Category: books (Page 23 of 23)

I came across an interesting review in The Guardian last weekend, of a novella entitled The Necrophiliac by a writer I wasn’t aware of, Gabrielle Wittkop. The review mentioned Nabokov, likening Wittkopp’s Lucien to VN’s Humbert Humbert. My attention was caught immediately and I bought the book the same day.  It’s a beautiful edition. Published by ECW Press of Montreal, with the first UK import consignment already sold out, the grey-brown mottled covers and the parchment-coloured paper within give the sense that

the book itself might have been stolen from a tomb. It’s the kind of book that’s nice to hold because it feels singular.

To say that I’ve enjoyed this book hugely might sound a bit strange. To say that it’s frequently made me laugh out loud sounds even stranger. Both statements, however, are true. I have enjoyed the concise excellence of the writing, which is tactile as poetry whilst maintaining the taut lines and nervous energy of the best Patricia Highsmith. I have laughed aloud with pleasure at the writer’s audacity, which goes beyond audacity into the realms of pure individualism, that European sang-froid that simply declares itself, that doesn’t give a damn about what the reader thinks or even if the reader exists. I read three books by Emmanuel Carrere towards the end of last year (I Am Alive and You Are Dead, The Adversary and the truly brilliant My Life as a Russian Novel) and reading Wittkop brings a similar exhilaration. If anything Wittkop goes further. I don’t believe she wrote this book to shock people – she wouldn’t have cared. She wrote it because she wanted to.

Something that did shock me about The Necrophiliac was that I found it filed in the Horror section. At first glance perhaps it might seem strangely appropriate to find a work so explicit in its graveyard humour shelved next to The Mammoth Book of Vampires and Zombie Apocalypse, but I fear that it found its way there more by accident than design. As with so much of the finest and most challenging fiction, the people charged with selling it weren’t entirely sure of what it was.

Shocking also is the fact that although The Necrophiliac was written in 1972 this is its first appearance in English. From what I have been able to glean from the internet, Gabrielle Wittkop lived a life as singular and full of risks as her writing. I feel lucky to have discovered her, and proud to share a birthday with her. She died in 2002, with the words: ‘I intend to die as I have lived, as a free man.’ Gabrielle Wittkop’s obituary in The Independent is here.

As a child of seven or eight, already harbouring the secrets of a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal) unusually sulky and indolent; actually of course, I kept daydreaming in a most outrageous fashion.

“Stop moping!” she would cry. “Look at the harlequins!”

“What harlequins? Where?”

“Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together – jokes, images – and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”

(Look at the Harlequins Vladimir Nabokov 1974)

I love Nabokov’s final novel more and more, and on some days most of all. We now know that it was not meant as a farewell – VN was fully immersed in writing a new novel right up until the time of his death – but in its reinvented autobiography it has that elegiac feel. It also contains – as quoted above – one of the most beautiful and evocative descriptions I have ever come across of what precisely it means to be a writer.

I read Lila Azam Zanganeh’s The Enchanter and was enchanted by it. What I loved was its sincerity, its passion. I didn’t mind that occasionally her close and clever pastiching of VN’s (in truth) inimitable style left me wishing she would use her own voice with a little more confidence. I didn’t mind, because there will be time enough for her to learn to do that, and this was a book she clearly felt an urgent need to write. And having an urgent need to write is, perhaps, the one true prerequisite for becoming a writer in the first place.

Zanganeh ‘gets’ Nabokov in a way that far too few of the major critics and experts do. She taps straight into his first and really only subject, which is the way in which our human mortality is redeemed by art. I felt, quite simply, joy in her epiphany, and privileged to witness it in one with such a power of expression. Too many commentators, especially British and American ones, tend to see VN as a trickster, a caricaturist, a ‘master stylist’ whose arrogant self-satisfaction makes him interested only in displaying his own linguistic brilliance. They dismiss his tender and emotive characterisations as mere puppetry. There has even been latterly, I feel sad to report, some embarrassingly embarrassed attempts to suggest he might have shared – at least in his fantasies – some of the sexual abberations of his own Humbert Humbert.

There was a spate of programmes and features on Nabokov a year or so back, to commemorate the release of his unfinished novel The Original of Laura. One of the programmes featured a longish interview with Martin Amis, who for years has cited VN as his literary hero. You could say I’m not a huge Amis fan, but as a VN fan this was something I had to see. I was shocked to discover that Amis, by his own admission, had only actually read about half of Nabokov, that his ‘expert’ knowledge is largely based on VN’s early, satirical novels (Laughter in the Dark and King Queen Knave, those novels which in fact – if we can say such a thing – are closest to Amis’s own) and Lolita, and that Ada, arguably VN’s masterpiece, had thus far eluded him.

