Fourteen-year-old Preston Wildey-King has a lot of problems. He’s on the outs with his girlfriend Peggy. His best friend Ryan always leers at him in a funny way, and Ryan’s older brothers want him to join their gang and do crimes. His older sister Erica accuses him of stealing from her. Preston’s failing at math, and his teacher might be trying to seduce him. His mother doesn’t know what to do with him.
And he’s addicted to Pepsi Cola.
This is, roughly, the premise of June-Alison Gibbons’ 1981 novel The Pepsi-Cola Addict, a raw and distressing young-adult novel that was actually written by a young adult. Gibbons was just sixteen-years-old when she wrote The Pepsi-Cola Addict and pooled her dole money with her twin sister Jennifer to have it published by a vanity press. Two years later, after a spree of petty crimes and then more serious crimes culminating in arson, Gibbons and her sister were committed to a psychiatric hospital and confined there for over a decade. The Gibbons twins’ story was detailed in a book by journalist Marjorie Wallace called The Silent Twins, later followed by a television documentary; in 2022, Wallace’s book was adapted into a feature film of the same name.
I knew nothing of the Gibbons’ sad early life when I picked up The Pepsi-Cola Addict at an indie bookstore, intrigued by the goofy title and bright pop art cover. The jacket copy informed me briefly of the Gibbon twins’ incarceration in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital and called the novel “one of the great works of twentieth-century outsider literature,” but I restrained myself from further exploring the author’s biography until after I’d read her novel (I’d recommend you do the same, reader).
It is difficult to explain how unnerving the world of The Pepsi-Cola Addict is. Gibbons grew up in Wales, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants, but she sets her novel in a version of Malibu Beach the creation of which seems informed primarily by picture postcards and pure fantasy. Preston lives in a shabby apartment in Malibu with his mother and sister. This ratty apartment is across from the beach, where he often wanders at night. He attends something called MALIBU STATE SCHOOL, which (contrary to U.S. school customs) runs year round, even in the (contrary to coastal California meteorological customs) sweltering summer heat.
Everything is more-than-slightly off in Gibbons’ setting. She anchors the plot in realistic visual detail, but the events, mediated via Preston’s bewildered consciousness, can’t square with their own apparent reality. The effect reminds one of the sinister dread the films of David Lynch often evoke from the most mundane of images—a lawn sprinkler, a Dumpster—or the fiction of Roberto Bolaño, which so frequently gnaws at the reader’s stomach, anxiously assuring him that everything could go to shit at any moment.
There’s a grittiness to Gibbons’ version of “Malibu” that belies its pop art contours, an essential griminess that finds its most repeated expression in Preston’s constantly sweating. Our hero sweats and sweats some more. And why shouldn’t he? Preston might be confronted with radical violence or unwanted sexual encounters at any time, and even if it’s not the twin axis of sex and violence coming at him, he’s always in danger of misinterpreting the language, faces, and intentions of every single person he interacts with. But he sweats nonetheless, addict that he is.
I haven’t really touched on Preston’s Pepsi addiction, although it’s definitely a problem, although no one can quite say why it’s a problem. (And, to be clear, he’s addicted to Pepsi, not Coca-Cola, as he makes very clear to Peggy during a date gone wrong (she tries to bring him a Coke)). Girlfriend Peggy has already left Preston once before because of his addiction. Preston’s sister Erica beats him up over the apparent theft of a five-dollar bill she’d saved, which she’s convinced he’s used to buy Pepsi. Preston’s mother is concerned that the Pepsi addiction prevents her boy from his studies—and indeed, he does skip class to surreptitiously sip the sweet nectar from a can he’s hidden in his gym locker.
The novel’s opening scene depicts Preston buying Pepsi in bulk, openly at a grocery store, during daylight, but as the story progresses, his purchases become more coded in furtive anxiety and sexual confusion. Consider this night scene, where a young liquor store clerk looks “somewhat lasciviously” at Preston while he purchases his cans:
He took three cans of pepsi and walked directly toward her. She looked about twenty; her large blue eyes seemed prominent from the rest of her face. Her white pinafore dress strained across her breasts as she turned to calculate money on the large till.
Preston glanced at her hands. Finding no ring on her finger, he looked closer at her. She looked back at him.
“That’ll be one dollar, two nickels please.” Feeling the touch of her hand as he handed her the money, Preston felt a quiver pass through him. He looked intently into her eyes, his excited passion aroused as he sensed a new look come about her. Immediately a hardening pain hit him between his eyes. Preston detached himself from his trance. Hot, speechless he turned and went through the open door, carrying his cans awkwardly.
By the novel’s climax, Preston’s craving for the soda has crossed into criminal territory. He helps a gang ransack a store, but only has eyes for the fizzy dark stuff:
He watched as they pulled down the shelves, scattering food onto the floor. He watched as they raided the store tills, pushing money into their pockets. Preston glanced around nervously. His eyes rested on a familiar stack standing in the corner of the store. With one move of his body Preston was over there, fighting desperately to free them from the cardboard box. His eyes dilated; he ripped off the ring, tilting the can to his lips, as the liquid ran down his chin. The pepsi cola, cool and tingling, entered his throat, like the spray of a fireman’s hose, killing the hotness of the fire.
Have I spoiled the plot’s trajectory by sharing that Preston takes part in the gang’s crime? I don’t think so. The Pepsi-Cola Addict is a picaresque novel, sure, but it also, perhaps paradoxically to the claim I made just a few words before, has clear, linear, and somewhat tragic plot.
And that plot—well, look, I have no idea whether or not Gibbons had read S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders, a seminal work of American (so-called) “young adult” fiction—but it is the book that, at least in my narrow estimation, The Pepsi-Cola Addict has the most in common with. Like Hinton, Gibbons captures the ever-present anxiety of being a teenager, that time of amorphous body and amorphous mind, that time we find ourselves an outsider among outsiders. And like Hinton, Gibbons was also a teenager writing about teenagers—again, this is truly a “young adult” novel, and to read it is to be thrust into an alienating and alienated consciousness.
It is likely though that we do not immediately think of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders as the work of an “outsider artist,” although she likely fits the loosest definitions of that term. (The term’s originator, Roger Cardinal, didn’t really think much of the term; he wanted to use Art Brut for his book’s title, but the publisher made him go with something more “English.”) But The Outsiders was and remains controversial and still faces challenges in school libraries, even if its apparent grittiness has since been synthesized and integrated into the confines of the YA genre proper. In contrast, The Pepsi-Cola Addict truly is “outsider” (even if its author took a correspondence writing course)—the general vibe is closer to a Paul Morrissey or early John Waters film than it is the gentle realism of Francis Ford Coppola. Like Hinton’s teens, Gibbons’ adolescents have their own argot, but it is bewildering at times. Characters call frequently call each other “babe,” for example, no matter if their relationship warrants it or not. At one point, his sister demands to know where he got the “roorback” on her. Has any teen—any person, really—used the term “roorback” in slang?
I’ve neglected so much in this short book—Preston’s confused sexual/nonsexual relationships with his best friend Ryan and his teacher Ms. Rosenberg, in particular, are central to the themes of the book, and will no doubt be of great interest to many readers. I might also have made the book sound befuddling and unattractive, when, to be clear, I fucking loved it—The Pepsi-Cola Addict is odd and distressing, yes, but it’s also very well-written, somehow simultaneously naïve and sophisticated, raw and refined, resoundingly truthful and plainly artificial. It’s full of strange little flickers, images that creep into Preston’s view, never to be explored or explained, simply witnessed in a kind of anxious low-level terror. And while I’ve compared The Pepsi-Cola Addict to The Outsiders, the feeling of reading the book is much closer to, say, Ann Quin’s Berg or João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner or Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. Obviously, this book Not For Everyone, but I think it will appeal to readers who enjoy a certain queasy, semi-surreal flavor. Finally, I think the novel can and should be enjoyed outside of any lurid interrogation of its author’s mental health and unusual background. Undoubtedly, there will be some readers drawn to Gibbons’ novel by the various Silent Twins stories out there—the film, the documentary, the book…but, to be clear, The Pepsi-Cola Addict is a strange and unsettling tale of teen angst that stands on its own as a small burning testament of adolescent creativity unspoiled by any intrusive “adult” editorial hand. Recommended.
The following discussion of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in translation by Max Lawton) is intended for those who have read or are reading the book. It contains significant spoilers; to be very clear, I strongly recommend entering Blue Lard cold.
We left off right before the gross abject center of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in gross abject translation by Max Lawton). The midpoint is a strange short story, “The Indigo Pill” (by one Nikolai Buryak, author of The Flood). “The Indigo Pill” is the textual tissue between Blue Lard’s warped lobes, a segue that marries opera and shit, champagne and piss. Buryak’s setting (which is to say, of course, Sorokin’s setting) is the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow sometime in an alternate 1950s—one that is, presumably, an alternate version of the alternate 1950s Moscow the second half of Blue Lard will deliver.
But “The Indigo Pill” is really about a romantic date. Our first-person narrator will escort his belle to Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin. How might one dress for the Bolshoi?
I am wearing a lightweight ultramarine diving suit. The mask is shifted back on my head. Freshly fallen snow crunches beneath my lead soles.
Our country’s main theater is brightly illuminated. All around it are people in diving suits of every possible color and shape. I ascend the steps, stand to the left of the second and third columns, and look at my waterproof watch. 7:22. No Masha.
Don’t worry! Masha’s just a minute or two late. Our young (oldish) lovers will have plenty of time to enter the airlock and descend into the theater, the seat of post-war Soviet big-C Culture:
The hall of the Bolshoi Theater constitutes the primary sump of the Moscow sewage system. Those who are superficially familiar with fecal culture suppose the contents of a sewer system to be a thick, impenetrable mass of excrement. This is not even remotely the case. Excrement makes up only twenty percent of its contents. The rest is liquid. Though this liquid is murky, it is still possible to survey the entire hall with enough lighting––from the floor spread with carpets to the ceiling with its famous chandelier.
(By now you, sweet dear reader, know if the Blue Lard is your particular flavor or not, right?)
Sorokin’s Buryak’s “Indigo Pill” episode ends in textuality: “the Bolshoi opens like a fat book, letters running and jumping, I swallow my own head and wake up.” Again, Blue Lard is writing about writing, writing as a kind of living (or at least counter-history/future). This metatextuality evinces in one of the stranger paragraphs in a novel full of strange paragraphs—a very short paragraph, which begins right after “I swallow my own head and wake up”:
Night.
Must go piss blood. Then make myself a coffee. And disdainfully recall my own ordinary life.
The lines are presumably, at least in the text proper, the final words of Nikolai Buryak reading his story “The Indigo Pill” over a loudspeaker to the Earth-Fuckers. But might they also be an authorial intrusion from Sorokin himself who, even if he may not piss blood (or prepare coffee, for that matter), shows a disdain for “ordinary life” in his fiction? Or not.
We transition back to the Earth-Fuckers who, in a time-travel sequence worthy of the Golden Age of Looney Tunes, explode a giant-testicled babe to deliver a package of iced blue lard (and Blue Lard; and us, the readers) to Sexy Swingin’ Moscow in the Spring of 1954! We land at a “celebratory concert dedicated to the opening of the All-Russian House of Free Love” in the Bolshoi Theater.
In a novel full of twists and turns, the next few pages of Blue Lard are especially challenging. Sorokin offers up an alternate post-war USSR history radiating decadence. Of course he does not follow the “rules” of sci-fi, whereby we might be treated to exposition (or at least a brief overview) that explains the alternate timeline we are about to navigate. Instead, the transition into Blue Lard’s second half is alarming, vivid, and very funny.
A “great Russian bard” delivers a song to the Bolshoi audience from a massive pink granite bathtub “filled with a translucent jellylike substance” (he’s tub-bound from a “pathological softening of bone matter.” The audience is moved by the drama of the bard’s song, but it’s soon interrupted by the interposition of the Earth-Fuckers’ time traveling blue lard in the form of a “semi-transparent funnel about the size of a person.” Luckily Joseph Stalin’s top lieutenants are in attendance to calm the audience and take control of the situation.
The first time I read Blue Lard I went through it stunned and guffawing, jogging in places to keep up and not lingering too long for fear of getting left behind. I didn’t pick up on the significance of that year, 1954–a whole year after Stalin’s historical death in March of 1954. Rereading Blue Lard, I took the time to apply the paltry bits of Soviet history I recalled and to index the various Politburo members who show up in this section.
The predominant of these Politburo ministers is Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. The historical Beria was responsible for purges and other crimes against humanity; some historians conjecture that Beria poisoned Stalin; Beria was executed in the summer of ’53 after Khruschev’s coup. He was also a serial rapist.
Beria explains the rude intrusion of the funnel to the aghast theatergoers:
“This is the so-called ice cone sent to us from the not-too-distant future by the Order of the Earth-Fuckers of Russia. The order will be formed from numerous smaller sects of Earth-Fuckers in 2012. In 2028, some members of the order will settle in Eastern Siberia, on Bald Mountain, in dungeons in which there is evidence of the settlements of Siberian Zoroastrians, descendants of a small sect that… it seems… fled from the great Achaemenid Empire to the north at the end of the sixth century BC. They slowly ended up in the taiga, between the two Tunguskas, then on to Bald Mountain, into the granite of which they successfully burrowed over the course of four centuries. Why? They were searching for the so-called Underground Sun, the rays of which, according to their belief system, would destroy the difference between good and evil and return the human race to a heavenly state. The Siberian Zoroastrians invented a time machine capable of sending small objects into the past. One of those objects is what you see here.”
Wait, didn’t I say this section of the novel eschewed exposition? Because that’s a lovely exposition dump there, friends!
Beria continues his exposition—if we believe it!—assuring his audience that the theater-crashing “ice cone” will likely be the last one: the Siberian Zoroastrians possessed but three time travel devices. These Earth-Fuckers blew their first load in “the summer of 1908 near Torzhok… Inside of it was a book bound in buckskin describing the history and structure of the Order. Nikolai II’s talentless government considered it to be a prank.” Again, in rereading Blue Lard more slowly and deliberately, I was attenuated enough to see the obvious cue here; namely, the Earth-Fuckers precipitated the Tunguska Event. (Blue Lard is a brother book then to Pynchon’s Against the Day.)
