Don DeLillo, The Body Artist, 2001

Lauren Hartke is a performance artist whose husband, a film director, dies unexpectedly in the company of his first wife. Then at the New England summer house they were renting, a mentally disturbed man appears who has little ability with language but who is somehow channeling her late husband. What is she to make of this? DeLillo extracts extraordinary depth from this simple situation, his post-modern style seeming well-suited to a novel replete with half-finished thoughts and sentences, casual grammatical slips and odd rhythms of speech, culminating in a language that blurs the edges between Hartke and the unknown man. It’s haunting and clever, and DeLillo makes creative use of the in-built flexibility of English that, while being entirely self-conscious, seems to be the right technique to portray a woman who is detached and remote from herself. Recommended as a rather challenging read.  PY

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Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp, 2002

Antwerp is a difficult novel to summarise, given that it’s a formative work in Bolaño’s oeuvre and one that possibly bears more relation to his poetry than his later fiction. These are fifty-six vignettes that function in part like snatches of half-remembered films, concerning a possible murder on a campsite in Spain. But just who has been murdered, and is the killer perhaps a reflection of the author himself? This is not the familiar Bolaño of the long, discursive sentences that became a style he settled into and made his own; instead Antwerp possesses a different form of intensity, perhaps showing the uncertainty of a writer in the act of setting things down in order to first find his own voice to make it stand out, or at least aside, from the influences of those he was reading at the time (among them, Norman Spinrad and James Tiptree, Jr.). Having said that, Bolaño once proclaimed this is the only novel he was not embarrassed about, which hints more at the integrity of the prosaic form he chose to use than the lack of clarity given to a reader: in 1980 it was written without any expectation of publication, but today it gives us a compact insight into the set of themes that Bolaño continued to use throughout his life. Disconnected sentences shoot past you like bullets, and the reader has to almost rearrange, Burroughs-like, what he or she is told and make of it what he or she can. Antwerp is still a self-conscious book for all its merits, but in this brief work it’s easy to discern the writer Bolaño would become in the years ahead: still manically driven at the fringes of literature, but also a far more relaxed and eloquent performer in the act of getting his message across.  PY

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Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments, 1995

Finding generally available Holocaust memoirs published outside of Yad Vashem is not always easy, and not made easier by questions about the authenticity of books such as Jerzy Kozinski’s The Painted Bird and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, which is now recognised as a rather unfortunate work of fiction. Wilkomirski’s now notorious 1995 ‘memoir’ had not been published for long in several other languages when, in 1998, questions were being asked by Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried about the authenticity of Wilkomirski himself. His investigations uncovered the likely perpetration of a deliberate literary fraud, and when the questions became accusations Wilkomirski’s literary agent commissioned Swiss historian Stefan Maechler to deconstruct Fragments and learn the truth about Wilkomirski. The ‘Wilkomirski affair’ is now well documented, but the potted history is that Wilkomirski was the son of a single Swiss mother who was given up for adoption at the age of two, is neither Polish nor Jewish nor had brothers (as he claims), had never set foot in a concentration camp, was brought up with the name Bruno Dössekker by a middle-class Zurich couple, and eventually worked as a classical musician. The best, ultimately, that can be said for Fragments is that it appears to be a misguided and unfortunate (perhaps even cynical) blurring of the line between metaphor and truth; at worst it may have undermined the reputations of several historians, educationalists and therapists who still believe it has proper contextual relevance and meaning, it provided fuel to Holocaust revisionists, and fooled a considerable number of people.

The book itself is a series of disjointed ‘recovered memories’, a shaky enough foundation on which to base a Holocaust memoir. The premise of the book is that Wilkomirski’s true parents were murdered by Nazis in Riga, Poland, and he continued to survive alone as a child in Majdanek and Birkenau before being smuggled out to Switzerland at the end of the war. His adoptive parents claimed his concentration camp memories were just bad dreams that he must forget, but with help he was able to establish that these memories were ’real’. Fragments was therefore driven by the need to fill a large hole in his past, which his adoptive parents refused to share with him. Why would Dössekker perpetrate such a fraud, when there appears to be no motive other than the attention-seeking behaviour of someone claiming victimhood? It is this that shouts loudest in Fragments, written with the tone of a scared child throughout, a persona which Wilkomirski/Dössekker carried through convincingly in his public appearances as the awards rolled in. In retrospect, with some self-imposed editing and revision it could have made a legitimate (if rather strained and brutal) work of children’s fiction, and Dössekker could have kept his credibility intact instead of being forced into hiding.

