial support services. The effects were positive for agriculture and most industries, apart from construction. The rate of capital formation was slowed somewhat and national income perhaps would have grown even faster without war. The most negative impact was a drop in living standards for the urban working classes.[44]"

Please take note of the "Except for damage to the working class" and the "The most negative impact was a drop in living standards for the urban working classes". The whole liberal mind speaks through these two lines. The economy is a total success. Its only downside is that it does not benefit the people who actually run it.

This echoes a statement I overheard yesterday on the radio: British economy is currently flourishing. We are back in a situation of full employment. 

That might well be the case. But anybody who takes this as the indisputable sign of a healthy economy ought to look at another two factors: the quality of jobs offered to the British working class (but, hey, why would anybody do this? After all the working class hardships are nothing but long accepted collateral damages, aren't they?) and the quality of British public services. Anyone who today dare pretend that public services in this country are anywhere near the acceptable needs to travel abroad. Anywhere abroad. Go there, take a train, go to a hospital, come back. And if you do not understand how run-down public services are here, then you have already been brainwashed.

The Book Sill: The Death Of Virgil

There is not much I am willing to say about The Death Of Virgil. A masterpiece of this amplitude commands humbleness, and silence. If only I could find, in the short form of these reviews, the hearty tone of conversations among friends instead of the pomposity of monologue, I would me more inclined to share the feelings Broch’s novel stirred in me. However, as reluctant as I am to put these subtle, fluid, conflicting emotions through the dry tools of text analysis, I also feel compelled to do what little I can to rescue from obscurity one of the greatest literary monuments of the past century.

Here sits my copy of Broch’s lifelong efforts: among Ulysses, La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit, L’Homme Foudroyé, The Satanic Verses, all of which proclaiming this truth buried under the weight of mediocre writing: literature is a form. Literature is form, erect against the modern doxa which puts at the core of all things the art of storytelling. The Death Of Virgil is testament to the opposite. Literature is a form. Anything literary occurs inside this form.

The Death Of Virgil is form. Its symphonic structure carries us, not through a detailed recounting of the poet’s last moments, but through the contrasting perceptions of a consciousness journeying to the fringes of its territory. From the extraordinary opening ploughing through the waves of the Adriatic and the swirls of the Brindisi crowd, following Lysanias the adolescent torchbearer – all at once Lucifer, lover, Hermes – to the ultimate drift towards the twin voids of the Gnosis, The Death Of Virgil is a musical meandering across the remote regions of our inner understanding and self perception. Inside ourselves, following the informed flow of the novel, we taste the whole universe in all its shapes. This is art. This is total art, blinding literature shining with epiphanic power, even through translation. It is form. It is form in its purest form.

Il est peu que je souhaite dire au sujet de La Mort de Virgile. Un chef d’œuvre de cette amplitude commande d’être humble, et silencieux. Si au moins j’avais pu trouver dans la forme courte de mes billets le ton chaleureux des conversations entre amis, au lieu de celui péremptoire de ce monologue, j’eusse été plus enclin à partager les sentiments que le roman de Broch a fait naître en moi. Toutefois, aussi réticent que je sois à soumettre aux froids outils de l’analyse textuelle ces émotions subtiles, fluides, souvent contradictoires, je me sens aussi le devoir de faire le peu qu’il m’est donné pour sauver de l’obscurité l’un des plus grands monuments littéraires du siècle passé.

Voici où j’ai placé mon exemplaire du travail auquel Broch a consacré sa vie : parmi Ulysse, La Recherche du Temps Perdu, le Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, L’Homme Foudroyé, Les Versets Sataniques, tous proclamant cette vérité si souvent enterrée sous le poids de la mauvaise écriture : la littérature est une forme. La littérature est forme, érigée contre la doxa moderne qui place au centre de tout l’art de l’histoire. La Mort De Virgile est un testament du contraire. La littérature est une forme. Toute chose littéraire survient à l’intérieur de cette forme.