Beria’s audience demands to know what was in the second cone, which “destroyed a train going from Moscow to Vladivostok on July twenty-ninth, 1937.” Beria informs them the cargo “was the body of a half-human, half-animal being. A six-year-old boy with horns, hooves, and a tail. There was a tattoo on his forehead that said: ‘A Babe of the Whorish World.'” Beria helpfully adds that the corpse was pickled and then hidden.
Beria’s audience then asks the question of Blue Lard’s second half “And where is Comrade Stalin?”
And where’s Stalin? We’ll meet him in a few pages. More to come.
I think we talked for a little over an hour, and while William Gaddis, his novels, and how we share ideas about him online (and elsewhere) was the focus, the conversation went to many other places: William Vollmann, Antoine Volodine, a fuck you to Jonathan Franzen, and the revelation of Evan Dara’s true identity (okay not really that last one).
There was also an underlying sense with most of the roundtable that the internet of yore as a means of deep conversation is slipping away; Chad summed it up neatly at one point, stating that “One of the disadvantages I see with everything right now, with the blog, podcasts, and so on, is being able to reach people, because the standard mechanisms have been screwed with for so long: it used to be that Google Reader and RSS feeds were a way to keeping aware of what was coming out. You could put something up and you’d have as much space as you wanted to, you could do whatever you wanted…”
There are also lots of new pieces up at the Gaddis Centenary page beyond our fun little roundtable, including a write-up by Mark Madigan of Gaddis’s 1979 lecture “On the Theme of Failure in Contemporary Literature” at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. Madigan’s piece shares John Puleio’s photograph of Gaddis and links to Vermont Public Radio’s audio recording of the lecture., which I enjoyed listening to this afternoon as I pulled weeds from my garden.
William Gaddis at St Michael’s College, November, 1979. Photograph by John Puleio.
The following discussion of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in translation by Max Lawton) is intended for those who have read or are reading the book. It contains significant spoilers; to be very clear, I strongly recommend entering Blue Lard cold.
The first hundred or so pages of Sorokin’s Blue Lard switch between Boris Gloger’s letters to his lover and the narratives of seven cloned Russian writers (the clone-narratives are, textually speaking, included in Boris’s letters).
The shifts between these layered texts are initially quite disarming. Boris’s letters are filled with invented futurese, neologisms, and Chinese slang; the clone-narratives each impose their own linguistic taxes (and rewards) on the reader.
However, these first hundred pages do establish some of the baselines one might expect of a traditional novel: setting (a futuristic laboratory in frozen northeast Siberia), characters (scientists with a military guard—and seven clones), and a basic mission (cloning Russian writers who, in writing their compositions, produce an enigmatic substance called blue lard).
That mission is a clear success by the time we get to Boris’s last letter (dated 8 April for those keeping track), and our team, “the arbiters of the BL-3 Project, have total L-rights to relax.” So they decide to throw a cocktail party. (“It’s sometimes necessary to drink cocktails all day. Not, of course, for L-harmony, rips ni ma de, but JUST ‘CAUSE,” bold Boris boasts boldly.)
As in some of the previous scenes of hard-drinking downtime, the BL-3 Project’s futuristic cocktail party feels like something from a pop sci-fi film. Much of the dialogue seems inscrutable in a first run through the novel, but the jargon and bickering and bantering over political and cultural circumstances alien to the reader are simply texture–verbal adornment to fill out the scene.
Sorokin does bolster his futurese with occasional asides of historical analysis though:
Everything is working out for the Chinese now, just as it did for the Americans in the twentieth century, the French in the nineteenth century, the English in the eighteenth century, the Germans in the seventeenth century, the Italians in the sixteenth century, the Russians in the fifteenth century, the Italians in the fourteenth century, and the Jews in the first (I think) century.
That “I” is Boris, although the style of the party section has subtly but significantly shifted from the flirtatious and gossipy tone of his love letters home.
But enough with style! Back to the party!
There is drinking and dancing and drinking and drinking and drinking. The ol’ fashioned colonel whips up a batch of whiskey sours (“A drink for lonely men who test AEROSEX once a month and prefer books to holo-bubbles,” a geneticist opines), and from there, the BL-3 Project crew goes to town in inventing ever-more daring cocktails.
Here is the recipe for Fan Fei’s CHINA 21:
5 measures of tomato juice
3 measures of spiritus vini
2 measures of red ants
1 measure of salty ice
1 pod of red pepper
Our party is in full drunken swing, abject sweat flung from the dancefloor, another round of cocktails called for, when all of a sudden the novel’s perspective upends itself (again).
The disruptive narrative event here would, again, not be out of place in a sci-fi actioner. A band of rebels (the “Brothers,” as they refer to themselves) breach the laboratory’s bunker, exchange gunshots with the soldiers, and kill everyone but our heretofore main character, Boris.
But the stylistic shift is intense—we go from the strange comfort of Boris’s letters to a new style, one utterly outside of Boris’s consciousness. Indeed, it’s through the eyes of these invading “Brothers” that we actually see Boris for the first time: The Brothers-centered narrator informs us he is “rail-thin… His face was narrow and swarthy skin clung to the bones of his skull. Metal plates in complicated shapes were visible beneath the skin of his temples.” He is the last living witness to the BL-3 Project—but not for long.
Again, the scene plays out as a cinematic trope, the scientist interrogated before his death. Boris isn’t much use explaining just what the blue lard is for or how it works. But he does tell us there’s
something called the MINOBO Project. I don’t know the details… [but] they’re building a reactor on the moon, a constant-energy reactor. They’re building it in the shape of pyramids… pyramids made of fifth-generation superconductors and blue lard… layers… layers and layers of it… and that allows them to plus-directly solve the problem of perpetual energy.
Our one-time narrator is then summarily executed, his brains ironically sprayed over a safety placard.
We are now firmly in the narrative purview of the Brothers. They harvest the blue lard from the bodies of the clones and head back to their lair, mumbling about their poor diet and their ever-constant war with “the whorish” who populate the surface of the earth. They are of the Earth-Fuckers, a bizarre monastic sect dwelling in a strange hierarchical series of underground caverns that seem to descend infinitely into the earth.
The narrative too moves with these earth-fucking brothers, as does the blue lard, a vibrant constant in a constantly-changing scene. Along the way we are treated to ever-stranger rituals and routines. Sorokin, in Lawton’s deft translation, gives us a surreal but limpid portrait of this subterrestrial monastery, where sacred cloister gives way to another sacred cloister:
The descent was quick––the staircase led into a large, dusky hall with a marble floor and marble walls. In the hall, there were ten marble desks, at which bald men in black suits were sitting. Green lamps were burning atop their desks. On the wall, a sigil made of rock crystal, jasper, and granite was illuminated in green light: a man copulating with the earth.
The blue lard slowly makes its way down to “the magister” who informs the reader that when he looks at his hands, he sees tiny golden children’s hands on his wrist. These tiny golden children’s hands speak to him through a language based on wrist rotations. He has transcribed some of these communications, including something called “The Swim,” a very short story about a group of military swimmers who hold torches aloft to create a constellation of language. They are swimming raft of lighted language, passing by crowds who read from afar the quotations they have created—quotations that the swimmers themselves cannot rightly read. They are, quite literally, marks. The story “The Swim” is actually a version of an older Sorokin short story, underscoring the intertextual nature of Blue Lard’s internal and external composition. This is a novel about writing; or, a novel about writing writing.
The Earth-Fuckers section of Blue Lard is probably where, on first reading, I truly gave into the novel’s strange wave and just went with it. After all, my dear epistolarian Boris Gloger was now deceased and I found myself far from the false stability of the BL-3 Project’s base. The section plays out as a series of wonderful deferrals, stories that descend into new stories as one Earth-Fucker descends to a new level of their strange subterranean labyrinth. There’s the infanticidal Nadelina, who gives birth to a child by a different father every year–twenty-six children in total in Max’s translation (one for each letter of the English-language alphabet?). She sacrifices the children so that she might always be able to “water the earth with her milk.” There are three mischievous “babes” — devilishly horny little cherubs who float around in what could be the set of a nightmarish technicolor Hollywood musical. There’s the history lesson of the great schism between the Northern and Southern Earth-Fuckers. There are enormous genitals.
The Earth-Fuckers section is larded with surreal episodes (all anchored in precise, clear imagery), but a re-read reveals that Sorokin is not solely interested in throwing bizarre satirical scenarios at his reader. Traditional novel-making elements are in play here, even if it’s easy to miss them in a dazzled first read. As Sorokin prepares to transition to a new sequence, he offers his readers a recap of the story so far, a blunt summary from an Earth-Fucker’s perspective. After declaring the blue lard an “eternal substance” that will never burn or freeze but “shall forever be exactly as warm as the blood of man,” we get this exchange:
And how did the whorish manage to produce this substance?
By accident, oh my father. They were doing whorish experiments restoring and regrowing people from the memories in their bones. These were people of various professions. But only those people who had at some point written down their fantasies on paper turned out to be capable of producing blue lard.
Again, Blue Lard is writing about writing (about writing about writing…). And, soon, another writer will enter the text and deliver the textual tissue between Blue Lard’s lobes: “The Indigo Pill.”
The following discussion of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in translation by Max Lawton) is intended for those who have read or are reading the book. It contains significant spoilers; to be very clear, I strongly recommend entering Blue Lard cold.
Previously on Blue Lard…We enjoyed the first of our clone narratives, Dostoevsky-2’s “Count Reshetovsky” (our dear correspondent Boris brag’s that the tale’s composition will yield “up to 6 kg. of blue lard”).
It is now Akhmatova-2’s turn to whip up some blue lard. Boris reports that “During the script-process, the object didn’t become at all deformed. Just heavy bleeding: vaginal and nasal.” Sorokin mixes abjection with creation. The Anna Akhmatova clone composes the song-poem “Three Nights.” I confess much of my idea of Ann Akhmatova’s poetry is informed by her sympathetic characterization in William T. Vollmann’s novel Europe Central—I’ve read fewer than a dozen of her poems, I’d guess—but nevertheless I found “Three Nights” very, very funny. Sorokin skewers Akhmatova in his parodic evocation of her earnest declaiming, perhaps lovingly, perhaps not, but with a fine ear, as telegraphed in Max Lawton’s translation. The plaintive sincerity of Akhmatova-2’s poem culminates in a riff on the old “farmer’s daughters” joke:
They rubbed sheep’s fat over his hard plow,
So that he could better plow the girls,
The three kolkhoznitsas-in-arms stripped down to their skin,
They lay down next to Comrade Akhmat.
Oh my!
Comrade Akhmat plowed them all night,
Gaptieva––three times,
Gazmanova––three times,
Khabibulina––three times.
Oh my!
Oh my! (A few pages later we’re treated (treated?) to the image of Lenin’s “heavy balls…crimson balls…shaggy balls… his hunchbacked balls.)
The clone narratives take over the text proper of Blue Lard (at least for now) and Boris’s tender letters to his tender bastard dwindle in length. (Boris does note in a letter dated 15 January that he’s reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms (attributed to Luo Guanzhong); perhaps the 14th-century historical novel , with its real-life figures and its epic sweep, signals a precursor text for Blue Lard.)
Our next clone is Platonov-3. Of all the cloned writers, Andrei Platonov was the one with whom I was most unfamiliar. That didn’t stop me from enjoying the scenario the first time I encountered it. It’s an actioner, featuring fight scenes on a train—uh, excuse me, a proletarian lumpomotive. Our hero is Bubnov, a stoker, machinist, engineer (and fighter) who takes on a new mission. The passenger who gives him this mission has to yell these new orders over “the class roar of the furnace with his bourgeois voice.” Such satirical lines riddle Platonov-3’s episode; later after digging a mass grave (I suppose such a scene shouldn’t be so slapstick, but it is), Bubnov’s comrade “got ready to say something sentimental, but was only able to growl because of the poverty of a human language that had entirely dried up in revolutionary winds.” I won’t spoil the trick of Platonov-3’s story, but it’s of a piece with Snowpiercer or The Train to Busan; one can easily reimagine Sorokin’s cloned Platonov-3’s riff as a sci-fi horror flick.
Another letter from Boris to bastard transitions to our next clone narrative, a one-act play by Chekhov-3 called “The Burial of Attis” (I should clarify that Boris includes the clone compositions in his letters). On my first reading of Blue Lard, I tuned into the depravity and linguistic difficulty of Boris’s letters. In the letter of 16 January that precedes Chekhov-3’s story, for instance, he complains that the colonel makes a pass at him while they are both drunk, tempting him to “test” some drug called “3 plus Caroline.” Boris’s letters are filled with futurese along with Chinese slang (he describes the colonel as a “hangkong mujian,” for example). A reread reveals more straightforward plotting elements–the letter of the 19th reminds us that this isn’t just a science mission but a military operation; the base is loaded with soldiers. And guns!
But on to Chekhov-3’s play, “The Burial of Attis.” The titular character is a beloved borzoi, now deceased. Attis belonged to Viktor Nikolayevich Polozov, a young aristocrat who seems to be barely maintaining his ancestral estate. He’s aided Anton, an aging footman. A former lover shows up at the burial, but he shouts her away in disgust after she declares that unlike dead people, “Dead dogs look just like dogs that are alive.” Later, an alcoholic neighbor, Dr. Schtange comes by to tie one on; in his drunkenness he urges Polozov to sell the ancestral manse: “Sell everything, sell it all! And as soon as possible! All this junk, all this decay, all this graveside garbage. A Chinese vase, a stuffed shark, these crystal goblets, what the devil are they to you?!” He does recommend keeping the weapons collection though, including a certain Mexican throwing knife. Chekhov-3’s Mexican throwing knife? Again, no spoilers, but the monologue that Polozov delivers at the end of the play is something else. A selection:
All things correspond to their names. The Chinese vase was, is, and shall always be a Chinese vase. Crystal is crystal and shall be thus until the day the moon falls to earth. You stood amidst these dead things––a living, warm-blooded man––and you alone did not correspond to your name. It wasn’t to do with the properties of your soul, not because of your decency or your wickedness, your honesty or your deceitfulness, not because of the good or the evil that was inside of you. You simply did not have a name… A person cannot have a name… They’re mere titles. We have no name. And never shall.
“There’s something M-unpleasant in this script,” muses Boris, “But I can’t figure out just what.” Something to return to later?
