Reviews

Prague: Capital of the Twentieth Century

By Esther Galfalvi

Derek Sayer’s meandering dérive through the hall of mirrors of 20th century European history may prove taxing to the scholar who expects a clearly signposted route, but exhilarating to the intellectual flâneur. The subtitle, A Surrealist History, gives the first enigmatic, elliptical tickle: Is this a book on Surrealism? Is it a book on the Surrealists? Or is it a work of Surrealism in itself? It eludes and elides easy categorisation – by design, for the point of Sayer’s psychohistorical walk is precisely to subver ‘grand narratives.’ With Prague, it seems that Sayer is not only putting a damper on a coherent interpretation of history, but setting fire to the notion of traditional, formal scholarship. Seekers of a chronological or thematic history of Prague should look elsewhere, but anyone wishing to experience an intuitive grasp of Modernism – artistic, literary, political – should buy a ticket and take a seat.

Autobiography of a Corpse

By Brendan Byrne.

The opening and titular story of the NYRB’s second collection of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s short fiction Autobiography of Corpse features a typical (for the time) protagonist, a journalist from the provinces with a typical (for the time) quest, the search for a room in newly Soviet Moscow which is accomplished in a deeply atypical (for any time) manner. Housing is a theme which crops up repeatedly in Russian fiction from the 1920s, most notably in Zamyatin’s story ‘The Cave’ and Serge’s novel City Under Siege. What makes Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction stand out is not its unacceptability to the Soviet state’s nascent notions of socialist realism (both Zamyatin, Serge, and host of other writers were censored, exiled, ignored, and/or shot) but its combination of post-Gogolian fantastical grotesque and perverse Cartesian metaphysics with explicit Kantian overtones. Krzhizhanovsky isn’t just weird for Moscow in 1925, he’s weird for anywhere and everytime.

The Night

By Brendan Byrne.

 

“Language is the poisoned air we live in. In spite of all our jokers, words don’t play; and in spite of Breton, they don’t make love except in dreams. Words work, to the profit of the dominant organisation of life.”

The above quote is from the polemic ‘All the King’s Men’ which appeared in Internationale Situationniste #8 in 1963, three years after Michèle Bernstein’s novel All the King’s Horses. The titles are not taken from the same source. The editors of Internationale Situationniste (of whom Bernstein was one) explicitly reference Humpty-Dumpty, whereas her novel takes its title from a traditional French ballad. In ‘Aux Marches du Palais’, the coupling of a royal and a commoner is imagined, creating what Greil Marcus called “as deep and singular an image of revolution as there was ever been”. This different ethic of love fuels the shared plot (such as it is) of All the Kings Horses and its successor The Night (1961): a married couple’s seduction and abandonment of two young lovers. All the King’s Horses tells the story in an irony on the style of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. The Night mimics Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman, fracturing the more or less undisturbed chronology of its predecessor.

The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien

By Adam Rivett.

Flann O’Brien didn’t have much respect for the traditional novel as we’ve come to know and scarcely tolerate it. At-Swim-Two-Birds, his first, can barely get started before it’s wandering down the winding track of digression and self-conscious hyperbole, all tongue-in-cheek mythology and undergraduate linguistic bluster. His second (and arguably greatest) novel, The Third Policeman, trades in the virtuoso style of the debut for a plainer prose, but, indisputably, a bleaker world view. Play becomes despair, and youthful drunken rhetorical games grow surreal and morbid. There was, from the outset of O’Brien’s work, a fundamental impatience with received forms. The ‘ideal’ novel that is so often rewarded these days – realist, tightly plotted, tastefully ‘well written,’ and above all consistent – is not O’Brien’s. Yet Birds is one of the 20th Century’s great debuts. Its voice – sardonic, harshly original, comfortable in numerous registers – seems formed and confident from the start. Reading the small amount of pre-Birds material in the new collection The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien, then, gives us, among other things, the only clue we have as to how the man otherwise known as Brian O’Nolan got it so right so fast.

Paradises

By Paula McGrath.

If in recent times the ‘literary’ novel has polarised into two distinct types — the expansive, all-encompassing Jonathan Franzen kind, and the other, more modest variety, slim volumes of spare, detatched prose, like Ben Lerner‘s Leaving The Atocha Station — Paradises belongs firmly to the latter. It follows an episodic structure, and this, combined with the uncomplicated sentence structure of its first person, present tense prose, makes it deceptive in its apparent simplicity.

Paradises opens a few years after Iosi Havilio‘s earlier novel Open Door ends, and follows its unnamed, recently widowed protagonist as she moves with her four year old son, Simón, from rural Open Door to Buenos Aires. Chapter by chapter, she finds accommodation, employment, meets an array of misfits, parties, sometimes takes care of, sometimes neglects Simon, considers participating in a robbery, and other somewhat random situations.