It’s been a busy couple of months so I’ve been finding it a little harder to carve out time for new posts but there are some brewing. In the meantime, please find collected the next ten microreviews from the year’s reading.
Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas (tr. Bibbi Lee)
One woman’s immersive monologue recounting the wounding love affair that has shaped her life brims with arresting philosophical aperçus, freighted by a keen sensitivity to the injustices of capitalist existence.
Chevengur by Andrey Platonov (tr. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler)
Platonov’s epic about establishing communism in the Russian steppe gives expression to the inner experience of the revolutionary period, his prose grappling with the surfeit of meaning and melancholy.
Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof (tr. Caroline Waight)
Yet another nordic septology (the second to be translated in this year alone) but instead of wafty reflections on time and spirituality, this is a mosaic composed of spiky shards of life and dreams under late capitalism that left me gasping for more.
TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker
An eccentric comic novel of ideas that explores ideas of art and authenticity through improvised jazz with prose to match. It reminded me of sixties Thomas Pynchon with its mix of capers and concepts and, I mean, what else can that muted trumpet refer to?
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
An incendiary collection of linked stories that dissect our contemporary hypermediated relations with acerbic relish and, like only fiction can, neutrally dramatise all the conflicts and contradictions with all their peculiar nuances.
The Bloater by Rosemary Tonks
A breezy comedy of manners set around the BBC Radiophonic Studio exploring the sexual mores of sixties London with caustic wit that we are lucky to have in print again.
Universality by Natasha Brown
You may not be able to write a state of the nation novel any more but you can write an article about a scandal that captures the state of the nation and exposes the hypocrisies of the London media class and those they choose to write about. While the satire came to a satisfying climax and its set piece long read article will rile people across the political spectrum, it’s hard to imagine this being read by anyone not already persuaded by its observations, its readership circumscribed by the polarisation it seeks to narrate.
Quit Everything by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
Bifo’s melancholic musings on the present conjuncture coupled with his penetrating readings of contemporary novels and films are always a necessary balm against absolute despair.
Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane
I will never tire of losing myself in the grassy labyrinths of Murnane’s mental imagery but I did not expect to find myself turning a corner into a black mass.
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans (tr. Robert Baldick)
Started this back in 2007 and thought it was high time I finished it. An opulent synaesthetic symphony that anticipates J.G. Ballard’s fictions in the way that Des Esseintes absorbs the excesses of modernity into a rich interior life to evade the degradations of the so-called real world.