Nabokov-7’s “Kardosso’s Way” is up next. The clone has composed this text “in blood,” which, as Boris archly notes, “the original [Nabokov] couldn’t quite manage.” The linguistic fussiness of Nabokov-7’s composition is soaked in some of the foulest culinary abjection since Roger Mexico and Pig Bodine served snot soup, vomit vichyssoise wart waffles in Gravity’s Rainbow. “I only eat white meat!” the golddigger Svetalana exclaims before digging into a “silver dish filled with the prostates of catamites baked in grated cheese and generously sprinkled with lemon juice.” Later, “having nepresnified herself,” Svetlana “immersed her feet in a vase filled with ferret pâté.” And what to order when dining out?
The spouses never betrayed their gastronomic preferences, as they always ordered an 1889 Tokay, a swamp grass salad, the roots of elderly proletarians’ wisdom teeth, marengo made from bolonkas, parchment with toad caviar, and the menisci of third league Belarussian football players under a pile of vomit. For dessert, Svetlana would have rock crystal with whipped bull saliva or “Lair.” Having eaten their fill, they would move on to the jointer-inlaid tabernacle, wipe the prisms and trample the hamsters for forty minutes, then slide down the larded chute into the cloakroom.
The diction above is obscure, to be sure, but it’s possible to figure out what a marengo made of bolonkas might look like (you might not want to imagine what it would taste like, natch). Beyond obscurantism though, Nabokov-7 lards his narrative with terms that seem utterly alien to any known language: geobnorobdy, sodictio, nepresenified, half-gronzezily… In his recent interview on this blog, translator Max Lawton stated that he “worked in a few of Nabokov’s pet words,” but I’m not sure if jebraifying was one of those.
“I’m sending this one without comment,” Boris begins his letter of 18 January, referring to Pasternak-1’s 13-stanza poem “Pussy.” “You know I can’t stand Russcenities. Because of this, I offer no commentary,” he appends. I too will withhold commentary on the Pasternak pastiche, but will note that Boris’s brief letter reminds us that their experiment is part of a military operation: a certain Sgt. Prut allows him to shoot off a Cyclops-238 MC, a “slaughtersome thing” that Boris notes “could easily hew a clearing into our taiga all the way to the ocean.”
The last of the clone narratives, Tolstoy-4’s, is my favorite of the group. We get three chapters from the middle of an unnamed novel set in what seems to be 17th-century Russia. In media res, we find out that, “Having spent the whole winter in Pospelov, the old prince Mikhail Savvich found out about Boris’s duel too late, after his son’s wound had already closed up, and, along with it, so too had the whole business of his quarrel with Nesvitsky closed up and scabbed over.” So prodigal Boris returns home, where he will relax by bear hunting with his father and his father’s retainers. These scenes are richly-detailed and wonderful to walk through. Sorokin doesn’t seem to parody or skewer Tolstoy, nor does he mimic or mock him (at least to my ear)—instead the Tolstoy-4 passages evoke what I sense is a tempered if contested respect for the old master. Of all the clones, this narrative points to Sorokin’s intertextual competition with Tolstoy, which Sorokin enters into not with barbed neologisms or depraved abjection (although there is a bit of that here!), but with strange pop-fantasy eruptions. Accompanying the aristocrats and their retinue on their hunt are three “crushers,” a bizarre Cerberus troop of beasts who also seem to be men. The crushers speak in cracked, harsh voices and possess hands, yet walk leashed and lick their master’s lardshined boots. (Tatyana Tolstoya’s 2000 novel The Slynx (in English translation by Jamey Gambrell) would expand on these “crushers,” reinventing them as “degenerators,” human hybrid slaves used as beasts of burden.) Later, as Boris recuperates in a bathhouse, the wound he received in the duel reopens and one of the crushers gently licks it clean. Sorokin weaves abjection and purity in this strange bathhouse tableaux. The wound/scabbing motif here at the end of Tolstoy-4’s narrative echoes a remarkable passage from the section’s outset:
How does an awakened person differ from one who is awakened a s i t w e r e ? An awakened individual, that is to say, an individual who has been awakened by their conscience once and for all, has shaken off the evil of indifference to the lives of other people, as if it were a scab strongly and tightly clinging to the body, which, like a shell or suit of armor, clings to the conscience of every contemporary person living in contemporary society, which is based on the lawful oppression of certain people, the weak and the poor, by other people, the strong and the rich; this awakened individual will always evaluate all his deeds and misdeeds based on his new, young conscience, which has just awoken from its slumber. A person who is awakened, a s i t w e r e, shall continue to evaluate his deeds and misdeeds based not on his conscience, but on the shape of the scab of socially legitimized deception that clings to his conscience, continuing to flatter himself as before.
I would read an entire novel by Tolstoy-4; at the same time, I love that we only get three chapters, reifying Blue Lard’s apparently discontinuous structure. The writing of the section is evocative enough that we can imagine our own befores and afters if we like.
The first six clone narratives included linguistic aberrations–mechanical repetitions, scatological eruptions, perverted interludes, abject impossibilities–but the only real syntactical tic throughout Tolstoy-4’s story are three iterations of a sentence that might best be understood as “Sonya, get the hammer out of the cupboard” — although we see those words recombined, repeated, and inverted. Is this the Sonya of War and Peace? A version of Sofiya Tostoya? Is this Sonya merely (merely!) the verbal tic of cloned version of a nineteenth-century Russian realist whose erregen object is a stuffed albino panther? Does it matter?
Ahead: cocktail hour, dance party, armed combat, earthfuckers, THE SWIM, THE INDIGO PILL…
Max Lawton is the translator of many, many works, including a number of books by the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. The recent publication of two of those translations, Blue Lard and Red Pyramid was the occasion for my email-based interview with Max. We began in earnest late last fall and finished up on Leap Day, 2024. While Blue Lard was our starting place, we meandered, discussing future translations of Sorokin’s work, like The Norm and Dispatches from the District Committee, as well as some of Max’s other translation projects, books like Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh and Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca. We also got into Max’s own fiction, which I anticipate seeing in bookstores soon. I want to express my gratitude to Max for generously sharing his time in this interview, and more importantly, making more Good Weird Stuff available to monolingual slobs like me.
Biblioklept: Max! Congrats on the publication of Blue Lardand Red Pyramid. I want to start with Blue Lard, because I think it’s a big deal that it’s getting an English language publication. It’s also my favorite Vladimir Sorokin book that I’ve read, and I know that it’s one of yours as well. The novel is perhaps Sorokin’s most (in)famous one, and I think it’ll attract new readers. What can readers expect when approaching the novel?
Max Lawton: Like TELLURIA, BLUE LARD is all about textures: literary, historical, ideological… However, unlike TELLURIA, BLUE LARD has a telos to it—an endpoint. I am firmly of the belief that BLUE LARD is Vladimir’s best novel. He had taken a long break from prose (about 7 years) before writing it, so this text simply burst forth from him and ended up as a neat showcase of all of his aesthetic preoccupations, butheld together by an edifice that has proportions none too short of classically harmonious. What should readers expect… hmm… the first section is rather challenging. One needs to surf its wave and not expect full comprehension. There is a glossary of Chinese words and neologisms at the back of the book, but I’m not sure it’s worth consulting in the expectation of further understanding. The middle section of the book—characterized by a faux-archaic language—is also terribly strange, but with fewer neologisms. The last section of the book—an alternate iteration of Post-WWII Europe—is formally very smooth, but insanely transgressive in terms of content. And I haven’t even mentioned the rather unorthodox parodies of Russian classics in the novel’s first section! What should readers expect? In short: to have their minds blown!
Max Lawton, Hollywood, California. Photog. by Ecem Lawton.
Biblioklept: Yeah, Blue Lard zapped me in the wildest way, and you’re right when you suggest the reader should “surf its wave and not expect full comprehension.” The first section is disorienting, but I think it also orients the reader to the radical disorientation to come. And the parodies of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Akhmatova, et al. are fantastic; there’s something really joyful in these deviant mutant performances. Sorokin constantly shifts linguistic registers in his work, which I know poses challenges and opportunities for you as a translator. For example, you’ve stated that in translating the polyglossia of Telluria you tapped into a range of voices including Chaucer, Faulkner, and Mervyn Peake. I’m curious about your process in translating Sorokin’s Russian classics parodies in Blue Lard.
ML: This is a fantastic question. The fundamental issue, however, is that Vladimir isn’t really interested in parody. If the clone-texts were a neat pastiche of Russian greats, that would be one thing. But Vladimir describes them as “essence hunts.” Oftentimes, they do not read like the authors they are “imitating.” This is especially so for Nabokov and Pasternak. Tolstoy and Akhmatova are in the middle. Then Dostoevsky, Platonov, and Chekhov are right on the money; their essence seems to line up with their outer form––their noumena are no different from their phenomena. For Dostoevsky, Platonov, and Chekhov, I did appeal to previous translations of their work, as not to do so seemed like a grave error. But, for the others, I had to think more outside of the box. With Nabokov, the one thing I “added” to the translation was recommended by a couple of professors and approved by Vladimir: I worked in a few of Nabokov’s pet words in English, as he is actually more famous for his writing in English than in Russian. For this reason, the insanely bizarre Nabokov “essence-hunt” reads more like a parody in English than in Russian––not that it isn’t very alienating in both languages. The Dostoevsky parody was especially fun to translate, as it allowed me to indulge the worst instincts of a Dostoevsky translator. I leave it to you to figure out what that might mean. The fundamental question posed by these parodies and the way they both resemble the texts of the original authors and not is: what does it mean, aesthetically speaking, when phenomena do not align with noumena?
Biblioklept: That seems like a central thread of what I’ve read from Sorokin in general—this aesthetic disarrangement of what we know, or what we think we know, and what might actually, I don’t know, be. To go back to Blue Lard: it reads like the work of someone joyfully detonating and reinventing realities. The “plot” of the novel is a series of displacements that culminate in this fucked up and hilarious reinvention of Postwar Europe. But as you mention above, that section is composed in a really precise, lucid, “smooth” manner, which only serves to highlight its transgressive content. The tonal shift isn’t exactly jarring, because by this point the reader has been through a linguistic gauntlet—but it does imbue the “alternate history” at the end of Blue Lard with an uncanny tinge.
ML:I actually think that the second half of the novel was more difficult to translate than the first. There’s a specific rhythm of Russian speech that is pun-filled and, I guess you’d say, overripe. This is how Russians speak in a sophisticated milieu even now. And I think it comes across as if it were wearing a fedora, so to speak, when it’s translated too directly. For that reason, I went back to the rhythms of dialogue at play in Old Hollywood films to find something that felt stilted but didn’t simply register as dissonance to the Anglophone ear. Of course, translating the narration of the book’s second half was more a question of reduction—making it as transparent as possible so that the horrors at its bottom would be visible. This wasn’t difficult, but was a good exercise in Hemingwayesque (or Sadean) style—Vladimir loves Old Man Ham and doesn’t much like Sade. As somebody who has written a lot of screenplays, Vladimir does sometimes enter a mode of narrative prose that seems to owe a lot to the way that screenplays are composed. With reference to the first half of the book with its constant destabilizing, I would say that it can be easier to translate things that sound utterly deranged because the question of normalcy goes out the window. As you will see in 2025, this is why the Soviet rhythms of THE NORM were a particular pain to render… we simply don’t have that register!
Biblioklept: Okay, so the fact that you drew from Old Hollywood patter actually makes a lot of sense to my ear. There’s like a heightened artificiality to the section, but one grounded in “realism,” which, again, lends to this uncanny rhythm.
ML: Yes, exactly. I have made this comparison before, but it bears repeating: Sorokin is a bit like a Russian hybrid of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. I very much hope that the dialogue in my translations of his work falls onto the Tarantino side of that spectrum. It should be crisp patter––highly rhythmic. Not stilted and highly unreal like Lynch’s screenplays. But, as with Tarantino and Old Hollywood films, something in Sorokin’s crispness eventually begins to limp, cloy, gum up the works… to glitch!
Max Lawton and Vladimir Sorokin, NYC.
Biblioklept:The Norm is Sorokin’s first novel, right?
ML: THE NORM is more or less Sorokin’s first novel. Things are a bit complicated at the beginning because he was simply writing “into his desk” with no prospect of publication. So, the early novels were sort of composed alongside one another. THE NORM is a Soviet Disneyland of abject horror: eight rides, each representing a different aspect of the USSR’s shittiness. Everyone knows it’s the book in which people eat shit, but it actually goes way deeper than that. The section people most love in Russia is a deranged epistolatory one, in which the distant relation managing an intelligentsia family’s dacha loses his mind with rage at having been saddled with its maintenance. Part 5––the best.
Actually, here’s a fun spoiler-free preview of the book––this diagram-thing will be included in the edition coming out from NYRB Classics in 2025.
TRANSLATOR’S LINATI SCHEMA FOR THE NORM
I. Contemporary dialogue. For a Soviet person, the same shock an Irish person might have had upon reading Dubliners. No point foraging through the American ‘80s. Therefore: the NOW.
II. Critical exegesis. These are mere words. American slang when necessary––then to explain the original by way of scholarly apparatus.
III. A thesis: Russian’s rhythms are generally quite defined by rurality. The agrarian empire was industrialized too quickly––couldn’t do away with the rurality of speech. But, so as not to exaggerate, to make the dialogue in “The Scourge” sound like a film noir about louche characters. Again: contemporary speech when necessary (esp. with the editors interrupting the text). Pilfering phrases from Constance Garnett for the Anton frame-narrative.
IV. Making the poems as perfect as any poems can be in translation. Total metrical adequacy.
V. No contractions. A dash of Benjy Compson. Instead of rhyming insults, total obscenity (“dickass professor” instead of the more literal “dickessor”).
VI. The occasional need to make a slogan more grammatical in English than in Russian.
VII. Not perfect lines, but shattered fragments. A meta-commentary on the clunkiness of official poetry (of poetry an sich as well?). The main thing: that the reader feels the clunky, contorted poetry when it supplants the prose, but that I not give into Miltonic excess entirely. Impossible to translate these as perfect poems as in Part V.
VIII. To occasionally add syntax to the gibberish so that it scans. “Jabberwocky.”
Biblioklept: I’m about halfway through The Norm—haven’t gotten to Part 5, which I’ll read tonight. The first section was, uh, hard to swallow, but also very funny. And once it told me how to read it, I was quite taken with how even in some of his earliest stuff, Sorokin has already found this strange, mutating form, a kind of narrative hot potato (or “hot norm” if we’re feeling extra abject today). I loved the third section, especially the sinister shift it takes.
