Ernest Junger

Germany again. Storm of Steel, the classic account of trench warfare by Ernest Junger, in a new translation by Michael Hoffman. Better than any comment, a transcript will give the flavor and the power of the descriptions. This from the first stages of the battle of the Somme:
"Occasionally my ears were utterly deafened by a single fiendish crashing burst of flame. Then incessant hissing gave me the sense of hundreds of pound weights  rushing down at incredible speed, one after the other. Or a dud shell landed with a short , heavy ground-shaking thump. Shrapnels burst by the dozen, like dainty crackers, shook loose their little balls in a dense cloud, , and the empty casings rasped after they were gone. Each time a shell  landed anywhere close the land flew up and down, and metal shards drove themselves into it".
Or this description of the first dead man seen upon arriving at the battlefield:
"A giant form with red blood-spattered beard stared fixedly at the sky, his fingers clutching the spongy ground"
Images, sounds, sensations are conjured in your head, vivid as in a film which you might or might not have seen.

Albert Speer's Battle with the Truth

Just spent 10 days frantically reading, at every opportunity, the 700 plus pages of Gitta Seveny's book, Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth, which I stumbled upon browsing in a second hand bookstore in Foxrock, Dublin. This biography, based on hours of interviews with Speer, his family and friends, and unparelled access to his documents, traces Speer's life from his unhappy youth as the second of three sons of an upper middle class couple, stern, cold and snobbish germans, his swift rise to become Hitler's architect, his deep bond with Hitler, his spell as Minister of Armaments, when he became one of the top figures of the Third Reich, his gradual disillusionment with Hitler, his acceptance of his share of responsibility for Hitler's crimes, his twenty years imprisonment in Spandau, his liberation in 1966, the enormous success of his memoir "Inside the Third Reich", his partial rehabilitation as a living memory of the Third Reich, his loneliness, his improbable love affair at the end of his life, and finally his death in a hotel room in London, hours after taping a long BBC interview, in 1981. The book hinges on Speer's overwhelming feeling of guilt for the genocide of the jews and, finally, his incapacity to acknowledge that he knew. Part morality tale, part intimate portrait of Hitler's circle, part psychological investigation, it helps us to grasp the collective madness that gripped Germany in the 1930's and the way post war Germany tried  to come terms with it - perhaps an impossible task given the enormity of the crimes.

Francis Bacon's studio

Squalor is the word that comes immediately to mind at the sight of Francis Bacon's studio, painfully reconstructed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The photographs do not convey the feeling of the place: a suffocating atmosphere of confinement — the studio was located in a small attic — the accumulated layers of dirt and débris, the single forlorn electric lamp hanging limply from a cord, a recurrent motif in Bacon's paintings, the familiar books of Velazquez eviscerated on the floor convey an impression of unbearable loneliness, anguish and despair. It is truly the alchemist's cove, where dross is turned into gold.

The lives of Limonov

"Limonov", by Emmanuel Carrère, is a great book, one of those which, once opened, immediately stands out from the pile and demands to be read. It tells the true story of Limonov, writer and soviet exile, who hanged out with Richard Hell at CBGB's and Rodovan Karadic in Pale, and is now the leader of the National Bolshevik party and a self styled hero for Russian youth. A pure non-conformist type, a bit of a "provocateur", his life led him from the Moscow underground under Brejnev, to New York and Paris, where, hungry for recognition, he achieved a kind of fame as the author of a series of autobiographical books depicting his (mis)adventures in appalling detail ("Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres"," Journal d'un raté" etc). His life — or rather his lives — are wonderfully told by Emmanuel Carrére, himself a kind of russian expert by default, being the son of the famous sovietologist Helene Carrere d'Encause, now in the Académie Française. It is a strange, oblique, moving and funny morality tale about the Soviet Union and the West.

1Q84

In the past, movies were shot like novels. Now, novels are written like movies. The language of cinema has infiltrated literature. Novels are becoming more visual, less psychological. Characters act in discrete scenes, rather than think or feel in a great continuum. Plot is more important than style. I have just finished the 925 pages of 1Q84, the first book by Murakami I have ever read and I feel like I went to a movie — well maybe a movie and a couple of sequels. I cannot really explain why I finished the novel — it did not seem to me great or unputdownable. Somehow, though, the story draws you in and so does the style — as he himself says, deceptively simple. It felt like a kind of pop literature of a high order.

Matthew Barney

I am still haunted by Matthew Barney's films shown yesterday at the London Estoril Film Festival. Especially his film set in Detroit, which he later explained is part of a cycle of 7 based on Norman Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings and featuring Chryzler cars as the mummy. Haunting is the word for his images of industrial decay and car worship. Barney later defined what he does as narrative sculpture, but having seen his films I now understand why he is considered one of the greatest artists alive.