La Mort De Virgile est forme. Sa structure symphonique nous porte, non au travers d’un compte-rendu détaillé des derniers moments du poète, mais par les perceptions contrastées d’une conscience voyageant aux confins de son territoire. De l’extraordinaire ouverture où, fendant les vagues de l’Adriatique et les tourbillons de la foule de Brindisi, nous suivons les pas de Lysanias le porteur de torche adolescent – tout à la fois Lucifer, amant, Hermès – jusqu’à la dérive finale qui nous mène aux sphères jumelles de la Gnose, La Mort De Virgile est une errance musicale jusqu’aux régions les plus reculées de notre propre entendement et de notre perception intérieure. En nous-même, à la suite du flux informé du roman, nous goûtons à l’univers entier dans toutes ses formes. C’est de l’art. C’est de l’art total, c’est la littérature éblouissante, dont la puissance épiphanique aveugle même au travers de sa traduction. C’est de la forme. C’est de la forme dans sa forme la plus pure.

The Book Sill - L'Exil et le Royaume

A l'instigation de mon cher frère, je viens de relire L'Exil et le Royaume, petit recueil de nouvelles de celui qui, en littérature, fut mon premier amour. Il y aurait beaucoup à en dire - et je soupçonne que beaucoup, déjà, en a été dit. Je voudrais en retenir et partager ces quelques notes.

La Femme adultère ouvre le recueil, et j'ai trouvé ce texte dans l'état précis où mon frère me l'avait décrit: le lent, exténuant voyage vers le désert, où une petite mouche aux ailes frissonnantes prisonnière à l'intérieur du vieil autocar nous dévoile, en deux lignes, la situation dans laquelle le début de l'histoire surprend Janine ; la distance d'émotions qui la sépare d'un mari médiocre et méprisable ; sa découverte du désert immense par-delà les pauvres remparts du petit village ; et la scène de nuit où sous le ciel glacé elle jouit de la solitude avec la violence d'un orgasme.

La Pierre qui pousse ferme le recueil avec une belle symétrie. Tout comme le texte liminaire, celui-ci débute par un voyage, une avancée dans l'inconnu. Pourtant on ne pourrait imaginer inconnu plus différent du village algérien. Ici le protagoniste, un ingénieur gras et vieillissant, s'enfonce de nuit, en voiture, dans la forêt amazonienne. On y étouffe. Les cieux n'y sont plus craquants et plein de petits feux glacés à la dérive, mais liquides et brouillés d'étoiles embuées. Ce n'est plus le récit mystique d'une femme abandonnant tout pour trouver dans le vide son extase, mais l'histoire prométhéenne d'un Européen piétinant les superstitions religieuses pour leur préférer l'humain. La scène finale où D'Arrast jette au sol, sur le foyer encore tiède, le lourd fardeau de celui qu'il s'est mis en tête de sauver, ne peut que convoquer au camusophile que je suis les dernières pages du Mythe de Sisyphe.

Les talents de Camus pour le mythe et la parabole, je les connaissais bien. Ce que je connaissais moins ce sont ses talents de conteur et, j'oserais même dire, de scénariste. Les pages d'ouverture de ces deux nouvelles mâcheraient le travail d'un réalisateur. Tout s'y trouve : lieux, lumière, cadrage, mouvement de caméra, changement de prise. Même les indications de fond sonores sont là. Ces textes ont-ils jamais été adaptés à l'écran? Il faudrait que je me renseigne.

Par dessus tout j'ai découvert un Camus voyageur. L'Exil et le Royaume est un incomparable compagnon de voyage. Les évocations du désert - le plus souvent froid, étrangement - sont tout simplement magnifiques. Les plus belles pages sont celles qui mettent un être seul face à son environnement immédiat. De ceci, Jonas est révélateur. Cette petite histoire par ailleurs assez convenue - Albert Camus s'y essaie à la satire légère, mais son talent dans cet art est loin de celui de Marcel Aymé - ne s'envole vraiment que dans les dernières lignes, lorsque Jonas s'enferme dans sa soupente et ne vit plus que par lui-même.

Il faut attendre la quatrième nouvelle du recueil, placée à son coeur, pour finalement trouver les trois Camus réunis, en un de ses textes les plus achevés. L'Hôte est à la fois une histoire façonnée par le désert (les pages qui l'évoquent sont d'une grande pureté), un conte remarquable fonctionnant sur un mécanisme dramatique aussi merveilleusement simple qu'efficace, et une fable emplie de tout l'humanisme qui assure à Albert Camus, trente ans après ma première lecture de L'Etranger, une place toute particulière dans mon petit panthéon privé.

A L'Hôte. Au désert d'Afrique. A l'homme seul.

The Book Sill - Case Histories

Online libraries make complete sense. They seem as obvious a development from electronic publishing as phone payment is from PayPal. In spite of that, and not unlike phone payment, they are still underdeveloped and almost not advertised.

I am writing these lines from the café where I usually take my morning expresso. Today I forgot my wallet. I have therefore no card and no cash. At first I shrugged it off. The place has wi-fi connection. I would simply download the Android Pay app and use it to navigate through my day on a sea of virtual money. It turns out that my bank is not a participant. Were it not for my Parisian habit of always going to the same place, every morning, and always ordering the same thing (single expresso please, no sugar), were it not for my waiter’s Parmesan habit of trusting people (yeah course you go ahead, you pay me at lunch, or tomorrow) I would be sitting outside in total caffeine deprivation. There is still a long way till electronic devices replace human contact.

Thus for online libraries. You would think that, at a time where your prime minister can find out in a click where you were, what you ate, what you read and what you said to whom two hours ago, your corner library would be able to rent any book ever digitized with the same ease. Alas, libraries offering such a service are still few and their offer meager. Put it on the lack of public funding, I suppose. Unless it is due to a gap in public funding, or, maybe, to public funding insufficiency. Or perhaps it is because the government does not give a flying duck (sorry, predictive text) about educating its own population. Because they are so busy playing their game that they have forgotten that their primary role is to run the country with, at heart, the interest of its inhabitants. Or (did I say this already?) for want of public funding.

Lewisham library had Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories though, right in the Mystery / Thrillers category. Working in IT, I understand that a system can be so stupid that each book need to belong to a category. In which case I would advise that someone create a “No Category” category, for Atkinson does not even try to respect the codes of the genre where she has been shoved. The resolution of her three mysteries is treated with slight. True, she keeps the suspense till the end. But Jackson, her “investigator” (one even hesitates to call him that) does not find out much, to say the least. His highest merit is to meet the right people, by chance. He finds Michelle’s daughter by luck. In Laura’s case, he happens to meet the one friend whom, in eight years, the official investigation has neglected to interrogate properly, and who happens to know the murderer. The same Jackson Brodie owes the resolution of Olivia’s mystery to the same combination of luck and criminal negligence from the police, which in thirty-five years did not conduct a thorough search of the immediate vicinity. Luck also puts him in Binky Rains's path, leading to a fairy-tale ending.

Atkinson’s point is obviously not about the cases resolution. There is a “Pepe Carvalho” manner in Jackson's disillusion as to his capacity to bring anything new to light. Atkinson’s point is, like in her more recent Behind The Scenes At The Museum (see my review in April), about women’s condition in the patriarchal society of today’s England. As in Behind The Scenes, men are pushed away from the main stage: they run from wives and children, they die, they spend their time in male occupations such as drinking, betting or hunting, they lock themselves away from the society of women, in churches or in their home studies – however, as in Behind The Scenes, they pull the strings of everybody’s life around them. Victor abuses his daughters and hides the youngest one’s disappearance, indifferent to his family’s mourning. Laura is murdered out of concupiscence. Jackson’s sister is raped and strangled. Michelle is driven to extreme acts to escape what her surrounding wants her to become – the wife of a farmer at twenty, the wife of an aristocrat twenty years later.

This is not to say that, in Atkinson’s universe, men are evil creatures. Jackson is a lovely and insecure character, caring very much for his daughter and still in love with a wife who left him. Taylor is the best father on earth. Even Keith, Michelle’s first husband, is shown as a good person. But the social model is so strong, society so rigid that women are left trapped in their role, sometimes with their consent, as is the case for Binky Rains, this racist, colonialist remnant of Victorian England. They are denied the right to think, feel, desire for and by themselves. Amputated from their sexuality they are mutilated souls whose only shelter is in madness, reclusion, exile, suicide or, like Amelia, in reprobation of her sister’s sexual appetites. I could only cry for them and feel shame for what I am, a male, an oppressor.