ML: THE NORM is a highly compressed preview of all the tendencies Sorokin would be working out in the first half of his career—all the way up until BLUE LARD. Of course, you have the binary bomb structure of the short stories, in which a highly ordinary situation that would typically make up the raw material of Soviet official prose is ruptured and gives way to something abject. This will be explored a great deal more in the short stories of DISPATCHES FROM THE DISTRICT COMMITTEE, coming out from Dalkey next year. ROMAN and MARINA’S THIRTIETH LOVE, also binary bombs, but novels rather than stories, belong to the NORM-universe as well. Sorokin’s imitation of the world of Russian classics in ROMAN is as precise as his immersion in Soviet shit. Indeed, in THE NORM, one cannot help but note the intense specificity of Sorokin’s engagement with the Soviet Life-World. His prose would not be quite as specific in and after BLUE LARD—it would be more imaginative and less grounded in any one reality. Perhaps what tortured Sorokin during the first half of his career was his inability to imagine a world other than the Soviet Union. In all books after THEIR FOUR HEARTS (so BLUE LARD AND all that follows), though he may be haunted by the Russian past, the worlds he imagines are light and free—defined by his own language alone. After BLUE LARD, it is only his short stories that are weighted down by the gritty details of Russianness.
Biblioklept: You mentioned Russians love the fifth section, the “deranged epistolatory.” I loved the section too—it’s a kind of linguistic unraveling, but a strangely sympathetic one. Why do you think this chapter resonates with Sorokin’s native audience? Can you tell us a bit about translating it—was it fun? Difficult?
ML: That part was only tricky when Soviet-houseware vocab would pop up—obviously not my area of expertise. But, beyond that, in the sections where Sorokin is exploring a very pronounced directionality, I find it somehow easier to ride along with him. Translation is more about translating intent than individual words, so when the intent is very legible, it makes the translator’s job easier. That section is so beloved because it depicts a Soviet archetype of resentment and envy—wasn’t all of that meant to have gone away? Isn’t this the Shining Future? Well, it turns out that people are still animated by precisely the same sorts of petty evil. The idea of this section is a lot like what Dostoevsky wants to convey with the Underground Man: human beings are immutably illogical, petty… From that perspective, there is something divine about the gibberish at the section’s end—as divine as Dostoevsky’s 2+2=5.
Biblioklept: I really enjoy the gibberish and jabberwocky that infiltrates The Norm (particularly the lulling but clunky rhyming in the seventh section). That polyglossic strand seems woven throughout Sorokin’s work but is more palpable in this early novel than his later stuff. (Not sure if novel is the right word for The Norm but I don’t really care.) In Blue Lard and other later works, Sorokin employs neologisms and a range of non-Russian-language terms, but these are deployed in a more narratively-coherent manner than what’s happening in The Norm. In your estimation, is this simply an evolution in style? Is it purposeful, or just a writer doing his thing? Is this a stupid question?
ML: THE NORM is what all of Sorokin’s later works emerge from. In that sense, it’s undoubtedly true that this “narrative experiment” (you’re also right that it’s not a novel in any real sense) is less laser-focused than books like BLUE LARD, in which tropes like gibberish or corporeal-mutilation-as-metaphor have been worked out to a precise science. Sorokin wrote the book when he was a young man, passing around pamphlets of each part to his friends in the Moscow Conceptualist Underground. They were over the moon about it. In fact, there’s no meaningful way in which THE NORM can be differentiated from MY FIRST WORKING SATURDAY (mostly collected in Dalkey Archive’s forthcoming DISPATCHES FROM THE DISTRICT COMMITTEE), ROMAN, or MARINA’S THIRTIETH LOVE. All these books are a singular meta-work that deconstructs the ideological and literary languages of the Soviet Union, during the period when Sorokin was coming of age as an artist.
Biblioklept: Can you tell us a little more about Dispatches from the District Committee? Also, if this is something you can get into, how do you go about placing Sorokin’s work with the U.S. publishers—is there a thought into which titles go to Dalkey and which go to NYRB?
ML: DISPATCHES FROM THE DISTRICT COMMITTEE is the dark Dale Cooper to the RED PYRAMID’s sweet pie-eating FBI man. Whereas the latter was structured in accordance with a certain sort of classical form (yes, it’s fucked, but its stories are fucked (and fuck) in a harmonious way, as it were), DISPATCHES is a collection of early binary bombs from Sorokin’s famous MY FIRST WORKING SATURDAY collection, along with a few bits of juvenilia and a few late-period stories. Without exception, these are woolly and insane tales, some of my favorite things Sorokin has ever written. And it is in this collection that we truly learn the meaning of the “binary bomb” of which he so often speaks: in such stories, the first half is the technically-accomplished outlining of a typical Soviet situation or Soviet literary mode, but, about halfway through the story, the pin of the grenade is pulled and all that which is “normal” about the tale we’ve been reading gives way to the abject and the obscene––to Joycean gibberish and Bataillean acts of violence. In a way, this collection is the ninth part of THE NORM, and I wouldn’t object to readers approaching it in that way.
The publishers themselves divided the books, but I do think there was a certain logic to how it shook out. The Dalkey books tend to be the cult-classic Sorokin novels that are particularly beloved by people in Russia: by his “cult readers.” And the NYRB books are the books foreign readers tend to come to first. This narrative might become a bit stranger in coming years with NIGHTINGALE GROVE and THE SUGAR KREMLIN, but I’d say that’s how the chips have fallen for the time being.
Art by artist Yaroslav Schwartzstein from ОПРИЧНАЯ КНИГА, a collaboration with Vladimir Sorokin
Biblioklept: Speaking of The Sugar Kremlin and different publishers: the manuscript I have includes wonderful color illustrations by Yaroslav Schwarzstein. If I understand correctly, these illustrations have appeared with other editions of the book? Is the plan to include the illustrations in a U.S. edition? The Dalkey edition of Their Four Hearts includes illustrations by Gregory Klassen—has he collaborated with Sorokin on other works? Can you give us some background on Sorokin’s relationship with visual artists?
ML: I’m not sure those illustrations are going to be in THE SUGAR KREMLIN, alas… But Greg Klassen’s wonderful frontispieces for DISPATCHES are going to be included. Sorokin was a visual artist before he was a writer, so his texts are profoundly visual. He also has a lot of love for illustrated editions of his novels and stories––especially the deluxe editions put out by ciconia, ciconia in Berlin. In the future, I would love to put out English editions of Sorokin’s illustrated works that are just as deluxe as the German ones. In a sense, Sorokin writes like a painter. When I read his books, I can always see exactly what’s happening on the page in my mind’s eye. But it’s funny to imagine an illustrated edition of something like BLUE LARD––his linguistic abilities outpace those of any theoretical artist. I am also working to get a couple of American film adaptations of Sorokin’s books and stories off the ground here in LA. Cinema is very dear to him––and he’s written quite a few scripts.
Sanke’s Love by Gregory Klassen. From Dispatches from the Central Committee.
Biblioklept: Yeah, Sorokin’s writing is very imagistic, photographic, cinematic—for all the wild unreal shit that happens, it’s anchored in highly visual, sensual prose. I think that imagistic quality is important to the storytelling, especially when he drops these “binary bombs” as you put it (or is that Sorokin’s term?). I think the term is appropriate; I also like how novelist Will Self describes this signature structure in his introduction to Red Pyramid: “Each of his stories is a sort of mutant Mobius strip, in which to follow the narrative is to experience the real and fantastic as simultaneously opposed and coextensive.” I’m curious how Self’s introduction came about—can you tell us a little bit about that process?
ML: The binary bomb is Sorokin’s term of art for his own early stories, not my own. In fact, the term in Russian is closer to “lil’ binary bomb”. Will’s introduction is just so beautifully written—Vladimir and I think it’s one of the best texts ever written about him. I’d met Will a long time ago—first when he did a reading from Shark at Columbia when I was doing my undergrad there, then when he debated Zizek in London when I was at Oxford (Will won the debate by a wide margin, you can still find it on YouTube). Will has always been one of my heroes—one of the writers whose books showed me a possible path forward with my own writing when I was starting high school. In fact, for contemporary English-language prose, one couldn’t do better than his “technology trilogy”—UMBRELLA, SHARK, and PHONE. Anyways… I’d emailed Will a few times about my writing and received polite replies, but, when I was in London on the eve of the release of THEIR FOUR HEARTS and TELLURIA, he tried to meet up with me, didn’t succeed, then we met up in NYC, where he was doing a bit of research for his new novel. We became fast friends and, just as Will has become a big fan of Sorokin, so too has he become a mentor to me. To my mind, Will represents all that which is glorious about the English literary tradition: its irreverence, wildness, erudition, biting wit… It means a great deal to both me and Vladimir to have him “coming out to meet the reader”—and doing such a damn fine job of introducing the book! To all those readers who haven’t yet touched Sorokin, I would recommend starting out your odyssey with Will’s intro to RED PYRAMID, then reading the collection itself, then reading BLUE LARD.
Biblioklept: You’ve touched on the timeline for publication for some of your Sorokin translations. Any news on when we might expect to see Roman or The Sugar Kremlin on anglophone shelves? What about your translation of Michael Lentz’s surreal opus, Schattenfroh?
ML: The Sorokin timeline is still a bit unclear. ROMAN and THE SUGAR KREMLIN will be coming out in the next two or three years, I would say. Actually, I take that back: THE SUGAR KREMLIN will be coming out in 2025, but ROMAN is a little bit more unclear. There is some discussion of ROMAN and MARINA’S THIRTIETH LOVE being released together in a slipcase.
SCHATTENFROH is the novel. I am most excited about having translated after BLUE LARD. It is such an incredible, strange masterpiece, and I really don’t think the Anglosphere is ready for it. That will be coming out in 2025 and in fact, my translation, or rather, the very final draft of my translation is due at the beginning of the fall, and my editor Matthias and I are thinking a lot about how much work that will be to get done.
Biblioklept: Who’s publishing Schattenfroh? I’m going to ask you an unfair and stupid question: What is Schattenfroh?
ML: I can’t reveal who will be publishing it, but a press release about all these books is coming within the month. In brief, SCHATTENFROH is about a man named Nobody, who, coincidentally, bears a great deal of resemblance to Michael Lentz, being forced to write a book called SCHATTENFROH by his father’s ghost, whose name is also Schattenfroh. The process of the book’s composition—the journeys undertaken during its composition and the technical elements of its assembly (and deconstruction)—are what it’s about. It also deals with family history, metaphysics, World War II, Hegel, the baroque, German urban planning, incest, the apocalypse, death, and much else. It is one of my favorite novels without question.
Biblioklept: Can you touch briefly on some of what went into translating Schattenfroh? The book is formally daunting; at times reading in it is like walking through a surreal nightmare; other times the prose is austere, even spare…
ML: In certain respects, I felt the inherent affinity to SCHATTENFROH I have felt to other texts I am deeply infatuated with as a translator (BLUE LARD, Antonio Moresco’s trilogy, Céline…). On the other hand, the technical vocabulary that crops up from time to time as a conceptual gag was absolutely brutal to work with and I am indebted to my editor Matthias Friedrich for the good work he’s done, of which there is still much to do. The printing press vocab will require a specialist in medieval printing technology to give it a rather intensive read, just as the section in which a museum guard quizzes the protagonist about a technical architecture article from an East German architecture journal will require an intensive edit by a perfectly bilingual scholar conversant in architecture and physics. Lentz has the luxury of using texts as found objects––we, alas, do not! Matthias has also been a great help with identifying quotes, which we then have to translate or find extant translations of. The latter option is preferable, as it safeguards the encyclopedic quality of the book––you see a quote, Google it, and dive deeper into the world of the novel. The most problematic translation question is what to do with historical quotes from Luther and others like him that have been translated into English, but into modern English, whereas the German is dense as hell and difficult to read due to its archaicism. Translations of Luther from the era he lived would be ideal, otherwise I’m left attempting to kitschify the English into an approximation of the archaic German.
Biblioklept: I expect Schattenfroh to become a cult novel for anglophones after your translation comes out. Do you know if it has a similar reputation in Germany?
ML: The fascinating thing about SCHATTENFROH is that it doesn’t have too much of an audience in Germany. It’s very much a cult novel. Its release in English will provide a new opportunity for more German readers to discover it. With that said, those German readers who have read the book have, for the most part, fallen in love with it. It’s the sort of novel one can’t believe is still being written. On the other hand, there’s a way in which SCHATTENFROH is the sort of book that might find an audience in America more readily than it has in Germany—this is just my suspicion.
ML: Yes, I’m very excited to dredge the depths of its pornographic scatology. It’s one of the most metaphysical projects I’ve ever encountered––moving from Moresco’s own lived experience as a monk and revolutionary to the most distant reaches of interstellar space in a frozen Steinian mode that is as gorgeous as it is infuriating. This trilogy is on the level of SCHATTENFROH and BLUE LARD and will be adored by all readers of 2666, THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM, and SOLENOID. The second book in the trilogy in particular, CANTI DEL CAOS, will be an event in English publishing that I hope will reach the heights of the reception to Bolaño’s masterpiece. I am also translating HORCYNUS ORCA and am still terrified of the Sicilian therein. The great writer and translator Francesco Pacifico will be editing these translations.
ML: It’s thanks to Andrei that I’m going to be translating SCHATTENFROH, Moresco’s trilogy, HORCYNUS ORCA, and, in a few years, Palol’s BOÖTES. He’s a great friend and mentor to me and there are few things in the world I appreciate as much as his taste and total aesthetic honesty. He is a source of great guidance to me, and I am deeply, deeply grateful that I stumbled on his blog and that he responded to me when I sent him the illustrated manuscript of THEIR FOUR HEARTS back in 2019. A true OG.
Biblioklept: Amazing. Andrei is a champion reader. Reading is such a private, internal process; it’s easy to overlook that great writers need great readers. And translators are clearly in the vanguard of great readers.
This is probably a really stupid question, but when you’re writing your own fiction, like your novel The Abode, are you in, like, a totally different zone than the translation sphere?
ML: Will Self always asks me about this and expresses concern that I’m being over-influenced by the fiction I translate, but, for whatever reason, I have found that translation is a self-contained system in my literary life. The words of the original enter me, then are flushed out like water turning into piss. I have the capacity to be influenced by texts, but the very fact of translating means that I also exorcise the influence. The commonality between my own prose and translation is the focus on style, but the difference is the question of what to write that must necessarily plague any original writer. That is the most difficult part of writing––ontological doubts. I have a good feeling that the Anglosphere will soon get to read my first novel PROGRESS, my short-story collection THE WORLD, and my second novel THE ABODE. These three books represent the first era of my writing. After I’m done with THE ABODE, the autofictional monstrosity I’m writing now, I’m going to stop writing for a while––just play black metal with my new band here in LA and read. Then see when I’m driven back to the blank page (though, to be honest, I’m half-lying: I already have two new novels planned out––they’re just very different from the first three books).
Biblioklept: To your parenthetical post-dash clause: When you write that your plans for these two new books differ from the first three, what do you mean? Style? Subject? Did this difference come from a conscious choice?
ML: Yeah, the first three are very selfish books in a sense. MAX LAWTON looms over them rather heavily. For the follow-ups, I’ve been thinking about certain American styles that are generous, biblical: Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, etc. I want to write a few books from which I am utterly absent, and I want them to be shorter, with the sentences screwed in tight. In brief, I want to write grown-up books. These first three are my graphomaniacal youth-culture books––Bret Easton Ellis casts a long shadow over them too.
Here are links to a few of my short stories that have recently been published:
Biblioklept: There’s that line near the end of the prologue of The Abode, where the third-person narrator tells us that “Max wasn’t interested in the ups and downs of a typical Bildungsroman or campus novel”…
ML: Yeah, I’ve always wanted to write a massive slab of autofiction but am keenly aware of the clichés that dog the form. This is the sort of cheeky line that might get thrown out in further revisions of the text but represents my desire to combine disparate tendencies: the neuroticism of Proust, the hedonism of Bret Easton Ellis, and the metaphysics of William Blake. Though my German reader says it reminds him of THE CORRECTIONS… In a sense, THE ABODE is all about wanting my cake and eating it too.
Biblioklept: I liked the line, especially in its context, which I hope you don’t mind if I share here with some readers:
“Max wasn’t interested in the ups and downs of a typical Bildungsroman or campus novel, didn’t believe he’d ever end up with a single woman to whom he would pledge his affections––he was the plinks of the second synth coming in over the washes of the first and each click of the metronome showed him something else––something he was meant to see, something pure and visionary that had been vomited up from the very center of the earth.”
The synth metaphor is lovely.
ML: Thanks so much! I tried to make the language chewy and specific without losing the pellucid quality of 19th-century narrative prose. My first novel PROGRESS is very dense stylistically in a way I strived to move away from.
Biblioklept: The style of Progress seems to rhetorically approximate the narrator’s attempt to register the material world he is moving through with his sense of interiority, selfhood, whatever. (That inside/outside distinction manifests in a number of the book’s motifs, including all the pissing and shitting.) I don’t know if I think of the style as dense, necessarily. The clauses stack up, but they also flow and move. I mean, I think the book is quite readable; it’s not like, Oh fuck another giant paragraph! Maybe that’s because Progress is, at least in part, about, “Y’know, like, apocalyptic stuff,” to quote one character out of context.
ML: I wrote PROGRESS during Covid and the lack that seemed to inform it was my feeling that narrative prose had ceased to describe the world as it exists (I was also reading a lot of Heidegger at the time). The conceptual sci-fi narrative is an excuse to describe the freeways and all that exists around them as if it were a natural idyll. The book is a beach on which the detritus of our age washes up––I catalog it.
Ralph Hubbell and Max Lawton pose before the house where Atay wrote The Disconnected (photog. unknown)
Biblioklept: So, besides your novel Progress, your short story collection The World, your autofiction-in-progress The Abode, the Moresco trilogy, Horcynus Orca, Schattenfroh, and a slew of Sorokin–what other projects are you cooking up?
ML: There are a couple of others (as if I didn’t have enough on my plate!). First is my new translation of GUIGNOL’S BAND in a single volume––the previous translations of the book’s two parts were done by two translators and put out by two publishers. It is my contention that GUIGNOL’S BAND may be Céline’s greatest novel. The extremity of his style increased all throughout his career, but,by the time it reached its point of extremity, the content had, alas, curdled (here, I’m thinking of the final trilogy recounting his years spent as a Nazi). GUIGNOL’S BAND, on the other hand, is a showcase of the way Céline would blow up his own idiom, but in the context of a propulsive London novel with a lot of crime and capers. It is my hope that a new translation of GUIGNOL’S BAND will truly bring home to the Anglosphere the quiddity of Céline’s “musical orality.”
My friend Ralph Hubbell and I are also hoping to translate Oğuz Atay’s great novel THE DISCONNECTED, which has already been translated into English, but, speaking delicately, needs to be redone if it is to be published (Ralph and I have written a lot about this and gotten into hot water for what we’ve said). The book is akin to a mix of ULYSSES and CATCHER IN THE RYE. It’s the best novel ever written in Turkish, and I sincerely hope we get good news from Istanbul in the near future––the offer from the Anglophone publisher that wants the two of us to retranslate the book still stands.
Biblioklept: The last time I interviewed you, I ended with my standard last question, Have you ever stolen a book? and you admitted that you hadn’t. Any updates there?
ML: I still haven’t stolen any physical books, but I hope that my work continues to be another kind of theft: stealing great books out of the maw of Anglophone oblivion and putting them into the hands of readers eager for fiction that is dense, extreme, and difficult. I am of the sincere conviction that the demand for these books is high and, to any Anglophone publishers reading this, I say this: take a chance, publish something that pushes the envelope, and you might just be surprised by the reaction…
A few weeks ago, I picked up Anthony Kerrigan’s translation of Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez and Other Stories based on its cover and the blurb on its back. I wound up reading the shortest of the three tales, “The Madness of Dr. Montarco,” that night. The story’s plot is somewhat simple: A doctor moves to a new town and resumes his bad habit of writing fiction. He slowly goes insane as his readers (and patients) query him about the meaning of his stories, and he’s eventually committed to an asylum. The tale’s style evokes Edgar Allan Poe’s paranoia and finds an echo in Roberto Bolaño’s horror/comedy fits. The novella that makes up the bulk of the collection is Abel Sanchez, a Cain-Abel story that features one of literature’s greatest haters, a doctor named Joaquin who grows to hate his figurative brother, the painter Abel. Sad and funny, this 1917 novella feels contemporary with Kafka and points towards the existentialist novels of Albert Camus. (I’m saving the last tale, “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr,” for a later day.)
I’m near the end of Iain Banks’s second novel, Walking on Glass (1985), which so far follows three separate narrative tracks: one focusing on an art student pining after an enigmatic beauty; one following an apparent paranoid-schizophrenic who believes himself to be a secret agent of some sort from another galaxy, imprisoned on earth; and one revolving around a fantastical castle where two opposing warriors, trapped in ancient bodies, play bizarre table top games while they try to solve an unsolvable riddle. I should finish later tonight, I think, and while there are some wonderful and funny passages, I’m not sure if Banks will stick the landing here. My gut tells me his debut novel The Wasp Factory is a stronger effort.
I’ve been soaking in Sorokin lately, thanks to his American translator Max Lawton, with whom I’ve been conducting an email-based interview over the past few months. Max had kindly shared some of his manuscripts with me, including an earlier draft of the story collection published as Red Pyramid. I’ve found myself going through the collection again now that it’s in print from NYRB—skipping around a bit (but as usual with most story collections, likely leaving at least one tale for the future.)
I very much enjoyed Gerhard Rühm’s Cake & Prostheses (in translation by Alexander Booth)—sexy, surreal, silly, and profound. Lovely little thought experiments and longer meditations into the weird.
I really enjoyed Debbie Urbanski’s debut novel After World. The novel’s “plot,” such as it is, addresses the end of the world: Or not the end of the world, but the end of the world of humans: Or the beginning of a new world, where consciousness might maybe could who the fuck actually can say be uploaded to a virtual after world. After World is a pastiche of forms, but dominated by the narrator [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc whose task is to reimagine the life of Sen Anon, one of the final humans to live and die on earth—and the last human to be archived/translated/transported into the Digital Human Archive Project. This ark will carry humanity…somewhere. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc creates Sen’s archive through a number of sources, including drones, cameras, Sen’s own diary, and a host of ancillary materials. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc also crafts the story, drawing explicitly on the tropes and forms of dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature. After World is thus explicitly and formally metatextual; [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc archives the life of Sen Anon, last witness to the old world and Urbanski archives the dystopian and post-apocalyptic pop narratives that populate bestseller lists and serve as the basis for Hollywood hits. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc namechecks a number of these authors and novels, including Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Ann Leckie, while Sen Anon holds tight to two keystone texts: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. But the end-of-the-world novel it most reminded me of was David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Even as it works to a truly human finale, Urbanski’s novel is spare: post-postmodern, post-apocalyptic, and post-YA. Good stuff.
Speaking of: Carole Masso’s 1991 novel Ava also strongly reminded me of Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Its controlling intelligence is the titular Ava, dying too young of cancer. The novel is an elliptical assemblage of quips, quotes, observations, dream thoughts, and other lovely sad beautiful bits. Masso creates a feeling, not a story; or rather a story felt, intuited through fragmented language, experienced.
I continue to pick my way through Frederick Karl’s American Fictions. He is going to make me buy Joseph McElroy’s 1974 novel Lookout Cartridge.
I read Will Oldham’s book On Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy almost a decade and it therefore doesn’t belong in a stack of recent acquisitions, but it’s there—I pulled it off the shelf last week and thumbed through it in anticipation of seeing Oldham play this past Thursday. I even brought the book to the venue, thinking maybe I’d ask him to sign it. But I left it in the car and simply enjoyed Oldham and his pal run through a set of covers and originals. His voice is more resonant, richer, bolder than the last time I saw him live, and even if I didn’t know half of the songs, I enjoyed the gentle chill music on a cold Florida Thursday night. (I suspect Oldham’s short “tour” of Florida is an excuse to get out of the midwestern cold—although he complained it was “fuckin’ cold” here.)
Other books in the stack above are a composite of three or maybe four book store visits. The most memorable visit was to Aeon Bookstore in the Lower East Side of NYC.
Aeon is a small, cozy shop, well-curated with art, philosophy, anthropology, and literature books, as well as an excellent selection of jazz records. The clerk let me handle some first editions of Williams Burroughs and Gaddis, as well as Ishmael Reed and others.
I resisted The Recognitions and The Hearing Trumpet and picked up first editions of Donald Barthelme’s City Life and Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star.
Over two or possibly three visits to my local bookshop over the last month, I picked up copies of Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man, Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, and Carole Maso’s Ava. I also picked up Anthony Kerrigan’s translation of Miguel de Unamuno stories, Abel Sanchez and Other Stories.
I also snagged an advance copy of Percival Everett’s James. Blurb:
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
A few years ago, spurred by a conversation with a colleague, I decided to blog about the best books from half a century ago. I enjoyed riffing on the possible “Best Books of 1972” so much that I did repeated the project last year with the possible “Best Books of 1973.”
As in the previous two posts, I’m again primarily interested in novels here, or books of a novelistic/artistic scope. I’ve also focused on books published in English in 1974, and will not be including books published in their original language in 1974 that did not appear in English translation until years later. (For example, while Georges Perec’s excellent Species of Spaces was first published in 1974, it was not published in English translation until the late nineties, and thus will not appear in this blog post, other than in this parenthetical example.)
I also will not be counting English-language books published before 1974 that were published that year in the U.S. So, for example, Richard Adams’s wonderful novel Watership Down dominated The New York Times bestsellers list in the summer of 1974, when it was released in U.S.—but the book was first published in the U.K. in 1972 (and thus appears in my “Best Books of 1972” post). Richard Adams’s follow-up Shardik was released in 1974 though. I tried reading it in my teens and never finished.
I brought up the NYT bestsellers list. I think it’s an interesting barometer to consider a book’s value fifty years after publication. Just four titles dominated the 1974 list: Gore Vidal’s Burr (published in the previous year), followed by Watership Down, then John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and finally James Michener’s Centennial. Two of these titles I think have made their case over the decades.
While the four novels essentially split the NYT fiction bestsellers list by season, the nonfiction list was dominated by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men, a work that still remains culturally important (despite Woodward’s best efforts to ruin his legacy).
In their year-end round up of 1974, the editors of The New York Times include plenty of titles that didn’t sniff the bestsellers list, like John Hawkes’s Death, Sleep & the Traveler, Donald Barthelme’s collection Guilty Pleasures (“Barthelme’s easiest book,” the editors suggest), Grace Paley’s collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. The English translation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities makes the list, but translator William Weaver is left out. James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk makes the cut, as do Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm, Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 follow-up, Something Happened. My favorite pick from their list is Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers. (The editors also include Toni Morrison’s Sula, which was actually published in 1973—likely a make-up call for its absence from the previous year’s round-up.)
Some of the strongest entries from the NYT 1974 notables list come in the “Young Readers” section, which boast three bona fide classics: Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins the Great, and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends.
In his personal round-up at the NYT, critic John Leonard discusses how the book review section came to their selections before adding some of his favorites, including works by his critical brethren (Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal, Irving Howe’s The Critical Point, and Dwight Macdonald’s Discriminations). For fiction, Leonard includes heavy hitters like Vladimir Nabokov (Look at the Harlequins) and Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, two novels I haven’t ever heard of until now. He also praises James Welch’s Winter in the Blood and Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman.
Godwin’s The Odd Woman also appears on the American Library Associations’s list of notable books for 1974, along with other titles duplicated in the NYT list. The ALA list also includes Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack in their slim fiction selection, and Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair in their nonfiction selection. (I don’t think we would count Zen as a work of nonfiction today, right?)
The Booker Prize winners and finalists for 1974 offer a less USAcentric list: Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist) and Stanley Middleton (Holiday) split the prize for the first time ever. The shortlist included Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up, Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing, and C.P. Snow’s In Their Wisdom.
In other literary prize news of the day, Michael Shaara’s 1974 Civil War novel The Killer Angels won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1975. In 1974, no Pulitzer was awarded; infamously, the Pulitzer board opted not to follow the jury’s recommendation to give the prize to Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
Like the Booker, the 1975 National Book Award split its fiction prize as well: Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers shared the prize with Thomas Williams’ The Hair of Harold Roux. Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins, The Great won the NBA for children’s literature. Hamilton’s book also won the Newberry Medal that year.