The Marriage Plot

"The Marriage Plot", the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, moved me. It is a sweet, funny, coming of age novel, set in the early 80's, centered on the transition from college to adult life. Ostensibly a love triangle, it is deft, knowing, compassionate, cool and strange, full of the promise and disappointment of early love. Like Franzen, Eugenides has a wonderful eye and ear for the texture and feel of contemporary life. It is always a particular pleasure to read a novel fresh from the printing press. This one is immediately captivating. From the very first sentence, it promises to be a treat and it seldom, if ever disappoints.

António Lobo Antunes revisited

In a previous posting a few years ago, I criticised António Lobo Antunes. This now seems short sighted and wrong headed. Reluctantly, slowly, I have moved into the camp of his fans - and they are legion. Whatever faults his novels may have, he should definitely be counted as a great writer. Why? Because of his unique voice, of his distinct literary universe, of his incomparable style, dense, sticky, rich, funny, outrageous. Yes, it may hard going at times (I am still reading the same novel I had put away years ago when I first posted about him - Fado Alexandrino) but the reward is there. This novel, dealing with a ten year period - say between 1972 and 1982 - in the history of Portugal - colonial war, revolution aftermath - really sends you sometimes into a time warp. And it makes you laugh out loud. It can be so vivid - I wonder what germans and americans make of it in translation. Lobo Antunes says the really great writers make demands on the reader. It certainly is his case, but once you get into it, it is as if you acquired a new lens to look at the world anew (Proust dixit).

Schoenberg on Spotify

Only the most devoted fans of the Viennese school or the most avid record collectors would risk their limited financial assets on Schoenberg records. His dodecaphonic oeuvre is not for the faint hearted. So why buy records you would most likely hear only once or twice? But - as far as I am concerned - Spotify has now come to the rescue of the famous and famously unloved and misunderstood Viennese master. On Spotify, you can listen to an unilimited choice of Schoenberg records - Boulez, Pollini, etc - and sample all this obscure stuff that he produced after straying from the narrow downtrodden path. Well, and a what a nice surprise it is! All of a sudden, Schoenberg does not sound quite as forbidding as one thought. On the contrary, he begins to grow on you... After all the late romantic "debordements", his astringent style can be quite a relief. But the main surprise is that these pieces sound musical and good. Who can tell who might come next? Ligeti? Berio? Stockhausen? Thanks to Spotify, there you have them all, in all these recordings impossible to find even in the best record store in the world.

Is History still over?

In a previous post in this blog, on April 2009, I argued that Fukuyama's famous boutade about the end of history still held true. Recent events in Egypt and Tunisia will confirm - or infirm - whether or not this is so. Personally, I - together with the likes of Barack Obama - still put my faith on Fukuyama's dictum. I know how terribly old fashioned it is to believe in human progress, but who could repress a stirring of hope watching these crowds in Tunes and Cairo claiming their right to freedom? I know that liberal democracy will be hard to implement in the middle east (the "muddle east", as an inspired error put it) but it does seem that this was precisely what this Facebook generation had in mind when it decided that enough was enough. Can anyone really believe that the crazed rantings of religious fanatics hold a greater appeal to egyptian youth than the prospect of free speech, free travel, free voting? Revolutions tend to be messy and bloody affairs and their outcome can be horrible, so it is probably naive to expect that everything will go smoothly in Egypt and Tunisia. But, whatever the outcome will be, the aspiration for freedom and democracy that is being expressed in the streets of Cairo remains a universal one.

Claude Lanzmann's memoir

Claude Lanzmann, the author of Shoah - that monument - has published a memoir with the incongruous title "Le liévre de Patagonie" which I have been reading - nay, devouring - compulsively. The whole thing may be faintly anachronistic - Lanzmann is 85 years old, he was a great friend of Sartre and longtime husband of Simone de Beauvoir - he remains faithful to both of them - he is a somewhat old fashioned fellow still living in the masculine myth "par excellence" - the myth of the hero, himself of course, the intrepid youth who fought in the resistance, the globe-trotting journalist, who met Kim il Sung, Bouteflika, Sofia Loren and Silvana Mangano, the fearless intellectual who directed "Les Temps Modernes" for twenty years. But the real theme of the book is jewishness, his own to begin with, Israel, the Shoah, his masterwork. With what deep reserves of emotion, and incomparable "verve" does Lanzmann recount his adventures, his very own personal odissey! C'est poignant, parfois bouleversant, a ne pas perdre!

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

Not a word of praise was wasted on Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, which was widely hailed as a masterpiece. Though the plot - especially the ending - can sometimes verge on the soapoperish, the novel rises above it through the incredible vividness of its characters, dialogue and scenes, which unfold majestically, in a way that is funny, dramatic and moving. The tension never relaxes and you are drawn into the novel to the extent that its moods seem contagious. In America it was particularly celebrated for how it captured the "zeitgeist", but it seems to me that depression and family neurosis is the real theme of the novel. Politics are just background scenario. It is love not power which is really center stage and its pangs in this novel seem all too real.