Book Reviews, well, sort of...

Right then. Where was I?

So I’m just about to embark on the final leg of my belated journey to getting a degree. The last course I’m taking is '20th Century Literature: stories, poems and stuff', and there is, as you may imagine - if you squint hard enough and really concentrate - a Waterstone’sworth of reading to be done. And I’ve more or less done it.

In my previous lives, I’ve reviewed records and concerts and TV shows, but never books. Here I shall demonstrate both the stupid amount of books I’ve read recently and also my madd skillz as a literary critic. I’m sure you’ll agree, having read my biting postmodernist aesthetic dialectical breakdown of the set texts that I’m a shoe-in for a ‘distinction’ come next summer.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon – Sunset Song.

Parochial proto-Irvine Welsh. Language seemingly inpenetrable, but if penetrated, very lovely and soppy and a little bit socialist.

Virginia Woolf – Orlando.

Boy/Woman skips through time and into bed. The blueprint for Captain Jack Harkness.

Daphne Du Maurier – Rebecca.

Ooh that Mrs Danvers!

Berthold Brecht – Life of Galileo.

Science and Religion, one of which I don’t understand, the other of which I don’t believe in. I believe I understood this book thing though. Could work well as a play.

Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Only if you put them into ‘sleep’ rather than ‘shut down’. Amazing book – in the sense that it explores some brilliant ideas and concepts yet at the same time it is completely rubbish and is as clunky as a dinosaur in leg-irons.

Manuel Puig – Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Mwah. Reminded me of the storytelling bits in Generation X (good). The plot certainly weaved an intricate web (sorry). xoxo

Abdulrazak Gurnah – Paradise.

Like Lord of The Rings but without the elves and the shortfolk and the talking donkey and the rings, and with more wheeler-dealing, like in Only Fools and Horses.

Pat Barker – The Ghost Road.

Hospitals, War, and random anthropological bits from the South Pacific. I liked the first two strands. The third I just wanted to wash right out of my hair.

Humbled

Tonight I went to the Welsh Millennium Centre to see Dan Rhodes. That there were other people performing was cool, but ultimately inconsequential. I certainly wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of convincing my wife to drive us to Cardiff if he wasn't on the bill. Especially with the Torchwood guys now decamped to the US - I mean, who's protecting Cardiff Bay from irregular rift activity?

I'd not heard of Rhodes until late last year, when my university tutor gave us four passages of prose to 'try on' in terms of style - one by Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, the brilliant S.J. Perelman, and all 101 words of Dan Rhodes' 'Baby', from Anthropology. The story I submitted for that assignment has already been on this blog, it's called 'Uncrossed'.

Something just clicked about it with me. The concrete surrealism, the concise and precise language, the blatantly obvious attention to microscopic detail. The empathy, the sadness, the humour, the pathos. I bought the book.

Since then, I've read everything he's written. Nothing has disappointed. I adore his digressions, an example being the lives touched by the titular character in Timoleon Vieta Come Home - each tiny bubble as well-rounded and fully developed as those surrounding the book's 'main' characters.

Rhodes has found a way to fuse the miniature perfection of short stories with the depth and length of a novel, and successfully create books that encompasses his clear talent for brevity, clarity, structure; wit, irony and utter, utter heartbreak.

Anyway, where was I...

So I went up to him at the end of the thing (show? performance? evening?) and was really rather nervous - I've never done this to a writer before, only bands, and they don't count - and asked if he would sign my copy of GOLD, and he did and we had a little chat and I went home having met my favourite author (sorry Ali Smith, sorry Douglas Coupland, you'll have to make do with 2nd and 3rd).

Everything he has written has inspired. I know as a writer I'm not 'funny', but as a reader, I do enjoy a smile with my wordplay. I try to make my own prose as tight as possible, never a sentence where a word will do. Like many new writers, I've had an over-descriptive prosaic flowery-language spell: not anymore, I'm over it now.

This is not to say that I want to bottle his literary gift and repeat and mimic and imitate and purloin: far from it. I'm not 'that' kind of writer, and while I love his stories, they aren't 'my' stories. But they are brilliant ones that even though I wouldn't / couldn't write them, I love reading them. I felt humble just shaking his hand. Why that Dan Brown fella sells more than Rhodes does, I just don't know. It's not fair.

It's late now, and I don't really have the words right now, but Dan Rhodes, honest to blog, is a fricking genius. And a really nice person too*.

The End.

* Based on reading online interviews and having a three-minute chat with him.

A Story by Someone Else

One of my fellow students on the OU Creative Writing courses had one of her short-stories read out at some sort of reading out short stories event, held somewhere in England.

It's very good. It's by Cathy White, and it's called I can see through people. And this is a video of it. Well done Cathy!

Cathy also writes several blogs, including the relentless jogblog, which is ace.

Poem: Consoling Myself After Your Affair

Consoling Myself After Your Affair

After James Tate.

My television is mocking me:

staring me into a strange proposition - the beguiling seducer -

compelling me to stare back and be sucked into its pixels.

No, [presses button] I have remote infrared power

sending out infrared beams to distant civilisations.

(It has no idea it is doing this,

it thinks that it is just sending out ‘On’ ‘Off’ ‘117’

but it is actually calling out to occupants of interplanetary craft

‘Come to Earth, invade, it’ll be fine

if you do it on a Saturday, around X-Factor time’).

I don’t need a custom kitchen or MTV or CSI or

to text flirt with real girls in my local area.

I miss you sitting next to me so badly

like ‘And Smith must score’ but even more painful,

and with that I taste the sweet fresh air,

running away from the home that you left.