The Nebula Awards short list for the best novels of 1974 included Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, T.J. Bass’s The Godwhale, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed—which won top honors. (I am likely to give The Dispossessed top honors too by the time I get to the end of this post.)
J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island did not make Nebula’s short list, but to be fair it’s not really sci-fi. But it is pretty good. (Also, not a sci-fi, but an island book, Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island was published in 1974). Leonora Carrington’s excellent surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet also is sci-fi adjacent, but is again overlooked. Oddball novels in general I suppose have to find their way to a cult—fifty years later, novels like Gerald Murnane’s Tamarisk Row, Ishmael Reed’s The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Fran Ross’s Oreo have all found wider and more dedicated audiences in the last half century.
Speaking of cult books: Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders was published in 1974. Bugliosi’s book was part of a select library we passed surreptitiously around in high school (along with Stephen Davis’s Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Go Ask Alice, and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—the aforementioned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair and Kerouac’s On the Road were part of the underground informal book loan, but I never really cottoned to them). Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood—published too in 1974—could have been in that secret library if we had known about it.
And 1974 spit out some books would-be hipsters would likely eschew, Peter Benchley’s beach read Jaws and Stephen King’s Carrie. (Both novels spawned fantastic films.)
As I mentioned above, 1974 was a standout year it seems for children and adolescent literature–Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins the Great, and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, of course, but also James Lincoln Collier’s My Brother Sam Is Dead, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, and Judy Blume’s Blubber. I loved all of these.
A few other books of note: J. M. Coetzee’s debut Dusklands (haven’t read it), Muriel Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark (read it when I was devouring Spark in 2020), Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (haven’t read it), and James Herbert’s The Rats (guess who read their mom’s copy of this novel in secret when he was about ten years old?).
I have undoubtedly missed many, many books of note that were published in 1974. I wonder how available, say in 1999 at the 25-year mark, a novel like Ross’s Oreo or Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet might have been. Again, my fun in this project comes down to a basic idea I have about literature—we really don’t know what books will retain their importance (or gain importance) until decades after their publication. None of this is to discount year-end lists of new books—I had four on my list this year!—I just aim to say something like: Books aren’t time capsules, they are time machines.
My list of the best books of 1974:
Blubber, Judy Blume
The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier
Concrete Island, J.G. Ballard
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Grace Paley
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Philip K. Dick
Guilty Pleasures, Donald Barthelme
The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, trans. William Weaver
In some cases, I’ve self-plagiarized some descriptions and evaluations from my old tweets and blog posts.
Night Business, Benjamin Marra
Sleazy, crude violent fun cribbed from the best seventies and eighties action flix you vaguely remember watching in a closet-sized room with six other kids you didn’t know while the adults drank themselves into merriment.
Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T., Benjamin Marra
One of the better satires on The War on Terror™ I’ve read, Marra’s comic assaults the flimsy veil of morality that the neocons threw over their two-front Near Eastern misadventures in mass death.
Benjamin Marra, from Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T.
A Funny Little Dirty War, Osvaldo Soriano, trans. Nick Caistor
A Funny Dirty Little War will in no way explain the Dirty War to those unfamiliar with its history. The causes and effects here unfold in the most basic way (all in a neat Aristotelian unity of action, place, and time). There is no introspection, no analysis—the violence just escalates. Absurd farce hurtles into absurd tragedy. Yet for all their outlandish, grotesque contours, Soriano’s characters are ultimately sympathetic. Or at least pathetic. In any case, this short novel will reward those who don’t mind their black humor extra bitter, with a heavy dose of violence.
The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy☉☆
Cormac McCarthy published his last two novels in the Fall of 2022 and died in the Summer of 2023. Over the last twelve months I’ve reread pretty much all of his novels (going through a fourth or fifth reread of Suttree just a few weeks ago). The Crossing is one of his best, and it might be understood as the bridge piece of a literary career from the acme of Suttree to the capstone of The Passenger. I also think that The Crossing is the perfect starting place for those interested in McCarthy’s oeuvre. I wrote about rereading it here.
A.V. Marraccini’s book is generative, creative, fruitful, a hybrid that points to something beyond the lyric essay. It is stuffed with art and poetry and life; it is erudite and frequently fun; it is moody and sometimes melodramatic, but tonally consistent.
CardinalNumbers, Hob Broun☆
I picked up Hob Broun’s underread, underappreciated 1988 collection Cardinal Numbers a few years ago, ate up most of the stories, and then shelved it with just two tales left, a move I’ve done many times in the past for reasons I can’t fully explain. I guess that I want to leave something in the bag, so to speak. Anyway, I read the whole thing straight through earlier this year—Broun is one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read. Fans of Barry Hannah, David Berman, and Charles Portis will appreciate his stuff.
Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy☉
About thirty pages into the final book of his so-called “Border Trilogy,” McCarthy devotes two entire pages to a description of changing a tire. Beautiful.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy☉
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy☉☆
Child of God, Cormac McCarthy☉
The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy☉
Like I mentioned above, I spent a lot of the last year rereading McCarthy. I did not find his death a shock or especially sad, or even really, a loss, I think, because of this fact: I was so grounded in all that he’d given us. The man really left all that he had out there, I believe. In an appreciation written after his death, I wrote that I had recently reread so much McCarthy because
The Passenger left me wanting more McCarthy–not in an unsatisfied way, but rather to confirm my intimations about its status as a career capstone. I reread All the Pretty Horses in the lull before Stella Maris arrived. I went on to reread The Crossing (much, much stronger than I had remembered), Cities of the Plain (weaker than I had remembered), The Road (about exactly as I remembered), Child of God (ditto), and The Orchard Keeper (as funny as I had remembered but also much sadder than I had remembered).
Gina Siciliano, from I Know What I Am
I Know What I Am, Gina Siciliano☆
Siciliano’s comix biography of Artemisia Gentileschi is a wonderful achievement—a rich, evocation of genius at work, genius in defiance against the social dicta that sought to suppress her light. Lovely stuff.
The Letters of William Gaddis, William Gaddis, ed. Steven Moore
I read most of the Dalkey edition a few years back; NYRB’s updated edition prompted a full read. I had initially planned to cover the book in a series of posts, but only managed one, covering our man’s youth. The Letters prompted me to finally read A Frolic of His Own, which I’d been “saving” for over a decade now.
Solenoid, Mircea Cărtărescu, trans. Sean Cotter
Unwieldy, uneven, wonderfully surreal and gross at times, simultaneously encyclopedic and introspective, plodding and thrilling, abject and ecstatic. The conclusion splits the elect from the preterite in a literary trick ultimately made ambiguous by everything that’s preceded it. It’s satisfying unless you think too hard about it.
Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad☉
An entire generation passed between my first reading of Azerrad’s well-researched semi-oral history of 1980s American indie rock and listening to a newish audiobook recording of it, read primarily by people inspired these bands. The conceit for the audiobook is gimmicky but works: a different musician reads a chapter on bands they love (Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth reads the Black Flag chapter; Jeff Tweedy does The Minutemen; Jon Wurster does The Replacements, etc.) What most fascinated me was how my tastes have changed—mellowed maybe? I still love Sonic Youth, Fugazi, and Hüsker Dü, but I’m more inclined to listen to The Replacements these days.
Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker☉☆
Fever dreaming holds up.
The Stronghold, Dino Buzzati, trans. Lawrence Venuti
…takes place in an unidentified time in an unidentified country. The novel’s eerie, fable-like quality—a quality that resists historicity—is what most engages me. Buzzati’s book captures the paradox of a modern life that valorizes the pursuit of glory (or at least happiness) while simultaneously creating a working conditions that crush the human spirit. We can find this paradox in Herman Melville’s Bartleby or Mike Judge’s Office Space; we can find it in Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama or Mike Judge’s Enlightened; we can find if in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King or Dan Erickson’s recent show Severance. I could go on of course.
My Stupid Intentions, Bernardo Zannoni, trans. Alex Andriesse☆
Absolutely loved My Stupid Intentions. It’s a coming-of-age novel narrated by a stone marten, a picaresque howl that seeks to find meaning in being a creature. It’s full of cruelty and heroism and humor and pathos, and, like I said, I absolutely loved it.
Escape from the Great American Novel, Drew Lerman☆
Escape from the Great American Novel is the latest collection of Drew Lerman’s Snake Creek strips, and the most cohesive collection to date. The strips collected here span August 2019 through August 2021; it ends up being an unintentional pandemic novel (while not about the Covid-19 pandemic at all, to be clear). In my review, I wote:
The strips collected in Escape from the Great American Novel span two years that often felt in “real time” like an eternity. Many of us were separated from friends and family over these months. Lerman’s gambit, intentional or otherwise, is to keep his central characters separated, which adds real tension to a comic novel that otherwise might be a loose collection of funny riffs. As I stated before, Roy and Dav are the heart of Snake Creek, so when Lerman finally reunites them the moment is not just cathartic, it’s literarily metaphysical. For all its sardonic jags, ribald japes, and erudite allusions, Escape from the Great American Novel is in the end a sweet, even heartwarming read (Dav and Roy would find a way to mock this sentiment, I’m sure). I loved it. Highly recommended.
Drew Lerman, from Escape from the Great American Novel
The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Jennifer Croft ☆
I’d been interested in Tokarczuk’s historical fiction 900-pager since hearing about it in English translation a few years ago (via Fitzcarraldo Editions). The US edition came out in 2022, but I never came across it used. I have a habit of browsing my campus library before the end of each term though, and at the end of our Spring session there it was, big and fat and propped outward. I didn’t expect to sink into the book the way I did, but quickly gave into its many characters, its simultaneous alienating qualities and deep humanity. Fantastic stuff.
Platitudes, Trey Ellis
Ishmael Reed praised Ellis’s 1988 debut as “delightfully rad,” noting that he was zapped by it. I felt the same. My review here.
Great Expectations, Kathy Acker☉
Bits and bobs, bites and pieces, unpeaceful, savage, a splatterpunk recapitulation of Dickens’ classic.
The River and the Child, Henri Bosco, trans. Joyce Zonana☆
If someone were to have described the simple plot of Henri Bosco’s 1945 novel The River and the Child to me, I might have passed on it—too rustic, too naive, too tender. But, having been sent a review copy of Joyce Zonana’s new translation, I opened it, began reading, and just kept reading. From my review:
I loved reading The Child and the River; I loved the feeling of reading it. It took me back to books I’d loved as a child: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, abridged and bowdlerized versions of Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn, and countless Robinsades. In a letter to a friend, Bosco suggested that The Child and the River was “a novel very good, I think, for children, adolescents, and poets.” Is there a better audience?
Inside the Dream Palace, Sherill Tippins☆
This summer, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary by staying at the venerable Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan. There, we were lucky to enjoy a visit and brief tour of room 629, the former residence of the artist Vali Myers. The current resident, photographer Tony Notarberardino was hosting a party later that night, and the theater curtains outside of his door, accompanied by ethereal music, attracted us to peer in as we were looking around the hotel. Tony graciously invited us for a brief peek before his party, and the rooms are simply otherworldy, covered in murals by Myers along with beautiful paintings, furniture, and other sundries. Among other books, he recommended Sherill Tippins’ history of the hotel, Inside the Dream Palace. Tippins’ book can be read as a history 20th c. modernism focused around one locale. Heroes include Harry Smith, Patti Smith, and Andy Warhol. Fantastic stuff.
This Is Not Miami, Fernanda Melchor
This is not to say that I was disappointed by This Is Not Miami, but in my not review of the collection, I wrote that
This Is Not Miami reads like a minor work, but one nonetheless vital to its creator’s artistic maturation. For me, This Is Not Miami is most appreciable as an apprenticeship work that points toward the Bigger Thing to come. And of course I want more.
Excellent and slight. Did Williams mean to mix Kafka and David Markson, or just arrive at her own place? (She arrived at her own place.) From her collection, a piece called “Nevertheless”:
At some point, Kafka became a vegetarian.
Afterwards, visiting an aquarium in Berlin, he spoke to the fish through the glass.
“Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don’t eat you anymore.”
I saw a very interesting-looking person reading an actor’s edition of Philip Ridley’s play Mercury Fur on a train. The title of the play was interesting too, so I picked it up and read it (not the interesting-looking person’s edition.) The play was fine; perhaps actors might have enlivened its dystopian hysterics. Maybe my inner-voice was a poor director. I worked with the script I had.
Mockingbird, Walter Tevis
Tevis’s dystopian novel, published in 1980 and set centuries in the future, posits a future where humanity has basically forgotten everything, letting cyborgs and robots run the world for them. The premise and sentiment exceed the prose and execution.
Rubicon Beach, Steve Erickson
Three strange strands tangle together in a surreal mess. The parts together do not synthesize, exactly; the whole is not greater than the parts. But Rubicon Beach is vital and odd and singular.
A Frolic of His Own, William Gaddis☆
After a few years of false starts, I finally finished the last Gaddis I hadn’t yet read. I wrote a kinda long riffed onA Frolic, concluding that,
Many contemporary reviewers suggested that A Frolic of His Own was Gaddis’s most accessible novel to date, and it might be. Whereas J R and Carpenter’s Gothic are composed almost entirely in dialogue, Gaddis provides more stage direction and connective tissue in A Frolic. There are also the fragments of other forms: legal briefs, depositions, TV news clips, Oscar’s play… A Frolic of His Own is not the best starting point for anyone interested in William Gaddis’s fiction, although I don’t think that’s where most people start. It is rewarding though, especially read contextually against his other works, in which it fits chaotically but neatly, underscoring the cranky themes in a divergent style that still feels fresh three decades after its original publication. Highly recommended.
