Day: September 23, 2022

Mild derealization at the used bookstore (Books acquired, 23 Sept. 2022)

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The first time that I remember having intense derealization in my adult life was when I spent a few hours cleaning out a large spare closet in the house my wife and I were then living in.

This was about sixteen years ago, close to the birth of our first child, our daughter, and I was removing from the closet boxes of nostalgia: high school and college papers, paintings and sketches, patches, guitar pedals, old issues of MAD Magazine, punk zines, stereo wire, soon-to-be obsolete audiovisual cables, record sleeves without records, 3.5 inch floppy disks, memory cards from abandoned cameras, rolls of film, tennis balls, band t-shirts I’d never fit into again, heavy stereo equipment, and so on and etc.

I was removing all these old things to make space for new things, a pattern that I’ve followed ever since. And well anyway, not an hour into the process I began to get an odd dizziness, a feeling that none of this was real. I was not thinking about any of the objects but something about their accumulated physicality overruled my subjectivity. I recall having to turn off the record I was listening to, drinking a lot of cold water, and lying down. But the sensation kept on, like a low-grade psychotropic trip.

I experienced similar misadventures later in similar circumstances—reorganizing large bookshelves, moving offices, more stuff with closets. I also began to (rarely) experience full-blown anxiety attacks later in life, usually triggered by driving an automobile over a large bridge or on a complex highway, and the feelings of derealization I’d previously experienced were a part of those attacks, but they were also accompanied by feelings of dread and difficulty breathing. Those kinds of attacks are awful; the derealization thing is just trippy and weird. And it happened to me today while I was browsing for books. I’m not sure if it was the closeness of the aisles or the smell or a certain book or the mild change in weather that we had in north Florida today, where the throbbing humidity and scorching sun relaxed to a cloudy eighty. I think it was the screaming child who triggered it though, thrashing around on the ancient cut carpet, slapping the carpet, kicking her feet like a swimmer. Her mother and siblings walked away from her, walked into another aisle of this mazelike used bookstore, while I completely lost and never regained the name of the author I was searching for in the “T” section of Classics.

From there I leaned into the unreality and made a nice little trip of it, reminding myself that if I am a little bit crazy, that makes me a normal American. I too have microplastics in my blood! I too feel the stress of the appearance of unrelenting, non-stop change!

I picked up two books: Javier Marías’s Thus Bad Begins and Osvaldo Soriano’s A Funny Dirty Little War. I mostly knew Marías from his “La Zona Fantasma” columns in The Believer, and I have read only one book by Marías, Voyage Along the Horizon, which I scarcely remember. But I know Roberto Bolaño was a fan, so I’d always meant to return and try again. Today, I saw a hardback copy of Thus Bad Begins (translated by Margaret Jull Costa) propped lazily up against a hardback copy of Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black. Mantel died yesterday; Marías died a dozen days ago; both books had strayed from their author’s placards, not unusual in this wonderful sprawling store. So I picked it up. It’s probably not the best starting place for Marías, right? I’ll try. I love the title; I am shallow.

The title on the spine attracted me to Osvaldo Soriano’s A Funny Dirty Little War (translated by Nick Caistor), the goofy, menacingly violent cover intrigued me and the Calvino blurb and first three pages sold me.

I don’t have a conclusion for this blog. I still feel a little outside of myself.

 

No failed work, only work pending | Hilary Mantel

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It has always been axiomatic that when the dying speak, they cannot lie. I knew a man whose mother told him, as she lay dying, who his real father was: like a woman in a Victorian melodrama. She might as well have climbed out of bed and kicked his feet from under him. The truth was far too late to do him any good, and just in time to plunge him into misery and confusion and the complex grief of a double loss. Some truths have a sell-by date. Some should not be uttered even by the dying. Some cannot be uttered. When a victim of Henry VIII faced the headsman, the standard scaffold speech praised the king: his justice, his mercy. You didn’t mean this, but you had to think about the people left behind: some flattery might help them. Oppressors don’t just want to do their deed, they want to take a bow: they want their victims to sing their praises. This doesn’t change, and it seems there are no new thoughts, no new struggles with censorship and self-censorship, only the old struggles repeating: half-animated corpses of forbidden childhood thoughts crawling out of the psychic trenches we have dug for them, and recurring denials by the great of the truths written on the bodies of the small.