However, Kate Atkinson writes lightly and loves happy endings. If not for that, her novel would have left me hopeless in the face of reality and doubtful that things would ever change. As in all good thrillers. Fortunately, she shrugs at the genre’s rules and laughs in the midst of the misery she exposes. And so, I hope.

James Crumley - The Last Good Kiss

James Crumley might be described as a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S Thompson. But he is a poet also. Now I want to visit Charlie's B bar in Missoula, Montana, and Three Rivers in Texas.
The Last Good Kiss, cruel title for a cruel novel, did not stay long on my window sill. It is the first of a whole new series for me to read - and I have not felt that impatient since I read my first Eric Ambler.

The Book Sill - Choke Hold

Before becoming a writer Christa Faust was a porn star. She does not hide it – the back cover of Choke Hold mentions it. Without ostentation nor shame she puts her past experience into her characters. Hers are the first female hard-boiled stories I have ever read. She feminizes all the genre codes with a remarkable efficiency. In Choke Hold the opening scene, so important in dark crime, shows it all. We are presented with the hero, her past, the prize character (Cody) and the antagonist side, all in a handful of pages, opening quietly, emotionally, almost happily, ending in a fury of violence. From there on, the pace never slows down. In this action whirlwind it takes Faust’s iron grip on her writing to keep the story afloat. Up to the final scenes every sequence is depicted in a crisp, finely cut style.

Strangely enough, though belonging to the tough side of the hard-boiled tradition, she often sounds closer to James Lee Burke than to Raymond Chandler. Like Dave Robicheaux her Angel Dare keeps running from a past which wants her dead. More, no matter how much she kills of it, that past grows back. It does not only try to murder her when she is awake. Like Dave Robicheaux’s, it haunts her nights and her soul, destroying her faster than she can destroy it.

For all their similarities Christa Faust does not write with Burke’s lyrical abandonment. Angel Dare does not have the gilts and mauves and mists of Louisiana to soothe her mornings. The novel is not lit by the sun. It bathes in the crude artificial brightness of the spotlights. Choke Hold starts in a diner. After a short scene in a field at night, it moves into a trailer. From there onwards, it will be the neon lights of MMA training rings, showroom stages, motels – a quick and furious sex scene at night on the road side, which Angel Dare instantly regrets – then Las Vegas, more showrooms, a porn movie stage, motels, cars. Everything lies under that white glare, all in primal colours, like metal paint on pale grey steel. The gruesome is exposed, the bodies go through ecstasy and pain, the souls are tortured and Christa Faust sticks it all on the pages, like dissected corpses pinned on cork. She has no time for lyricism, for compassion, for pathos. She is not foreign to tragedy (her Hank is the most tragic and poignant of characters, despite an initial appearance verging on caricature). But her novels are about survival. Comes the last page, only the bare minimum remains. Just enough amber under the dust and smoke to let us expect a sequel. 

Pour en finir avec la nuit du 12 avril

Il y a 104 ans que le Titanic s'était ouvert le ventre sur un iceberg. Cette nuit-là, tapis dans celui du Volturno à quelques centaines de miles au sud, Blaise Cendrars avait fait la route inverse, serrant dans ses papiers les 51 dyptiques des Pâques à New York

Le capitaine avait bien capté les Mayday du géant de Liverpool. M'aider m'aider m'aider. Il n'a pourtant pas changé sa course, grincheux, aigri, croulant comme son rafiot fumant de sa cheminée noire

Donc ce Volturno est un très mauvais bateau

Lent, vieux, rouillé, rabistoqué, rafistolé

Un enfant de l'Uranium Steamship Company, sorti des chantiers de Glasgow

Délivrez-moi un billet de 3e classe

The Uranium Steamship Co

J'en veux pour mon argent

Le navire est à quai

Débraillé

Les sabords grand ouverts

Je quitte le bord comme on quitte une sale putain

On raconte une autre histoire. On raconte que le Volturno aurait pris la route le 6 juin et pas le 10 avril. On raconte que le premier Mayday fut poussé en 1923 par un opérateur de Croydon doté d'un mauvais accent français. On raconte que Volturno serait le nom d'un fleuve italien qui serpenterait petitement la plaine de Capoue. Qu'il n'aurait rien d'un vautour.

On raconte qu'il aurait fini en flammes le 9 ctobre 1913, le Volturno. Ballotté dans l'orage sur une mer furieuse. Qu'il aurait fallu jeter 50 mille tonnes de pétrole sur les vagues pour les apaiser avant d'en extirper des survivants, plus de 500 émigrés d'Europe qui fuyaient sa misère et sa violence. Qui rêvaient qu'on les accueillait à bras ouverts, à Ellis Island.

On raconte qu'on l'aurait laissé 9 jours seul, abandonné et vide, ballotté toujours, brûlant toujours. Qu'on aurait fini par envoyer un autre bateau, un navire de guerre, pour le couler par le fond, le 18 octobre. Abattu dans la nuit comme un chien fou.

Cendrars, lui, n'en parle pas. Pas un mot sur la fin misérable de cette barcasse flambante.

C'est que. La vérité ! Ah ! Les mensonges ! Ah !

Les histoires ! Ah !

(Image publiée sur cette page)

The Book Sill - Rimbaud le Fils

Voici 104 ans, tandis que le Titanic heurtait un iceberg, à quelques centaines de miles de là Blaise Cendrars, tapis dans le ventre d'un autre paquebot, faisait la route inverse, tenant serré dans ses papiers les 102 vers des Pâques à New York. Je choisis cet anniversaire si cher pour achever de lire, sur un homme tout aussi cher à mon coeur, cette magnifique incantation - et des trois poètes, c'est encore Pierre Michon qui me fait frissonner.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1594857810

The Book Sill - Behind The Scenes at the Museum

I was reviewing another first novel recently - and in this regard Atkinson's is in striking contrast with Bacigalupi's.

Not everything is perfect in her novel. Its complex structure does not always work. But, up until the very end, Atkinson keeps injecting emotional charges which hit the reader like so many electric shocks.

Dealing with the past, memories and how they carry their ghosts into the present (is the past what we leave behind, or is it what we take with us?), Behind the Scenes at the Museum rivals with the best novels of a John Irving. It sometimes echoes Garp or The Hotel New Hampshire. It has the same mix of dark humour and foreboding. But spanning over the whole 20th century, the two world wars and set in the harsher light of the North East of England, it resonates with themes much closer to my heart.

The Book Sill - The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl is pretty, smooth and polished like the front panel of a Jaguar. Like a mahogany piece of furniture of industrial facture. Move your hand on its beautiful surface and you will feel only perfection.

This is not to say that the novel does not have limitations. Its postulates are not completely explored. The energy situation, for example, could have been delved into in more depth. We are given to understand that, on this future Earth, fossil energy is exhausted. But what about hydro-electricity, what about nuclear energy, what about solar panels and wind farms? Bacigalupi leaves these questions aside. However, it is hard to see it as a fault. If anything, it feels that a decision has been made to give the novel a narrower scope so as to strengthen its focus.

If the above sounds like project management more than book review, it is no coincidence. The Windup Girl is a very professionally conducted piece of work. All its characters have this precisely measured balance of good and bad. Anderson Lake, the corporate spy, shows empathy towards Emiko the Windup Girl. Emiko, the story’s victim, owes her fate to her genetic configuration – but for a victim she is a cringing one: we pity her as well as we despise her. “Tiger” Jaidee, the figure of the white knight, the unflinching Galahad, has the moral ambiguity of those living by and advocating Purity. He has the double face of the fearless hero and of the pitiless assassin. The terrifying figure of the Dung Lord takes advantage of the very people he pretends to protect. Hock Seng, survivor of two ethnic cleansings, is as oppressed, courageous and unlucky as he is servile, selfish and mean.

Science-fiction’s old guidelines kept a clear, Manichean separation between good and evil. But the influence of the thriller changed the rules. Nowadays it cultivates characters ambiguity. Bacigalupi follows these modern guidelines faithfully. He writes by the book. He is an implementer of ideas into fiction. For that, he abides to strict popular literature methodology.

That same methodology demands that each character be motivated by an inner desire. Emiko wants to go to the northern regions where, rumour has it, her kind lives freely. Anderson Lake’s corporate agenda is to gain access to the Thai seed bank. Gibbons, the genius geneticist, is a cynical doctor Frankenstein who only cares about bringing to life a creature as perfect as possible, regardless of the consequences. Jaidee the Tiger is fuelled by his refusal to bend.