Stone Junction, Jim Dodge☆
I just went back and read the review of Stone JunctionI wrote this summer. I put the little star guy up there, because my impression of the novel was that it was one of the best things I read this year—I remember the plot, the imaginative contours that it opened up; I remember the paths it took me on—rereading The Once in Future King, in particular, as well as Riddley Walker. But my actual review hedges a bit more: “In its strongest moments, Stone Junction reads like a YA Pynchon novel; in its weakest moments, it reminded me of Tom Robbins,” I wrote. I think it’s stronger than YA Pynchon, I think I think! But I continued:
The stronger moments prevail, however—Stone Junction is a fun, flighty, and at times unexpectedly heavy summer read. The novel might also be read in (stoned) conjunction with Pynchon’s 1990 twin Vineland. Both novels diagnose the fallout of the 1960s counterculture wave crashing against the Reagan eighties; both seem attempts to, at least in the world of letters, check the burgeoning nostalgic romanticization of that turbulent decade. Pynchon’s is the more flawed, sillier, and better-written effort; Dodge’s is likely his magnum opus… I called Stone Junction “YA Pynchon” above, but I didn’t mean it as an insult—it’s YA in an older sense, in the sense of the novels handed me when I was young, hardly adult, novels that etched their own versions of reality onto our own banal reality; realities more real: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Outsiders, The Once and Future King, The Lord of the Rings, Hatchet…Stone Junction is about youth, but it’s also about maturation, and the ache and melancholy of aging out of the game…
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is not a great starting place for anyone interested in Le Guin’s worlds. Interested parties would do better to start with The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, or The Left Hand of Darkness—but interested parties are probably aware of that. The book is better suited for folks like me—folks who tore through the Hainish cycle and the Earthsea books and collections, and still wanted a little more. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is ultimately most interesting as a document of a writer coming into the prime of her powers, and, as such, is indispensable for hardcore Le Guin fans.
Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg, trans. Jenny McPhee
Listened to the audiobook; great stuff, my first Ginzburg.
The Once and Future King, T.H. White☉☆
A perfect book, made perfectly imperfect when capped with its posthumous footnote, The Book of Merlyn—a didactic screed tacked on to a grand Modernist epic, which I hadn’t previously read. It’s probably been thirty years since I’d read The Once and Future King in full; I’d read the first book, The Sword in the Stone, to both of my children when they were young, and before that in my teens, and before that as a kid (big thank you to my cousin Tripp who gave me a paperback copy for Christmas decades ago). But reading the four + one epic (I don’t think Merlyn counts) as a “real” adult was a different matter—I missed so much of what makes The Ill-Made Knight so tragic and what makes the final moments of The Candle in the Wind so unbearably sad and moving. I urge anyone who remembers the contours of this book to return to its rich prose.
Beasts is little big: each of its nine chapters might be read as a short story in which we get a glimpse from one perspective at a balkanized, dystopian post-USA. A species of genetic hybrid called leos are corralled on reservations or outright hunted by the militant Union for Social Engineering; what remains of the Federal Government vies for control with various Autonomous zones; utopian cultists try to hide from the world; slavery has returned under the guise of contractual indentured servitude. A mutant fox, the trickster Reynard, plays kingmaker behind the scenes. The nine chapters refuse to explicitly connect the pieces of the world the present; that is the job of the reader.
Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, César Aira, trans. Chris Andrews☆
A perfect little book, which ends, or nearly ends, with this lovely little line: “The artist, as artist, could always be already dead.”
My Death, Lisa Tuttle
A creepy, cozy literary mystery that blooms into an abyssal loop. I reviewed it here.
Based on a True Story, Norm Macdonald☆
I was not expecting Norm Macdonald’s fake-not-fake-memoir-cum-novel Based on a True Story to be as good as it was. I listened to Norm read his book, which in its finest moments is painfully funny and terribly sad, and in its worst, just goofy—the kind of self-sabotage one might expect from a genius who made sure to derail every track he was otherwise sailing along.
I love how it’s written; I love its themes, its layering, its construction. It’s a dense book that feels light; it’s serious and erudite but also psychologically drawn. Ford eschews exposition. In fact, at times he even sets the reader up to look the wrong way. And this fits with a lot of the themes and motifs and bits of the novels—illusionists, forgers, secret agents, disguises, spies, thieves, and so on. So it’s not just happening in the plot; it’s also happening at the rhetorical level.
Schattenfroh, Michael Lenz, trans. Max Lawton ☆
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Sonic Life, Thurston Moore☆
“I really loved reading Sonic Life. It’s not a perfectly-written or balanced book, but it feels real,” I wrote in my review of Moore’s memoir.
Yaroslav Schwarzstein, from The Sugar Kremlin
The Sugar Kremlin, Vladimir Sorokin, trans. Max Lawton
This forthcoming collection of Sorokin’s novel-in-stories unfolds like a horror-comedy on power, coercion, and Russian soul.
Atticus Lish, from Life Is with People
Life Is with People, Atticus Lish
Doodles.
Poor Things, Alasdair Gray☉
A nice reread. Still haven’t seen the film. My review here.
Aladair Gray, from Poor Things
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy☉☆
Possibly the best book.
(Or at least the best book by an American published in 1979.)
A late year reread—I can’t believe how many connections to The Passenger I’d missed (for example, Sutt has an Aunt Alice he visits in a mental ward). Such a rich, fertile thing, this novel, especially in the way it refuses to be grander than it is, but also is much, much grander than it pretends not to be.
Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh
I listened to the audiobook of Moshfegh reading her 2022 novel over my Xmas break. I hadn’t read anything by Moshfegh before; I was aware of her hit novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation though. A colleague had suggested I read Lapvona though, promoting it in the most enticing way: “I really, really hated this, Ed, but I think you’d like it a lot.” She was right—Lapvona is a grimy mix of faux-medieval evil fabulism and insane comedy (I think?) — and wholly abject. A story where Nothing Good Happens—except that’s not right. I loved the end.
The Norm, Vladimir Sorokin, trans. Max Lawton ☆
An intense abject antitotalitarian antiauthoritarian howl against language itself. Fun, funny, gross, grand.
Maybe an hour ago, browsing in a used bookstore, I opened a worn and some might say dirty copy of Iain Banks’s 1985 novel Walking on Glass. The very first page of this old book was inscribed with the following:
Have a weird Xmas ’90
John
This copy of Iain Banks’s 1985 novel Walking on Glass—a 1990 Abacus trade paperback printed in London, the embossing on its cover yellowed by wear on its cover and back near its spine—this particular copy was addressed to no named person, its inscription signed by a name so anonymous we apply it to unidentified cadavers and prostitute clients.
I take myself to be the unidentified person being addressed by the identified generic John, wishing me weird wellness, a ghost of Xmas past.
Earlier this year I made the tragic mistake of not pulling the trigger on first-edition hardbacks of Banks’s first two novels, The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass. I hadn’t read Banks at that point, and my familiarity with his work came almost entirely of his proximity to the J.G. Ballard titles I routinely perused. I ended up reading and loving The Wasp Factory this summer (reviewed it here), and the blurb on the back of Walking on Glass promising further perversions intrigues me too, of course.
Today, I also came across a first-edition, first-U.S.-printing of Roberto Bolaño’s opus 2666. It was marked at a third of the original cover price and has never been read. I could not leave it behind.
Maybe a week after that, I was browsing with my son, who wanted a collection of Harlan Ellison short stories. I was shocked that we couldn’t find any—I had given away two mass market collections to some students maybe seven or eight years ago in a purge. Apparently a lot of it is out of print, but a “greatest hits” collection is coming out this spring. Anyway, I ended up finding hardback editions of Robert Coover’s Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Denis Johnson’s novel Fiskadaro.
The Johnson is a British edition, Chatto & Windus, and while it’s hardly my favorite novel by him, I found its form too attractive to pass (and it was, like, cheaper than a beer in the same bookstore). I also picked up a book by Lewis Nordan, a slim collection of short stories called Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. I picked it up because I love those horrid lovely wonderful gross stylish Vintage Contemporaries editions, and then acquired it based on the blurb, which compared it to Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Gilchrist, and Harry Crews. Here it is next to my Vintage Contemporaries copy of Denis Johnson’ Fiskadaro:
I hope you have a weird Xmas. And I hope that John, wherever they are, has a weird Xmas too.
I am a huge fan of Atticus Lish’s 2014 novel Preparation for the Next Life, and I’m a fan of indie Tyrant Books, but I’d never heard of his 2011 collection of doodles, Life Is With People. The book wasn’t even shelved properly yet, and I was initially attracted to its strange pink and black cover. It turned out the bookseller who checked out my purchases that day (the Lish and some books for my son) had brought the Lish in; his interest in it was in Lish-as-son-of-Lish. We chatted about Barry Hannah a bit and I recommended he read Hob Broun, which I recommend to anyone who expresses admiration for Hannah or Father Lish.
Here is one of the cartoons from Lish’s collection:
This particular cartoon is probably my favorite in the collection, as I find it the most relatable.
In a lovely bit of serendipity, I happened upon a first edition hardback copy of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things. The previous day, I had pulled out my paperback copy to reread it in anticipation of Yorgos Lanthimos film adaptation. I ended up reading the old paperback copy, already somewhat battered, highlighted (not mine!) and dogeared (mine…), and had initially planned to trade it in toward future hardback editions of books I already own, which seems like my mission these days, but my son expressed his desire to read the novel, so it’s his I guess.
The book sans jacket is gorgeous too:
I finished Poor Things before Thanksgiving, and should have Something on it on this blog in the next week or so.
I’ve brought my son up a few times in my riff—most of these November bookstore trips were in his company; twice because he showed his art at one of the bookstore’s location, and once (the most recent, the Gray acquisition) because he’s reading like a maniac. I’m frankly jealous of how he’s reading right now—fast, somewhat indiscriminately, but with designs on reading what he calls “You know, the classics.” Initially he was reading old mass market paperbacks of mine — Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus, John Gardner — but he wanted his own copies (“I need to start my own little library, right?”).
I couldn’t pass up the first editions of Gass’s Middle C or Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations. I knew that I no longer had a paperback copy of The Gold Bug Variations, having loaned it to a colleague years ago who moved to Norway in the middle of a semester, leaving her history department scrambling to cover classes. Maybe it’s in Norway. I did think I had a copy of Gass’s Middle C, but I must’ve checked it out from the library or lost it, or maybe it’s shelved behind other books. I’ll shelve it by The Tunnel, a reminder that I need to take one more shot at that beast. And if that one shot is not sufficient, another shot I will take…
In the final third of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance, the narrator, having departed the titular would-be utopian farm, enjoys some city time in a hotel. He takes a voyeuristic pleasure in watching people from his window, and elects to deepen the pleasure by ordering a drink: “Just about this time a waiter entered my room. The truth was, I had rung the bell and ordered a sherry-cobbler.” The explanatory end note for my Penguin Classics copy of Blithedale gives the following recipe: “A drink made with sherry, lemon juice, sugar, and cracked ice.” I decided to make a few.
A brief internet search resulted in dozens and dozens of recipes, all more or less the same iteration: long glass, crushed ice, sherry, simple syrup, citrus (oranges cited most frequently), fresh berries if you have ’em, and a straw. The straw is the kicker here. Here is a passage from Charles Dickens’ 1844 novel Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewitthat shows the titular hero’s delight with his first sherry cobbler (note Chuzzlewit’s ecstasy when he gets “the reed” to his lips):
‘I wish you would pull off my boots for me,’ said Martin, dropping into one of the chairs ‘I am quite knocked up—dead beat, Mark.’
‘You won’t say that to-morrow morning, sir,’ returned Mr Tapley; ‘nor even to-night, sir, when you’ve made a trial of this.’ With which he produced a very large tumbler, piled up to the brim with little blocks of clear transparent ice, through which one or two thin slices of lemon, and a golden liquid of delicious appearance, appealed from the still depths below, to the loving eye of the spectator.
‘What do you call this?’ said Martin.
But Mr Tapley made no answer; merely plunging a reed into the mixture—which caused a pleasant commotion among the pieces of ice—and signifying by an expressive gesture that it was to be pumped up through that agency by the enraptured drinker.
Martin took the glass with an astonished look; applied his lips to the reed; and cast up his eyes once in ecstasy. He paused no more until the goblet was drained to the last drop.
‘There, sir!’ said Mark, taking it from him with a triumphant face; ‘if ever you should happen to be dead beat again, when I ain’t in the way, all you’ve got to do is to ask the nearest man to go and fetch a cobbler.’
‘To go and fetch a cobbler?’ repeated Martin.
‘This wonderful invention, sir,’ said Mark, tenderly patting the empty glass, ‘is called a cobbler. Sherry cobbler when you name it long; cobbler, when you name it short. Now you’re equal to having your boots took off, and are, in every particular worth mentioning, another man.’
Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yeah—so I looked around for recipes. David Wondrich’s 2007 cocktail history Imbibe! gives a helpful baseline recipe by citing Jerry Thomas’s 1862 classic, How to Mix Drinks. From Thomas’s book:
Thomas doesn’t mention muddling the oranges, although pretty much every online recipe I read called for muddling.
So reader, I muddled.
Here is my variation on the sherry cobbler (or Sherry Cobbler, or sherry-cobbler). In the loose spirit of the cocktail, I made ours entirely of ingredients I already had at the house. These were for each cocktail:
–4 oz of sherry
–1/2 oz of simple syrup
–1/2 oz of maraschino syrup
–1 oz of sparkling water
–1 clementine (muddled)
–sprigs of mint
–blueberries
–crushed ice
The maraschino syrup was an afterthought after I’d mixed the cocktail and was about to pour it over ice—I wanted to get a pop of color at the bottom of the glass. The mint and blueberries were from our garden. The pic above is lousy; sorry—not sure why I didn’t move the dishcloth and maybe photograph the cocktails like, uh, not in front of my wife’s kombucha hotels.
So how was it? Pretty refreshing. My wife enjoyed it more than I did, although I’m not a huge cocktail guy. (I think it’s pretty hard, for example, to improve upon neat scotch , although I do like bourbon straight up in the hotter months).
I’ve always been fascinated by literary recipes, so I’m a bit surprised the sherry cobbler has evaded my attention until now, despite its having shown up in various novels I’ve read (including Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, as Troy Patterson pointed out in a remarkably thorough literary history of the cocktail at Slate years ago). I’m not sure I’d go out of my way to make a sherry cobbler again (not that I went out of my way to make these ones), but the basic cobbler recipe’s spirit is very close to my approach to making cocktails at home anyway—use what you have. In fact, the major difference between the sherry cobblers I made yesterday and the kind of cocktail I’d normally cobble together for my wife on a Saturday afternoon is the sherry—I’d usually use rum or maybe vodka. Anyway, the whole thing was fun, which is like, the point of cocktails.
