February Books, March Books

In February I read the larger part of vol. III of William Vollman’s Rising Up and Rising Down (which I’ve made mention of before), and, undaunted, continued on to complete vols. IV and V in relatively short order, before setting course, full-speed-ahead, into vol. VI, where, at last, I ran aground, a little more than half-way through. Even though I generally enjoy Vollman’s prose, and, for the most part, thought his ‘long essay’ to be an admirable endeavour, I found I could stomach no more for a time, and took a break of two weeks or so, during which I read nothing at all. Meanwhile, February went, and March came.

When I picked up volume VI again, it was with slightly diminished enthusiasm, and I admit that I skimmed my way through much of what remained. I then dipped selectively into the index volume before closing that and declaring myself as good as done with the whole book, even though I had hardly read every page. Was the book too long? I would say yes, but not by all that much…

In Vollman’s 1989 collection The Rainbow Stories, there are some pieces, combining fiction and reportage, which focus with attentive and sympathetic fascination on marginalised individuals: outcasts - pariahs, even - such as neo-Nazi skinheads, drug-addicted street prostitutes and hopelessly alcoholic hobos. In the journalism collected in vols. V & VI of Rising Up and Rising Down it was interesting to see similar preoccupations coming to the surface in Vollman’s no-less-sympathetic accounts of life in countries that have been marginalised, that have become pariah states: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Taliban-run Afghanistan, Serbia. It seems to me that Vollman’s compulsion to come to know and even to love ‘the enemy’ inspires some of his finest writing.

The first book I started in March was another non-fiction title: Facing the Ocean - The Atlantic and its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500, by Barry Cunliffe. This is a wide-ranging archaeological and historical account of Atlantic Europe from Mesolithic times to the Renaissance, with an emphasis on seabourne cultural and material trade & exchange. It was something that caught my eye at Amazon when I was looking for Christmas gifts for my folks. I’m only halfway through the book - it’s sporadically fascinating, and conveys a great breadth of information, but has also, here and there, some of a textbook’s flatness about it.

I also read a couple of volumes of short stories toward the month’s end: When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías and Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš. I hadn’t read anything by either author before. On balance, I liked the former book slightly better than the latter. I loved the urbane suavity of Marias’ prose. Although several of his tales were of the kind that, when I came to turn them over in my mind after I’d read them, seemed to me slighter and flimsier than they had while I was reading them, I considered this as more a tribute to the beguiling quality of Marias’ narrative voice than anything else. I thought that Marías’ repetition of motives and character-traits across unrelated stories worked as an effective and economical way of suggesting an extra sense of depth to the book, although I’ve no idea whether that was a deliberate ploy of the author’s, or just a side-effect.

Kiš’ book felt a little less inviting, with a less polished literary surface, and with a greater variety and discontinuity between the stories. I found some of the tales rather inscrutable, although to be fair, it’s easy to forget that they were written for publication in a Communist regime where a clear statement of intent would often have been inadvisable. A few of the tales were unambiguously fascinating, though, and I was particularly struck by one piece called, I think, The Book of Fools and Kings, a thinly fictionalised history of the tangled origins and baleful influence of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Posted by misteraitch at April 1, 2004 10:41 AM | TrackBack