So knowing it’s a fraud, why read a book such as this? Mostly to view the tone with which it is written, to see if one can smell the rat and maybe see where Wilkomirski trips himself up. These ’recovered memories’ are far too detailed to be authentic. The style is one in which almost every paragraph, filled with “shards of memory with...knife-sharp edges”, craves sympathy for yet another hardship, yet another injustice or indignity, calculated to bleed you dry of emotion. Comparisons are sometimes made with Elie Wiesel’s Night, recognised as a legitimate memoir but still with its own detractors, though Wilkomirski seems to want to go one better by delivering his points of impact with an overbearing intention to shock: adults are dangerous because they are best at fooling you, children stand in buckets of shit to keep their feet warm, babies die from gnawing their fingers to the bone for lack of food. At an early point in the book, presumably as a suppressed memory, Wilkomirski witnesses the murder of his father and from this point on women are mostly portrayed as stern nurturers and men as psychopathic murderers, a delineation that lacks balanced realism. This tells you it is not so much ‘us vs. them’ in the context of a Holocaust memoir, as ‘big vs. small’ or ‘me vs. everyone else’, with only a loose grounding in verifiable fact.

It was a technique that in terms of literary style alone perhaps should not have fooled as many as it did, yet in other places, relieved of its unfortunate accompanying baggage, it is easy to see why Fragments initially received the accolades “small masterpiece”, “stunning”, “unforgettable”, and “morally important”. But in truth it is nothing more than a catalogue of invented horrors, supposedly unquestionable because of their sacrosanct location, and as a piece of holocaust literature Fragments is now worthless even as a legitimate novel, only worth reading for the curiosity value and necessarily to be taken with massive pinch of salt.  PY

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Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, 1999

Picador picked up a total of eleven Bolaño titles in 2009, and this was the first to be released in English after publication of his posthumous magnum opus 2666. There is a link between the two books: the year 2666 gets a mention here, included among the many other ramblings of Bolaño’s wonderful creation Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan immigrant and the self-declared ‘mother of Mexican poetry’. She’s holed up in a Mexico City university washroom, hiding from the military as they try to quell student demonstrations in 1968; her rather prolonged stay there results in an increasingly hallucinatory excursion backwards and forwards in time as she recalls meeting people she could never have met, plus some far-flung predictions of which authors will be popular in, say, 2059 or 2017 – there’s a surprise in store here for fans of science fiction as Bolaño indulges a penchant for name-dropping outside his own genre. He also gives himself plenty of space to let his words breathe with his familiar long rambling sentences, and it’s often difficult to see where fact separates from fiction or where he is taking the story until the very last page, although the thrill, as with By Night in Chile, is in Auxilio’s mad journey itself. Simply, a lovely book.  PY

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Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, 2005

Out-of-his-depth Llewelyn Moss stumbles across a drugs deal gone horribly wrong, makes off with a case containing $2.4 million and engages the relentless pursuit of the toweringly bad Anton Chigurh. This is not a book that’s especially complex with its plot, and McCarthy makes it a relentless ride because it feels so completely testosterone-driven. It might be trite to say that his idiosyncratic grammar and punctuation is what carried this story for me: commas only when absolutely necessary, no quote marks, in fact nothing that detracts from the punch of his storytelling. McCarthy has his own way with written English; and why not, for him it’s a toolkit, he uses it as he wants but with precision.

The story itself is direct enough not to be bogged down with (or even need) much in the way of descriptive passages, although the rambling observations of Sheriff Bell on the decline of common decency gradually gain the upper hand in the reader’s mind over the the amoral violence of Chigurh, and you end up sympathising, if not completely then at least with a degree of respect for his outdated point of view. Bell may also be something of a Jubal Harshaw: McCarthy’s point seems to be that violence such as this needs to be considered minus its modern, fake, grafted-on glamour (à la Natural Born Killers) and seen once more in a properly moral context. In No Country For Old Men he embeds the men – and only the men – all at different levels in a culture of violence from the top to the bottom – the women, all but invisible in background supporting roles, can never upset the balance of machismo by getting in the way of the guys figuring it out for themselves, the hard way. A mostly excellent and memorable read despite its overtly masculine trajectory.  PY

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Carsten Jensen, Earth in the Mouth, 1991

This is an interesting experiment in self-reflection: the Danish author Jensen revisits an unpublished fictional Indian travelogue he wrote twenty years earlier, and questions himself – and indeed his younger self – on why it remained unfinished. The travelogue itself is of the kind many thousands of backpackers-as-aspiring-writers would have turned out, with the self cast as a third person and where the protagonist’s culture shock is explored to the nth degree. In fact Jensen’s alter, Thomas, excels at this as he staggers from one crisis of the ego to another, utterly overwhelmed by the alienness of India. The bracketing prologue and epilogue frame it well, and understandably Jensen never really gets to the bottom of things as his journey isn’t yet finished. A mature book, with writing that has been compared to Bruce Chatwin and Milan Kundera.  PY

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Jim Crace, Continent, 1986

— A novel in seven stories, Continent is an exploration of the cultures, communities and natural life of an entirely imaginary realm. Built on rich seams of myth and metaphot, this new, seventh continent is strange, atmospheric and yet not wholly a mirage, for its inhabitants are disarmingly familiar, known to us through their loves, their hopes and their struggles to make sense of life.

