The Second Circle

Brief Reviews

BRIEFLY NOTED by Fin Keegan...

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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

Reviews by Fin Keegan at The Second Circle: