Tag: Dinah Brooke

Dinah Brooke’s Death Games (Book acquired, 8 Aug. 2024)

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I broke down and bought an inexpensive copy of Dinah Brooke’s 1976 novel Death Games from an internet vendor. I absolutely loved her 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home, which never got a U.S. release (until a year or two ago). Death Games did get a U.S. release—I guess because it involves the Vietnam War?—and was reviewed by Jane Larkin Crain in The New York Times. She wrote:

Pornographic brutality dominates this distasteful tale of carnage, corruption and colonialism in Indochina, starring young, beautiful, demented Elspeth Waterhouse, who pursues her impeccably detached tycoon of a father from Bangkok to Vientiane to Saigon, hungering after his recognition and love. Also featured are maimed and traumatized American war veteran who conducts an unlikely affair with Elspeth and Veronique, Waterhouse’s business associate and mistress, whose son is relegated to boarding school so that she may go globe‐trotting with her lover. . .

Death Games . . . largely dispenses with the mechanics of plot, pacing and characterization. In the course of a very short novel, scenes of debauchery, rape, murder, cannibalistic fantasy, suicide, bloodshed follow so quickly one upon the other, with so little sense or modulation…

I think Crain hated it!

Riff on July 2024 reading, etc.

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I experienced the middle weeks of July 2024 as simultaneously rapid and static. Doldrums should never be so frenetic. If this decade were a novel I would’ve put it down several chapters back. I try not to obsess over things I cannot control. I try to get away from screens. I try to go outside, but the feels like heat index here in north Florida goes over a hundred and five every day. (At least it’s raining again and nothing is on fire.) So I try to read more (and actually write more).

This July I read some great stuff.

I finished Katherine Dunn’s first novel Attic a couple of days ago. The book is seriously fucked up—like William Burroughs-Kathy Acker fucked up—an abject rant from a woman in prison in the mode of Ginsberg’s Howl. The narrator seems to be an autofictional version of Dunn herself, which is perhaps why Eric Rosenblum, in his 2022 New Yorker review described it as “largely a realist work in which Dunn emphasizes the trauma of her protagonist’s childhood.” Rosenblum uses the term realism two other times to describe Attic and refers to it at one point as a work of magical realism. If Attic is realism then so is Blood and Guts in High School. I need to read her second and third novels (Truck, 1971 and the posthumous Toad) and then go back and reread Geek Love, which I remember as being Gothic and gross but also whimsical. (I don’t sniff any whimsy in Attic.)

There are eight stories in Oğuz Atay’s story collection Waiting for the Fear (in translation by Ralph Hubbell); I’ve read the first five this summer, including the long title story, which is especially good, as is the opener “Man in a White Overcoat.” Atay’s heroes (I use the term loosely) find their antecedents in Kafka’s weirdos. Or Paul Bowles. Or Jane Bowles. I should have a proper review up near the end of October when NYRB publishes Waiting for the Fear.

I had picked up Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel American Abductions earlier this summer and finally started it a few nights ago after finishing Attic. Each chapter is a run-on sentence that has made me want to keep reading and reading, running on with it. The novel is, at least so far, both challenging and entertaining; it is not difficult, exactly, but rather engrossing. Sometimes I’ll find myself a bit lost in the layered consciousnesses, layers (layerings) of speech in Cárdenas’s sentences—especially when I find myself startled by an image or a joke or idea—and then I’ll wade backwards again and pick up the rhythm and keep going. The plot? I’ll steal from the Dalkey Archive’s blurb: “American Abductions opens in a near-future United States whose omnipresence of data-harvesting and algorithms has enabled the mass incarceration and deportation of Latin Americans—regardless of citizenship.” But that’s not really the plot; I mean, this isn’t a third-person dystopian world-building YA thing. The novel, at least its first half, is about a family, daughters Ada and Eva and their father Antonio, a novelist who was abducted by the titular abductors (the Pale Americans!). It’s also about writing, how we construct memory in a surveillance state, and, I suppose, love.

I reviewed Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s latest novel The Son of Man (in translation by Frank Wynne) in the middle of July, although I think I probably read it in late June. In my review I suggested that The Son of Man “is ultimately a novel about the atavistic transmission of violence from generation to generation.” I also highly recommended it.

I went on a big Antoine Volodine binge a couple of years ago which stalled out before I got to (what I believe is) his longest novel in English translation, Radiant Terminus. I finally started into it a few weeks ago (in translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman), and I think it might be Volodine’s best work. In my longish review, I declared Radiant Terminus “an astounding novel, a work that will haunt any reader willing to tune into its strange vibrations and haunted frequencies. Very highly recommended.” I think it’s a perfect starting place for anyone interested in Volodine’s so-called post-exotic project.

Denis Johnson’s The Stars at Noon was one of two novels I revisited via audiobook this month (the other is Portis’s Gringos, which we’ll get to in a moment). I honestly didn’t remember much about The Stars at Noon other than its premise and the fact that its narrator was an alcoholic journalist-cum-prostitute in Nicaragua. It hadn’t made the same impression on me as other Johnson novels had when I went through a big Johnson jag in the late nineties and early 2000s, and I think that assessment was correct—it’s simply not as strong as Angels, Fiskadoro, or Jesus’ Son. As an audiobook though I enjoyed it, especially in Will Patton’s reading. (His narration of Johnson’s perfect novella Train Dreams is the perfect audiobook.) I guess the audiobook came out in conjunction with Claire Denis’ 2022 adaptation of the film, which I still haven’t seen.

The collection of Remedios Varo’s writings On Homo rodans and Other Writings is another book I read earlier in the summer but didn’t write about until July. I was fortunate enough to get a long interview with the translator, Margaret Carson, and I think the result is one of the better things Biblioklept has published this year.

I picked up Dinah Brooke’s “lost” novel Lord Jim at Home in late June, and then read it in something of a sweat over a few days. In my review, I wrote that

Lord Jim at Home is squalid and startling and nastily horrific. It is abject, lurid, violent, and dark. It is also sad, absurd, mythic, often very funny, and somehow very, very real for all its strangeness. The novels I would most liken Lord Jim at Home to, at least in terms of the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading it, are Ann Quin’s Berg, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and James Joyce’s Portrait (as well as bits of Ulysses).

Gringos is the other book I “reread” via audiobook this July. Charles Portis wrote five novels and all of them are perfect—but I think Gringos might be my favorite. David Aaron Baker’s reading of the novel is excellent. He conveys the dry humor of narrator Jimmy Burns as well as the cynical sweet pathos at the core of Portis’s last novel. Highly recommended.

So well I guess July is over; the kids will be back in school again soon, and so will I. The air here will remain swamp thick, humidity that starts cooking you the minute you venture out of the desiccating AC that licensed growth on this weird peninsula. It might let up by November. Maybe because I’ve spent my entire adult career as a teacher I have always thought of August as the end of the year, not December. And some years I feel melancholy at this end, this pivot away from freer hours. But writing this on the last day of July, I think I want a return to routine, to something I can think of as a return to normalcy, the kind of normalcy that makes me appreciate the weird fucked up oddball novels that I do so love to hang out inside of.

A review of Dinah Brooke’s excellent cult novel Lord Jim at Home

Edwin Turner1 Comment

Dinah Brooke’s 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home had been out of print for five decades — and had never gotten a U.S. release — until McNally Editions republished in 2023 with a new foreword by the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh. I always save forewords until after I’ve finished a novel, so I missed Moshfegh’s implicit advice to go into Lord Jim at Home cold. She notes that the recommendation she received to read it “came with no introduction,” and that “I wouldn’t have wanted the effect of the novel to be mitigated in any way, so I’m reluctant to introduce it now.”

I am not reluctant to write about Brooke’s novel because I am so enthusiastic about it and I think those with tastes in literature similar to my own will find something fascinating in its plot and prose. However, l agree with Moshfegh’s advice that Lord Jim at Home is best experienced free from as much mitigating context as possible. I had never heard of the novel before lifting it from a bookseller’s shelf, attracted by the striking cover; I flipped it over to read a blurb parsed from Moshfegh’s foreword attesting that Brooke’s novel “was an instrument of torture. It’s that good.” The inside flap informed me that reviews upon its publication “described it as ‘squalid and startling,’ ‘nastily horrific,’ and a ‘monstrous parody’ of upper-middle class English life.” I was sold.

Lord Jim at Home is squalid and startling and nastily horrific. It is abject, lurid, violent, and dark. It is also sad, absurd, mythic, often very funny, and somehow very, very real for all its strangeness. The novels I would most liken Lord Jim at Home to, at least in terms of the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading it, are Ann Quin’s Berg, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and James Joyce’s Portrait (as well as bits of Ulysses). (I have not read Conrad’s Lord Jim, which Brooke has taken as something of a precursor text for Lord Jim at Home.)

After finishing Lord Jim at Home, I read it again by accident. At first I intended to take a few notes for a possible review, but after the first few pages I just kept reading. On a second reading, Brooke’s novel was just as strange—maybe even stranger—even if I was able to read it much more quickly, finding myself quicker to tune into the novel’s competing (and complementary) narrative registers. I found it far more precise, too, in the rhetorical development of its themes; Brooke’s styles and tones shift to capture the different ages of its hero. The novel begins in a mythical, archetypal mode and works its way through various registers, exploring the tropes of schoolboy novels, romances, war stories, adventure tales,  modernism, realism, and journalism. But despite its shifting modes, Lord Jim at Home is not a parodic pastiche. Rather, at its core, Lord Jim at Home skewers how aesthetic modes—primarily those derived from notions of class and manners—cover over abject cruelty. As Moshfegh puts it in her forward, Lord Jim at Home is “an accurate portrayal of how fucked-up people behave, artfully conveyed in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand.”

I’ve tried to be clear that I think it’s best to come to Lord Jim at Home without too much context—it’s best to just go with the novel’s strangeness. Below, however, I offer a more detailed discussion of the novel, its language, and some elements of the plot for those so inclined.

Answer, 2014 by Henrietta Harris

Continue reading “A review of Dinah Brooke’s excellent cult novel Lord Jim at Home” →

Biblioklept Does Seattle (Books acquired, some time last week)

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We visited Seattle over the fourth week of June 2024, our first time there.

We met up with some old friends and took our son to see his favorite band play at the Woodland Park Zoo. Unlike my last getaway (to Atlanta) I was carless and a bit more encumbered (kids, friends, friends’ kids, etc.), so I wasn’t able to get to as many bookstores as I would have liked to—but I still got to quite a few.

We stayed in the Belltown neighborhood. Full of restaurants, bars, and independent shops, Belltown’s about a ten or fifteen minute walk to the famous and touristy Pike Place Market, which, despite being famous and touristy also boasts some really cool little shops—including Left Bank Books which features “anti-authoritarian, anarchist, independent, radical and small-press titles.” They also have a section devoted to “Transgressive Literature/Weird Shit.”

Left Bank’s collection of used stuff is impressive, as are the myriad and diverse offering of zines. My son picked up a bunch of art zines and comix and I left with anarcho-surrealist Ron Sakolsky’s prose mixtape Scratching the Tiger’s Belly.

Also impressive at Pike Place is BLMF Literary Saloon, brimming with towers of reasonably-priced used books. Lionheart Bookstore is a bit less chaotic than BLMF and sells newer titles, with fewer used books. (Less chaotic is not a knock on BLMF, by the way.) I didn’t succumb to picking up a first-(US)-edition of J.G. Ballard’s The Day of Creation there, maybe because I was already carrying around some LPs my son bought at Holy Cow Records. We also stopped by Chin Music Press. They make some beautiful books.

I think my favorite spot at Pike Place though was Lamplight Books. There was a nice collection of used literature (including a lot of so-called weird shit). The proprietor patiently let me handle first editions of  Ballard, Barthelme, Borges, and Burroughs books (among other non-B titles). They were happy when I picked up Jacob Siefring’s translation of Rabelais’s Doughnuts by Pierre Senges, proudly letting me know that I was supporting not just a local indie bookshop but a local indie press, Sublunary Editions.

Despite the crowds of tourists in Pike Place lining up to go into the world’s oldest Starbucks (which, as my pal pointed out, is no different than lining up to gawk at the first CVS or first Harbor Freight), Pike Place has some nice niche shops. (Our lunch at the terrace of The Pink Door was lovely, too.)

While thrifting and record shopping in the so-called “hipster” Capitol Hill neighborhood, my crew indulged me in a too-long browse at The Elliot Bay Book Company. I’m generally a used-bookstore guy–I tend to order new titles from my local used bookshop, and I’m mostly out looking for the weird shit–but I’m always impressed by stores like Elliot Bay, which features the kind of odd and out of the way stuff you won’t find at a Barnes & Noble. I have silly little “tests” I like to do in stores that sell new books, checking to see if they stock certain authors, and, if so, which titles, and Elliot Bay excelled. (No Antoine Volodine, though, but I assume someone picked up the last copy of Radiant Terminus.) There, I picked up Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke. The lovely evocative cover was facing outward and appended with a bookseller’s note. The flap copy notes that when “Lord Jim at Home, was first published in 1973, it was described as ‘squalid and startling,’ ‘nastily horrific,’ and a ‘monstrous parody’ of upper-middle class English life” so I figured I could get down with that.

I suppose I could remark more on Seattle itself.

We were there for six days and seven nights, which is clearly not long enough to take the measure of any major city. The weather was wonderful—sunny with maximum temps of around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, a relief after weeks of a Florida heatwave mired in a humid and insufferable drought. Even a day hiking on Mt. Ranier was warmer than we expected. (We had a nice early dinner in Enumclaw that day; a charming town, we all agreed. Curious about this quaint hamlet, I read the Enumclaw Wikipedia page aloud to my crew as we drove back to our Belltown digs before stopping, aghast, thinking of the children.) Seattle itself was more touristy than I expected, and perhaps a bit more depressing. In both Belltown and Capitol Hill we witnessed far more addicts nodding than I might have expected, although no one bothered us. Most of the patrons in the bars, restaurants, and shops we visited in these neighborhoods seemed like they were from Some Other Place, transplants to this big city who might also move at any time to Some Other Place. Even in the warm weather it was a bit cold.

We did some of the touristy things, too: The Museum of Pop Culture (the Nirvana exhibit was depressing; I loved looking at their guitar collection and jamming with my wife and son in their Sound Lab space. The stop-motion-animation exhibit was cool); the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum was unexpectedly beautiful and curated in a way that made me appreciate the glass anew (we saw a baby rabbit, wholly unafraid, snacking in the garden); the Space Needle views were amazing (its history, an optimistic ideal of American progression, brought me down before I got on the fast elevator up). I’m not sure if any of it really cohered for me into the kernel of angst I get when I fall in love with a city—a city like Mexico City or New Orleans or Tokyo or Los Angeles—but that’s fine. We shouldn’t be falling in love all the time.

The show at the zoo provides a nice addendum to what I’ve written (even if it happened in the middle of the week). My son loved seeing the band with the awful name that I am Too Old to really get and I loved seeing him get to see them and loving them. What I loved was seeing the crowd of freaks and weirdos and nerds and normies, all so unconcerned, it seemed to me, with being hip or being seen as hip, so unconcerned with doing anything aside from taking the sensual summer solstice air. Everyone seemed so chill, so unuptight.

Maybe it was the overpriced zoo beers coursing in my ugly veins, but I loved the city a little bit right then, forgiving it for any of the ways it had failed to live up to the imaginary picture of Seattle that my twelve-year-old brain had manifested over three decades ago. Maybe I was seeing the fruition of the dream I’d latched onto, so so long ago, a dream for a place where people didn’t have to struggle so hard just to like, be who they are. I think I remember, for maybe a good half hour or so then, loving Seattle.