Continent achieved quite a trio of honours for a debut British author. It’s seven short stories provide no geographical details yet it does still feel like more than just an imaginary realm, and in some respects is also reminiscent of Christopher Priest’s The Dream Archipelago. Some stories focus on how Europe and America relate culturally to its rather backward population, and there’s no doubt the best story among them is ‘Sins and Virtues’, by far the easiest to understand from a cultural perspective and also the best plotted. The rest of these stories are difficult to engage with for a variety of different reasons but are all self-evidently significant, and they demand close attention as there’s not a wasted word anywhere. Cautiously recommended, but without reservation if you go in for Italo Calvino.  PY

•  Continent won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize for Fiction, all in 1986.

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Julian Barnes, The Porcupine, 1992

A fictional satire of the fall of Communism in an unnamed East European country, loosely based on the trial of former Bulgarian Communist president Todor Zhivkov. Bulgarians are suspicious of Westerners writing about their country but The Porcupine turned out to be a bestseller there. It also became a minor footnote to Communist Bulgarian history when Zhivkov himself requested a copy to read while under house arrest; also, his prosecutor Krasimir Zhekov later identified with the persona of the book’s fictional prosecutor Peter Solinsky when he later introduced himself to Barnes, declaring “I am Peter Solinsky.” This is a memorably good a book. It’s relentlessly cynical, angry, funny and sharply observed, and cleverly blurs any easy distinctions the reader can make between what constitutes either good or bad ideological politics. Barnes puts across a vital, incipient energy very easily in the first few pages and then carries it through right to the aftermath. A very well crafted novel indeed, recommended unreservedly if only because it’s vastly more entertaining that its subject matter might suggest.  PY

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John Banville, The Newton Letter, 1982

An Irish writer retires to an country lodge to finish his book on Isaac Newton, but he comes up against the impossibility of explaining the reasons behind Newton’s mental breakdown at age fifty, a time when Newton felt that all he had achieved was ultimately meaningless. Instead, our writer becomes distracted by his emotional entanglements in the lives of the strange family he is staying with, ultimately abandoning his book. There are some great if too-brief character portraits here, and Banville’s style consciously carries the concise intensity of poetry as he compares the rationality of science with the irrationality of the heart, while the writer experiences in his own small way why the heart will always win out. A clever and sharply delineated book, and with a particularly deep meaning that can be divined from its mere hundred pages.  PY

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Tim Winton, Blueback, 1997

In the waters of the reefs near his Queensland home, 10 year-old Abel Jackson encounters an old grouper, a creature that inspires his sense of wonder and who becomes a ‘friend’ he keeps returning to as he passes through school, university and out into the world as a marine biologist. Blueback is a pearl-like fable for kids and adults; Winton doesn’t put a foot wrong, and he pitches a well-aimed ecological message to wake people up to Australia’s natural heritage that is both taken for granted and casually endangered. A great place to start reading Tim Winton, it reminded me of Peter Benchley’s The Girl of the Sea of Cortez in its intent, only this is far better.  PY

Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006

A nameless father and his son head south on the roads of America after a nuclear war, hungry, wary and often on the run. The Road proves that it’s still possible to conjure gripping stories from the thinnest of plots, and the frequent negotiations between the man and his boy read like an unspoken transaction: the father has to remind the boy of the need for courage, and equally often the terrified boy, who has never known any other kind of world, must remind his father of his humanity. It’s the absence of any back-story, which one might expect from a fully realised bona fide science fiction novel, which made me think no, this isn’t SF – any specifics as to what brought about a nuclear war would be irrelevant to the emotional heart of McCarthy’s story. His pared-down prose echoes their spare existence, making this a grim and bleak read, and I wonder if T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’; may have formed part of McCarthy’s inspiration (“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”). It’s just a shame that The Road doesn’t quite live up to some of the adulatory excesses of the 32 pull-quotes used on the cover of the UK edition; nevertheless, still an excellent and necessary book.   PY

•  The Road won both the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award.

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