In the whole characters cast only Kanya stands out. This strange, never-smiling woman swims in the surrounding sea of moral ambiguity. She tries to make sense of it, cannot pick a side and despises herself because of her indecision. In Bacigalupi’s well-rehearsed puppet theatre she is the only literary anchor – but her voice is soon drowned under the perfect mechanics of the author’s industrial plot.

So what can one retain of such a standardised product? After closing the book, the long lasting taste I had of it was the depiction of East-West relationships. This, I thought, might be Bacigalupi’s novel’s best achievement. This was before I read through Goodreads readers’ reviews.

This is something I often do. I usually pay them little heed. This time, I found most of the reviews to the point. One particular reader drew my attention. He is from Malaysia – and he is furious. Bacigalupi, he yells, has made an unforgivable mistake: he calls Malaysia Malaya. Malaysia is not called Malaya. Malaya is what Malaysia used to be called before 1963, before it managed to shake off the British control. I would have considered the detail unimportant had The Windup Girl not left in me this particular aftertaste. The whole plot is based on the confrontation between Asia’s oldest civilisations and the colonizing power of Western money. The detail, our reader claims, would not even have been an issue if Bacigalupi had contained it to the vocabulary of his Western character Anderson Lake. But, as it appears, the misnaming of Malaysia is not a small negligence, nor is it a deliberate character building strategy. It is an unfortunate, blatant mistake about one of the novel central themes.

For this is where Bacigalupi’s voice resonates with the most authority: the way a Western writer imagines Asia’s inner sense of identity. Apart from this, this faultless novel, with all its merits, with its impeccable language capable of painting urban landscapes as well as animating action scenes, stays too close to the format of the American science-fiction industry. Its generous and optimistic transhumanism is not enough to provide it with the soul it needs. Its characters are cold blooded creatures. They lack the warmth that would make us care for them.

I must be fair. There are moments where the characters spring to life, full of fear and rage and love and desires. The scene when Anderson, having found a wounded and terrified Emiko by his apartment door, risks everything to protect her, sent my heart racing. When Hock Seng scuttles through the ravaged streets of Bangkok, trying to escape from the fury of the armed invasion, I could hear the deafening noise, smell the billows of smoke from the rain of explosions. The final flinching moments when Kanya chooses her fate have the tone and feeling of Chandler's dark monologues. These few pages where Bacigalupi's voice pierces through are good omens for his work to come.

For, all being said, I shall acknowledge The Windup Girl for what it is: a first novel. It might not deserve all the awards it received, but its failures are small in regards to its achievements. Before it, I had read the author’s collection of short stories. It is beyond doubt to me that Bacigalupi has the talent to become a great novelist. A novelist technique always improves over time. Bacigalupi has all the technique he needs already. He must now learn to let his soul shine through.

The Book Sill - Nova Swing

Nova Swing is a lament. A Greek tragedy. A choir comes, holds the Gods as its witnesses and tells the sorrows and misfortunes which befell the hero. No heroic deed, no fatal clench from destiny, no suspense or tension is necessary. Only this joined presence of a choir, a hero, a place.

The place is Saudade, the sorrow, the nostalgia, the longing for something gone. Ask a Portuguese to translate Saudade and he will baulk. There is something holy in this word, something so deeply rooted into the Portuguese mind that to translate it is to desecrate it. Saudade is a wound of the soul. Its only cure is lament, then silence.

And so for Nova Swing. As Colona is to Oedipus, Saudade is the place where the hero comes to die. This small town lost in North America is the theatre of extraordinary phenomena. Extraordinary, at least to the human race. They negate all the physical laws which ruled Earth for the first 4.5 billion years of its existence. But they have become common to anyone who has spent some time on the Beach of the Kefahuchi Tract. They are well known to the reader of Light, Nova Swing’s prequel. The Event, this fragment of the Tract fallen on our planet, generates an area very similar to the Zone found in Roadside Picnic, the Strugatsky’s masterpiece often described as Nova Swing’s model. In the Zone, the physical space had been affected by an alien artefact. The usual laws were not applying, or rather were following some logic unknown to human scientists. In Harrison’s Event though, physical laws, whether existing or not, whether possible or not, all apply at the same time – “or not”. The Event is this area where nothing is predictable any more: where you are going, where you come from, who is with you, how long you have been here, whether you are moving or standing still, what you see, what you hear, what you touch, what you taste, what you feel, what you think, who you are.

