Families:
without them one would have so little to groan about. And if you think
you've got it bad, spare a thought for Doug, possessed of ninety-nine brothers,
many of them mentally unstable. Together they comprise Donald Antrim's
richly imagined clan, a slapstick progeny ranging in age from young "horny
bastards" to a most cantankerous ninety-three. An accident-prone lot, the
hundred have gathered at the family's accident-provocative mansion to share
a dinner of pork chops. There is a further purpose: to find the ashes of
their "old fucker" of a father--though, his prodigous manhood aside, as
in Perec's La Disparation one feels the constant absence of a primary
element, in this case the gaping vowel of the feminine. Not much happens.
The entire narrative is concerned with amusing or sinister descriptions
of characters colliding with or falling over one another, varieties of
men condemned to a life-long coping with the concentrated perlexity that
can be family. The Hundred Brothers can surely trace some paternity
to Robert Pinget's equally slim nouveau novels of the 1950s, Baga and Mahu
(the latter ending with the words "Well, there you are, I've nothing else
to say, but the game's mine, I've won"--which is true enough I suppose
if, unlike a friend of mine whose first action when picking up a book is
to read the last paragraph, one bows to tradition by reading a book straight
through from the beginning). All in all Antrim gives us tortured highbrows
an agreeable diversion, an hour or two's distraction from the duty of calling
up to pester one's own relatives. Not at all novelistic (in fact the author
seems to save his plots for his short stories) more a short fiction that
swelled into a book, one looks forward to Donald Antrim dredging more out
of himself for us next time around. Fin Keegan
Americas
| Europe,
Africa & Asia
|
The
Hundred Brothers
by
Donald Antrim
|
|
Mr Phillips
by
John Lanchester
|
The eponymous protagonist
of John Lanchester's second novel has lost his job but cannot break the
habit of donning a suit and commuting into the City from his suburban fastness.
Thus a day spent wandering, like a tailored situationist, about a London
scarcely noticed before catastrophe struck.
Victor Phillips' ruminations
will be familiar to those who have trespassed inside the mind of Leopold
Bloom and even Mrs Dalloway, heroine of a book which Lanchester claims
not to have read. But, unlike Joyce, Lanchester here falls victim to his
subject matter: Mr P., ultimately, will only be remembered by career drones.
For the rest of us, despite his emotional twitching, Phillips comes dangerously
close to the emotional blankness of a Medieval Everyman: such is the state
of a world being mediocratized by mass media that it may well be that the
mental life of a Bloom (or even a Dalloway, God help us) is no longer conceivable--or
credible. Fin Keegan
Americas
| Europe,
Africa & Asia
|
| Artfully
packaged to seem longer than it is, Ian McEwan's Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam
provides a gripping though brief read, gleefully tracing the slide from
virtue and propriety of an Establishment composer and his broadsheet editor
friend. One for the plane or the beach, a slighter reprise of McEwan's
previous page turner, Enduring Love, and touching once more on the
fascination with public and political ethics in his earlier shot to the
solar plexus, The Child in Time, this book engages and diverts--but,
with such perfect control, one wonders what the point is of writing such
books for a writer of McEwan's ability and literary awareness. Fin Keegan
Americas,
Africa & Asia | Europe
|
Amsterdam
by Ian
McEwan
|
The Stranger Next Door
by
Amélie Nothomb
|
The
Stranger Next Door (Les Catilinaires, 1995) makes a virtue of French
publishing's prediliction for short novels: since the book is unputdownable
readers who need to eat and sleep will be grateful that it runs to less
than 150 scanty pages. As tightly wound as a Hitchcock film or McEwan novella,
the story concerns a bourgeois couple who buy a house in the country and
move in for what promises to be a peaceful retirement, replete with the
charming novelty of an occasional visit from their peasant neighbour. However
this gentleman proves to be a relentless guest, inclined to sit in their
living-room for hours on end, fortified in a silence as absolute as God's.
Their middle-class weapons exhausted one by one, often hilariously, his
hosts slide from sarcasm to outright insult and finally violence to regain
their rustic coma. (As I read the book, aware of its first appearence in
1995, it was easy to see the story as an allegory for the unwelcome intrusion
of the Balkan Wars in the European psyche, accompanied as it was by footage
of a vast and forgotten peasant population). Amélie Nothomb, the
vampy Belgian author of over half-a-dozen books, is a star in literary
France. If current favourites Darriesecq, Echenoz and Nothomb herself are
anything to go by, the French seem to have turned their back on prosey
excursions in style in favour of tightly wound psychological lit-thrillers.
This is a gripping and memorable book with disturbing undertones. Fin
Keegan
Americas
| Europe,
Africa & Asia
|
Tabucchi's work is nowhere
more dreamlike than in this little book, his first written in the language
of his adopted home of Portugal. Like John Lanchester's Mr Phillips,
reviewed above, the narrator has an unexpected day to kill wandering about
Lisbon. Personal tragedies are explored and explanations sought, rendezvous
with the dead and the lost forming the major episodes of the book.
Frankly this one, at
least for those who cannot read the original, is for lovers of either the
city on the Tagus or the Italian novelist in its thrall. As a fan of both
writer and city I spent a happy hour or two reading this. Fin
Keegan
All
Territories
|
Requiem
by
Antonio Tabucchi
|
|