He’d tried to read it three times and each time failed. Not to be beaten, he set himself the task, specifically for this programme, of finally slogging through to the end. Not liking or not understanding what he read, he described it as ‘stillborn,’ VN’s failure to recapture the high ground he’d won in Lolita.

I’m using Amis’s experience as an example here not to have a go at Amis (although that might be fun, too) but to illustrate the misconceptions so many seem to have about Nabokov: that he is ‘difficult,’ or ‘precious’ or simply incomprehensible. These are misconceptions that Lila Zanganeh does not entertain even briefly. She shows, in a variety of delightful, original and audacious ways, how Nabokov is a writer to be read, not studied, a writer to get passionate over, to argue about late into the night, a writer who can inspire us on a daily basis.

The one thing she doesn’t get is the butterfly thing, which is a shame, because without any doubt ‘The Aurelian’ is my favourite VN story.

I finished the first draft of my new ‘Martin’ story today. To celebrate I went for a stroll along the Stade, a working fishing beach that is more or less unique to Hastings and one of its many delights.

It also features in the story, and I had the curious sensation while walking there that I was intruding on one of my own fictions.

Stonefield Road, Hastings

The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness Lila Azam Zanganeh/Allen Lane May 2011

I had expected to find enchanters and demons in Nabokov. Shuddering magic. The stuff of fairy tales, ‘noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings.’ The rest, in truth, was something akin to falling in love, a haunting feeling of native otherness.

(Lila Azam Zanganeh, foreword to The Enchanter)

I found out about this book a week or so ago. Today I purchased my copy and have just begun reading it. My reading pile grows more unwieldy by the day, but I found The Enchanter was a book I could not ignore. I first read Lolita when I was in my early twenties. It was a book I devoured in a single sitting. I was disturbed, upset, perplexed, thrilled and above all transported by the experience. Lolita was then (and perhaps still is now) what is sometimes referred to as a ‘notorious’ book, and of course I was curious about it. In the event I found that most of what I had already read about it was either completely wrongheaded or beside the point. More than anything I felt I had discovered a unique genius, a writer who spoke to me in ways I had never encountered before and who left me in a state of perpetual nostalgia for the world – both material and creative – that he invented. A genius who spoke uniquely to me.

Of all the writers I came to know during this crucial period of development and learning it is Nabokov who has remained a stalwart, a constant inspiration in my life and whose works seem as relevant and electric to me now as they did then.

So when I read about Lila Zanganeh’s attempt to chronicle her own literary love affair with Nabokov I was instantly both intrigued and on my guard. Intrigued because her feelings about Nabokov seemed to concur so closely with my own, on my guard because, well, she was trying to pull off something that was impossible. No one can compete with the master, or should even try, and yet here Zanganeh was, playing games with his style, having imaginary conversations with him – how was this ever going to work?

This girl clearly had some guts or some nerve. Either that or she was insane.

What unnerved me most of all though was some of the online tittle-tattle surrounding this book. I found numerous instances of hostility at the very idea that The Enchanter had been written, let alone published. Many of these comments were personal insults aimed at the writer. Most of them were written by people who had not, at least to date, read the book. Not exactly what you’d call informed debate.

I found this to be deeply distasteful. It seemed to me that Zanganeh had set out honestly to do something brave and original, and that this, of and for itself, should be applauded. (It’s what good writing is all about, surely?) The idea of fusing biography with memoir with fiction with literary criticism seemed to me beautiful and audacious, an idea I could get fond of myself. Whether or not I end up liking this book I’m glad it has been written.

And if Zanganeh’s work draws new disciples to the feet of the master that goes double.

Find out more about The Enchanter here, and here.

House of Fear is a new anthology of stories based around the theme of the haunted house. It’s edited by Jonathan Oliver, published by Solaris, and will be available from October 1st – which makes it the ideal Hallowe’en gift.

For the full (and impressive) line-up go here:

http://www.solarisbooks.com/titles/title_details/house_of_fear?hjfi5q35e736aun17d82n65jt1

My own contribution to the anthology is a story called ‘The Muse of Copenhagen.’ I suppose you could say it’s my own twisted look at the Battle of Maldon…..