People come here and die. People do not come here TO die. Some come to find something they have lost. Elisabeth Kielar – the closest Harrison will give us to a femme fatale – has lost part of her soul and she laments. She sings her Saudade to Vic Serotonin – the closest Harrison offers to the hard-boiled detective – . Will Vic Serotonin, who makes a living out of wandering inside the Event with whoever is crazy enough to pay him, will Serotonin take her in there, as far as she can – as far as HE can? She pays good money for it, good enough for Vic to say yes.

Vic himself has lost his soul, years ago. He has seen too much of the Event. Once looking for adventure, the spectacular of the unknown, the thrill of the unexpected, he aspires to nothing more nowadays than drink himself to death. This is his own Saudade, the loss of adventure, of thrill, of hope. He never found any of it in the Event. He still looks up at his role model, Emil Bonaventure, now an old man dying of weariness and of whatever one catches from wandering too often too far in the Event. Vic Serotonin interrogates Bonaventure, steals his diaries, in search for what he might have missed. Vic Serotonin searches for what he might have lost and the women who love him lament.

At times it feels that every woman in Saudade is in love with this big loser Vic Serotonin. Edith Bonaventure, the old adventurer’s daughter, sleeps with him whenever he comes visit her father. Liv Hula, whom we knew to be the assistant pilot of this other hero Ed Chianese and now is the poor owner of the Black Cat White Cat, a shady bar on Saudade main street, worries for this coward Serotonin, even when he runs in trouble for abandoning his customers. Elisabeth Kielan, the abandoned customer, wants to have sex with him as if her life depended on it. Strong women lamenting a weak man, a man addicted to a youthful dream, who cannot let go of who he thinks he could have been and who one day, they all know it, will go into the Event in search of his never happening future, to never return.

The place is Saudade – but who is the hero? Serotonin is too weak a man, too whingey, too much of a mop for the title. Could it be Aschemann, the old cop? But what do we know of Aschemann? That he resembles Einstein very very much. Disturbingly much. Aschemann bought his face from Uncle Zip, a company selling cheap gene selections. Aschemann bears his resemblance to Einstein like a mask. Aschemann has lost his wife. She died resenting him. This is his lament. He too searches her in the Event. Aschemann wears the mask of the hero. But no one is here to lament him. No one speaks for him, not the prostitutes with whom he sleeps, not his assistant rendered mad by uncontrolled gene changes. Aschemann is a hero without a choir.

For the choir, when not busy with Serotonin, is busy lamenting itself. In Saudade everybody has lost something, including the weepers. Edith is in search of the young circus artist she once was. Liv wonders what happened to the promising pilot who used to fly with Ed Chianese. They lament the heroes then, when all heroes have died, they pick themselves up. Taking off the weepers’ habit they become someone else. They decide to leave it all behind. But is it even possible? Are we not, in spite of our best efforts, always someone different and always the same person?

“None of us is anyone any more” Liv Hula says.” We all lost who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be happy to fly this rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it Nova Swing, which is the cheapest name I’ve ever heard”.

Something else. In a universe with a Kefahuchi Tract humans cannot be individuals any more. The heroes are dead. The remaining humans are mere replica of ancient models: Einstein the genius, Mona the intriguing prostitute from Light, copies of dead cultures, artefacts of our imagination, things. The Event may make everything possible, it is still powerless to change a single life. Those who come to Saudade in the hope of enlightenment and stay around, stick around, get entangled in its everyday life, those will die waiting. “You weren’t the person you were before you got trapped; you weren’t the person you were while you got trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren’t someone entirely different either.”

Nova Swing: the name of a cheap spacecraft. Of a poor adventure. Of a hop to the next place, hoping to become someone happier. But the nova towards which we swing proves to be the same old yellow star. Nova Swing is the story, never ending, always repeated, of our memories and our hopes.

Hypnopompicture XIII

The wheel spins
People run
Everything precipitates 
In Winter's frozen sky