Lisa Tuttle’s 2004 novella My Death receives an American reprint this fall from NYRB. In her introduction to this new edition, novelist Amy Gentry expresses her hope the reprint will set off a “Lisa Tuttle renaissance.” My Death was first published in the UK (Tuttle’s adopted home), and released in a small run from the feminist indie press Aqueduct; their edition is now out of print.
I had never heard of Lisa Tuttle’s work until a reading copy of the novella arrived in my mail a few days ago. The enigmatic title and the wonderful cover art by Cameron (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel) intrigued me. So did, I admit, the slim shape of My Death. It is one hundred pages of dialogue-driven weirdo art mystery stuff. Skipping Gentry’s introduction, I started reading, finishing the book over the course of two nights.
My Death is very readable, in that page-turning, suspense-building way. Gentry points its readability out at in the first line of her summary of the novella, which I will steal for its precision:
The opening pages of My Death seem to promise nothing more than a cozy tale of literary detective work. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the story, is a recently widowed novelist living on Scotland’s craggy western shore, her career stalled out by grief. While visiting the National Gallery in Edinburgh, she comes upon a portrait of the painter and writer Helen Ralston, an early-twentieth-century visionary whose work has long been overshadowed by her tempestuous affair with a more famous male author, W.W. Logan. Having been heavily influenced by Ralston’s work as a young woman, the narrator embarks on a biography that will elevate her from muse to “forgotten modernist” — and, it is implied, help the narrator rediscover the wellspring of her own creativity.
Tuttle shuttles her plot along, pushing her narrator out of the inertia of grief and into the possibility–quite literally–of a new life. We sit upon the narrator’s shoulder, by her eyes, ears, mouth, nose, as she goes about changing her life. This process kicks off in weird earnest when she finally meets her would-be subject, Helen Elizbeth Ralston (yes, “H.E.R.”). Previous to this meeting, Tuttle spikes her tight narrative with occasional vertiginous dips into the uncanny, but for the most part the novella chugs along its track as “nothing more than a cozy tale of literary detective work.” After the two writers converge, things good far more creepy.
Creepy, but also comfortable—the narrator indulges herself in Ralston’s tales of Paris in the Modernist thirties (“she’d taken tea with Sylvia Beach and James Joyce and his Nora”; she and her pal Virginia Woolf have their photo taken), and Tuttle indulges herself and her reader in a fantasy of this celebrated time. Notably, those macho sexist sons of guns “Picasso and Hemingway were both, by then, much too grand to be known.” Tuttle subtly highlights the art of women instead: Stein, Woolf, and Barnes echo throughout My Death, as does A.S. Byatt, whose 1990 novel Possession–perched on Ralston’s shelf by Nightwood and The Rings of Saturn—might be a prototype for Tuttle’s novella. These moments, even in their oddity, confirm the old pleasures of Art Gone By, high days of Grand Modernism not to be found again, except in novels and paintings—but also to be found anew in, say, the diaries and notes of “forgotten” modernists like Helen Elizabeth Ralston. Is there a strange, unnerving, uncanny set of secrets in Ralston’s diaries?! Well of course.
The fun of My Death is in its propulsive mystery plot; the art in the novella is in the small eruptions that distort that plot. Tuttle’s prose, for the most part, is straightforward and workmanlike, delivering action and thought without any many messy seams showing. The best bits break through the surface, showing just a glimpse of all the weird writhing underneath. Consider the following passage–never mind the context:
The sounds, our unnaturally slow pace, my worries about what was going to happen all combined to affect my brain, and after a while it seemed to me that the earth beneath my feet had become flesh, that I was treading upon a gigantic female body. This was bad enough, but there was something stranger to come, as it seemed I felt the footsteps upon my own, naked, supine body: that I was the land, and it was me. My body began to ache, but it seemed there was nothing to be done. I lost track of time, and my sense of myself as an individual became tenuous.
Elsewhere, there are eruptions of raw memory that penetrate any cozy gauze, as when the narrator recalls being a child and waking screaming from a nightmare. Her mother tries to comfort her but fails. And fails indelibly, imprinting a negative epiphany on her young daughter:
…what upset me was that I’d just realized that my mother and I were separate people. We didn’t share the same dreams or nightmares. I was alone in the universe, like everybody else.
Alone in the universe underscores one of the novella’s major thematic tracks—grief. My Death does not wallow in its grief; it never wallows, it always moves. But it does explore different kinds of grief, different kinds of relief, different kinds of loneliness. And, as it hurries to its conclusion, it suggests that maybe being alone in the universe might not be so awful.
The creepy coziness of My Death evinces most strongly in its final brief twin chapters. I won’t spoil the novella—for its pleasures really do depend on plot—but simply suggest that the final moments of Tuttle’s book point to a looping abyssal structure, simultaneously finite and infinite. We get to eat our doomed cake and keep it too; the narrative is both finished and unresolved. My Death is not life changing, but it is a creepy, cozy pleasure, the kind of story that bothers a reader in the nicest sort of way.
I finished John Crowley’s 1976 novel Beasts this morning. Loved it.
Beasts is not quite 200 pages, each of its nine chapters centering on a different character’s perspective. Crowley’s writing is rich and poetic here, as readers of his 1981 opus Little, Big might expect. In that novel, likely his most famous, Crowley conjures a vast, deep, detailed world; Little, Big is big big.
Beasts is little big: each of its nine chapters might be read as a short story in which we get a glimpse from one perspective at a balkanized, dystopian post-USA. A species of genetic hybrid called leos are corralled on reservations or outright hunted by the militant Union for Social Engineering; what remains of the Federal Government vies for control with various Autonomous zones; utopian cultists try to hide from the world; slavery has returned under the guise of contractual indentured servitude. A mutant fox, the trickster Reynard, plays kingmaker behind the scenes. The nine chapters refuse to explicitly connect the pieces of the world the present; that is the job of the reader. As Joachim Boaz puts it in his excellent, thorough review of the novel,
Beasts embodies a fascinating dialogue between nature and civilization, man and animal… Do not expect a straightforward narrative for many chapters function more as mood pieces. Each is part of a mosaic of images, characters, and philosophies that struggle to survive, or are altogether snuffed out, in a rapidly collapsing Old Order.
That imminent collapse is where Beasts leaves us, its final line a utopian promise: Shall we begin?
Last week I read a 1985 Washington Post profile of the American novelist William Gaddis. The profile, by Lloyd Grove, celebrated the publication of Gaddis’s third novel Carpenter’s Gothic. In the profile, Grove paraphrases literary critic Frederick Karl’s 1985 essay “The Mega-Novel” in the following way:
Karl argues that unlike “categories of Jewish novelists, gays, Black writers [and] female authors” who address special interests, “these white Protestant males [Gaddis, Pynchon, John Barth et al.] write very close to what America is,” having “sensed the country as a whole.”
I tracked down and read Karl’s essay “The Mega-Novel”; it is, almost entirely, a sustained argument for the kind of giant-assed so-called “experimental” novels typical of the bracketed Gaddis, Pynchon, and Barth above. And yet Karl seems to slide into and side with Harold Bloom in that old man’s pompous war against the so-called “School of Resentment”; once in the quote above, and then a few pages later, when he chooses to claim that “The Mega-Novelists have avoided the individuation of ethnic, gay, female (or even strictly male) experience and sensed the country as a whole.” Yes—Grove weds this second line in Karl’s covert attack on the “School of Resentment,” this maddening and dismissive “country as a whole” bit to the previous language. The effect is so odd, as if Grove has purposefully ignored every other bit of Karl’s essay and cherry-picked the lines that valorize the Real American Viewpoint™ as White Protestant Straight and Male.
Karl’s essay is, apart from these unnecessary declarations, really quite good—he champions Gaddis’s J R and Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge in particular. And yet I found myself troubled by his claim that it is the dead white guys who write very close to what America is because they sense the country as a whole, in a way that somehow, like, I guess Ishmael Reed or Fran Ross or Toni Morrison or etc. just can’t. And because I’m so simpatico with Karl’s general idea in “The Mega-Novel,” I found myself looking for his 1983 book American Fictions 1940-1980 : A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation.
While I didn’t find it in the literary criticism section of my beloved used bookmine, I did find the second volume of Gaddis-scholar Steven Moore’s The Novel, covering 1600-1800.
I also picked up César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (in translation by Chris Andrews) and Gabriel García Márquez’s In Evil Hour (in translation by Gregory Rabassa). The latter is another title in Avon/Bard’s Latin American authors series, and I can’t resist them.
The next day, yesterday, Saturday, I participated in an online discussion about the literature of William Gaddis on non-academic forums. (I represented Ye Olde Bloggers, and I will share more about the forum some time in the future.) Early in our forum, one of the participants, the author Jeff Bursey, raised a copy of Frederick Karl’s American Fictions 1940-1980 in front of his webcam. I believe he declared it one of the first places he’d heard of Gaddis, although I could be misremembering. It seemed like a serendipitous moment. I hope to muster more words on most of this later.
I stayed up later than I meant to the other night reading all of Matt Bucher’s new book The Belan Deck in one cover-to-cover go. On his website, Bucher describes The Belan Deck as “a little book…set mostly during a layover at SFO” that “centers around a person who maybe doesn’t really fit in at their AI tech job but still needs to produce one final PowerPoint deck.” This description approximates the plot, in the barest sense, but doesn’t touch on the spirit or form of The Belan Deck.
Let’s talk about the spirit and form of The Belan Deck. Bucher borrows the epigraphic, anecdotal, fractured, discontinuous style that David Markson practiced (perfected?) in his so-called Notecard Quartet (1996-2007: Reader’s Block, This Is Not A Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel). “An assemblage…nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like,” wrote Markson, to which Bucher’s narrator replies, “Bricolage. DIY culture. Amateurism. Fandom. Blackout poems.”
Bucher’s bricolage picks up Markson’s style and spirit, but also moves it forward. Although Markson’s late quartet is arguably (I would say, by definition) formally postmodernist, the object of the Notecard Novels’ obsession is essentially Modernism. Bucher’s book is necessarily post-postmodern, taking as its objects the detritus and tools of postmodern communication: PowerPoint, Google Street View, Wikipedia, social media, artificial intelligence.
At the same time, Bucher continues Markson’s obsessions with artists and death, adding to the mortality lists that wormed through DM’s quartet. Bucher’s updates are odd though, in that they seem to, in their print form, contextualize anew coincidences that were so raw and immediate when they popped up on Twitter and other social media:
Nicanor Parra died the day after Ursula K. LeGuin died.
Larry McMurty and Beverly Cleary died the same day.
(In my memory, William H. Gass died the day before LeGuin, but this is not true. He died almost two months before LeGuin. But I recall teaching selections from both of their work in a literature class in the spring semester of 2018, and pointing out to my students that the empty spaces behind the dashes after their birth years might now be filled in. “An encyclopedia entry demands at least a birth or a death,” notes Bucher’s narrator.)
The encyclopedia, by which I mean Wikipedia, becomes a heroic motif in The Belan Deck. “Wikipedia is the number one result for over 50% of Google searches,” Bucher’s narrator points out, following it up with,
Wikipedia, made by humans, for free, is a better search engine than Google, the most expensive and sophisticated algorithm in the world.
Earlier in The Belan Deck, the narrator points to the “mindless pleasure of going down a deep Wikipedia rabbit hole,” a pleasure that an artificial intelligence, no matter how developed, could never feel. About three dozen pages later, Bucher’s narrator throws a slant rhyme to his previous note on the “mindless pleasures” of Wikipedia rabbit holes, pointing out that Thomas Pynchon had used Mindless Pleasures as a working title for Gravity’s Rainbow. That’s how this book operates: Disparate fragments of information are “Clues rather than trivia.”
The goal is to find the sublime in these connections; Bucher’s narrator repeatedly and succinctly argues that finding the beautiful, much less the sublime, is impossible for an artificial intelligence. The Belan Deck plays out as a discursive, looping, and unexpectedly moving argument for humanity, in all its serious triviality, against the backdrop of capital’s rapid encroachment into the human position in the arts.
“Capitalism is incompatible with being an artist, for most people,” avers our narrator. “Yet you participate!” might come the retort, and it’s true—not only does Bucher’s narrator work in a soulless medium, the deck (trying to inject some soul, some sublime, some humanity into it), he also works for the soulless Belan, a money guy who would love to replace artists with machines. (In what I think has to be a great intentional gag, Bucher’s narrator’s point of contact for Belan is a middleman named Jimmy Chen. I just have to believe that the character’s a take on the Jimmy Chen who wrote and designed on HTMLGIANT for all those years.)
The narrator participates because there aren’t that many other options, as we all know. “Do you understand what I am saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” the narrator plaintively asks. I mean, for me, that’s a Yes, all the time.
There’s much more in The Belan Deck than I can get to here—more on art, artists, baseball, airports—it’s voluminous for a “little book.” (“When we buy a book, we think we are buying time to read” is a line I underlined but could not otherwise work into this review, so I’ll include it here parenthetically. (A lot of this review has happened in parentheses.))
I’ll end with two bits of personal trivia, two coincidences.
First: The day The Belan Deck arrived in my mail, which is the day that I read The Belan Deck, some AI-cheerleading dork went viral on Twitter for posting a series of unasked-for renderings of “what the backgroundsof the most famouspaintings in the world look like with AI.” He was roundly and rightly mocked for his endeavors, and I found the general antipathy heartening, but still a small cadre of people who know absolutely nothing about art congratulated his vapidity.
Second: Earlier that same day, I read a passage from Walter Tevis’s 1980 dystopian novel Mockingbird, and found its sentiment largely heartening as well. The hero of the novel, staring at a “dumb parody of humanity” declares it “nothing, nothing at all.” He continues, pointing out that the forces of capital “had given robots to the world with the lie that they would save us from labor or relieve us from drudgery so that we could grow and develop inwardly.” But underneath this false promise was a deep “contempt for the ordinary life of men and women,” a deep hatred of human life itself. The sentiment I find heartening here is in the hero’s recognition and resistance to this contempt.
The Belan Deck isn’t a straightforward guidebook or manifesto or map, but it nevertheless, in its elliptical, poetic approach, offers a winding, thinking, feeling path of opposition to not only the machines themselves, but also the hollow men who would gladly replace artists and creators and thinkers with those machines. It’s also really fun to read. Great stuff.
Previously on Blue Lard…
Biblioklept 