I have 97 notebooks in a wooden box. I do not count them as suppressed volumes. I work on the principle that there is no failed work, only work pending: that there is nothing I won’t say, only what I haven’t said yet. In my novel in progress I have written, “If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?” A notebook written eight years ago says, “I am searching for a place where the truth can be uttered: a place, I mean, that is not an execution ground.”

From Hilary Mantel’s essay “Blot, Erase, Delete,” published in Index on Censorship, Vol. 45, Issue 3, 2016.

A review of Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black

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In Hilary Mantel’s 2005 novel Beyond Black, a fat psychic named Alison endures the harrowing torment of a collective of ghosts she calls the Fiends, the spirits of cruel men from her childhood. When a young, aimless woman named Colette comes into Alison’s life and assumes managerial duties for her career, Alison’s bilious past comes to a head. Colette engineers more and better gigs for Alison (the death of Princess Diana causes a huge spike in business), who, despite her genuine psychic talents, must nonetheless run the kind of scam the “punters” in her audience crave. Colette and Alison soon move in together, buying a new house in a quiet, boring suburb outside of London; their prefab homestead is drawn in sharp contrast to the slums of Aldershot where Alison grew up–the novel’s second setting. As Beyond Black progresses, contemporary suburban Britain increasingly crumbles into Alison’s grim, greasy past in Aldershot. Alison’s chief tormentor is, ironically, her “spirit guide,” a mean little man named Morris, a one-time frequent customer for Alison’s prostitute mother. Alison, like many victims, has suppressed much of her grotesque childhood, but it’s hard to black out everything with psychic baggage like Morris weighing her down. In time, more and more of the Fiends reemerge, forcing Alison to confront her mother and the abuse they both suffered at the hands of those awful men. As the book lurches to its chilling climax, Alison asserts independence, casting out her metaphysical and psychological demons.

At its core, Beyond Black asks what it means to be haunted and how one might survive an abusive past intact. A slim specter of a character named Gloria floats through the book. The Fiends, whose vile antics are sometimes compared to a gypsy circus, have dismembered Gloria with the old saw trick. In Alison’s memory, pieces of Gloria are scattered around her childhood home, parceled out, fed to dogs, transported in boxes at midnight, hidden. Alison’s awful mother frequently alludes to Alison herself being “sawed up,” a metaphor that dances on the literal as we come to realize that the old drunk has pimped out her daughter repeatedly. Mantel’s novel investigates the return of the repressed, and although she gives us something like a happy ending, the book’s central thesis seems to be that pain cannot be abandoned or hidden, but only mitigated through direct confrontation.

The book’s humor does nothing to lighten its grim subject–if anything it exacerbates and confounds the darkness at the heart of Beyond Black. Mantel’s gift for dialogue fleshes out her characters (even the spectral ones), and while the book aims for a satirical tone at times, its characters are too richly drawn to be mere cutouts in a stage production. Mantel’s satire of contemporary English life is sharp and bleak; you laugh a little and then feel bad for laughing and a page later you’re horrified. It’s a successful book in that respect. It’s one real weakness is in the character of Colette, whose voice gives way to Alison’s past by the book’s end. This is actually no problem, as Colette’s narrative life is not nearly as interesting as Alison’s psychic traumas; Colette is, however, catalyst for the changes in Alison’s life. It would’ve been nice to see more resolution here, but I suppose Beyond Black hews closer to real life here, with all its messy loose ends.

I chose to read Beyond Black because I enjoyed Mantel’s recent Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall so much. The books have little in common other than being well-written and tightly paced, and I think that anyone who wanted more Mantel after an introduction via Wolf Hall would do right to pick up Beyond Black. Recommended.

[Ed. note—Biblioklept first published this review in 2010. RIP to Hilary Mantel, who died “suddenly but peacefully” yesterday at 70.]