The Second Circle

Brief Reviews

BRIEFLY NOTED by C.J. McCarthy...

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The Clay Machine-Gun
[AKA Buddha's Little Finger (USA)]
by
Victor Pelevin

Americas, Africa & Asia

Europe

Victor Pelevin’s The Clay Machine-Gun (1996) consists of three strands: the narrative of Pyotr Voyd, reluctant commissar to a legendary Red commander during the Russian Civil War; that of a patient in a 1990s Moscow psychiatric institute, convinced he is said commissar; and, in a kind of a literalisation of Buddhist philosophy, a series of narratives wherein characters experience reality as a flux of mental projections. Rather than exploiting any of these narratives in and of itself, Pelevin is interested in their juxtaposition, each in a distinct way exploring the nature of perception, memory and reality. Indeed, what narrative drive the novel possesses derives from the tension between these three narratives—the manner in which one strand illuminates or undermines the others, or attempts to assert its own primacy.
That said, Pelevin regularly displays an ability to crystallize key moments in the narratives into particularly striking and complex images. Equally, although the dialogue consists at times of lengthy psychological analysis and playful philosophising, its debates are regularly offered in distilled form: having heard his co-inmates offer a series of insightful self-diagnoses, for instance, the patient Voyd declares that reasoning like doctors 'would be perfectly fine if you were standing here in white coats. But why are you lying here yourselves, if you understand everything so clearly?' Frequently brilliant and consistently engaging. CJ

Click here for Fin Keegan's review of Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra

Whenever a novel hits a dead-end, have a man with a gun enter the room. That was Raymond Chandler’s declared strategy. In his third novel, In Babylon (J.M. Meulenhoff, 1997), Marcel Möring takes a slightly less original approach: every chapter begins by cutting to a situation more or less removed from that just established—either by jumping forwards or backwards in time, or into the memory or imagination of its chief protagonist. The chapter then proceeds to fill out the new scene, dropping various bits of information on the way as a means of simultaneously advancing the narrative and allowing the reader get his or her bearings, before repeating this trick all over again. In short, although it begins with an unexplained death and at times takes on the air of an intellectual whodunnit, the novel only ever engenders a sense of mystery by withholding information. Its narrator, Nathan Hollander, is a writer of fairy-tales trapped with his niece in a remote, book-lined hunting-lodge in the middle of a snow-storm—which (in case we’ve missed the point) he himself describes as ‘straight out of some dark fairy-tale.’ The house itself has been left to him by his uncle, a famous sociologist, on the condition that Hollander write his biography.
And so, complete with explicit references to the Decameron, with a storm outside the house and ‘a mysterious presence’ within, Hollander begins to piece together that biography for his niece. But just as the niece does little more than ask the right questions at the right time, the biography is essentially a vehicle for digressions on tradition, ‘home’, Jewishness and storytelling, and for a broader history of several generations of a Jewish family of Eastern European origin. One review on the blurb proclaims that In Babylon sets the Dutchman 'in the ranks of the most important European writers of his generation.’ Highly competent though it may be, the novel’s closely-observed incidental details cannot reduce the distance at which its characters are held, supernatural presences cannot offset banal dialogue, and the broadness of the novel’s historical scope cannot compensate for narrowness of its intellectual range. CJ

Americas, Africa & Asia | Europe

In Babylon
by
Marcel Möring

Last Call
by
Harry Mulisch

All Territories

This late novel by one of the elder statesmen of Dutch literature concerns an ageing actor, Bouwmeester, who is called out of retirement by an experimental theatre company. He is called on less to return to the mediocre comedies of his heyday (before and during the Second World War), however, than to the heights achieved on the stage by previous generations of his family, of which he is the last survivor. The metaphors are quite clear here, and indeed a metaphorical reading of the novel is kindest to it. The action of the play alternates between a theatre company's rehearsal and performance of The Tempest. Parallels abound: like the dying actor, the play sets itself in opposition to time; likewise, the project is threatened with extinction by a variety of external forces, not only financial and bureaucratic, but historical—as when the actor's ambiguous role in the war and his reactionary views are made public; and just as the play strives to exceed conventional notions of what a play may be, so the actor must overcome his own limited vision of his abilities. As rehearsals progress, it is Bouwmeester's personal development which drives the narrative. That said, there are no epiphanies, no contrition for his past or his views, no reassessments: any engendering of vulnerability, affection or respect in his arrogant personality by the company are made despite himself, and the solidarity this shared project brings to persons of radically different views, ages, backgrounds and abilities is achieved without ever disregarding those differences. The novel is not served well by its humour, however, which veers always towards slapstick and the bathetic; likewise, the word-play, double-entendres and ironies of the original are ill-served by a creaky, literal translation. CJ

'Don't be cynical ... I don't like it,' orders the narrator's mother at one point one in this vigorously misanthropic debut novel, which made its twenty-three year old author something of a cause celèbre when it first appeared in his native Holland. 'I wasn't being cynical, I was being truthful,' the narrator assures us. It's a disingenuous pose maintained throughout this picaresque narrative, which catalogues his transition from boyhood to manhood, from the puerile realm of his parents' house to the adult one of dead-end jobs and dead-end sex. What the narrator gains as he accumulates experience in the brothels and bars of Amsterdam, however, is less an understanding of the world than an attitude towards it. Thankfully, the narrative exceeds this pose: where the narrator insists on masking deeply felt emotion as sardonic aphorism, the inadequacy of his 'indifference' is blatant and unsettling. Ghosting the narrative are the narrator's Jewishness and his parents' experiences under the Nazis, but he is determined to reject the identity offered therein as readily as he does the bourgeois values so desperately promoted by his parents. Along with a black and farcical humour, this lends a nihilistic sensibility to what could easily have remained a familiar urban rites-of-passage. C.J. McCarthy

Americas, Africa & Asia | Europe

Blue Mondays
by
Arnon Grunberg

Reviews by C.J. McCarthy at The Second Circle:

Break it Down by Lydia Davis
Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller
The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus
Brief Reviews including Arnon Grunberg and Harry Mulisch