Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan

Last month, I was pleased to receive a copy of Faith, Hope and Carnage as a Christmas present, as I’d heard about the book but hadn’t gotten around to buying it. The book os co-authored with Sean O’Hagan, but their collaboration was not in the traditional sense of celebrity biographies (i.e., the celebrity lends his name and the partner does all the actual writing).

For one thing, the book wasn’t written in the traditional sense. Rather, it is the transcript of an extended interview with Cave, conducted through phone calls over a roughly year-long period. The start of the timeline is shortly after the first COVID lockdowns, which are to some extent an impetus (a book written by phone being an apt medium in the era of social distancing).

The pandemic is thus naturally a subject for discussion, but the biggest theme is certainly Cave’s experiences as a grieving father in the wake of his son’s death in 2015. I doubt the years lessen the pain in an absolute sense, but they do offer Cave some time in which to reflect and articulate the experience, which those without children can never understand, and those (like me) who have kids but have not lost one can sense only as a sort of vertigo. I make no claims that I can in any way truly understand the abyss the grieving parent plunges into, but since becoming a parent, I can, in contemplating such a thing, peer queasily over the edge.

Though the book deals in grief, O’Hagan’s questions never feel exploitative. He is a good interviewer, probing where he senses more could be said without driving the conversation, pushing back on some statements in a way that is not confrontational, but prompts Cave to delve a little deeper or offer a clearer sense of his meaning. This isn’t needed often, for Cave is, in my opinion, a great thinker. There is an unfortunate tendency to assume people in a creative field have an innate understanding of larger issues, but Cave has long struck me as someone who truly thinks deeply about things. He is the sort of religious person that I greatly admire. Not a zealot, because zealots are invariably shallow thinkers who don conviction as a kind of flashy armor, but one who doubts as much as they believe. One whose belief is fueled, almost paradoxically, by that doubt. As someone who struggled with belief and wound up on the other side of the equation, it is always fascinating to me to read from someone who wrestled with the same questions and reached the opposite conclusion.

Of course, Cave is known most of all as a musician, and while the book avoids the trappings of the standard music interview (when’s the new album out? What does this song mean? Who are your favourite artists?) some discussion of his work is inevitable—and much appreciated. It’s particularly intriguing to read his discussions with Sean while in the process of writing Carnage with Warren Ellis.

I loved this book, loved it’s intimacy, loved Cave’s passion that has mellowed with wisdom into a surprising optimism. I was sad when it ended. As a Cave fan, I’m certainly the target audience, but I’ve also never been huge on biographies or books about my favourite bands for their own sake. Too often, these feel more like collector’s items than works of literature. This one is different. I would recommend it to people who haven’t even heard of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. What Cave has to say cuts deeper than fandom.

The Man who Was Thursday: A Nightmare - G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton was one of those writers whose name I absorbed during University without knowing much about what he actually wrote. I’d heard of him primarily as an essayist and Christian apologist, and was surprised to learn he’d written a novel. After starting The Man Who Was Thursday, I was even more surprised to learn exactly what kind of novel he’d written.

The Man Who Was Thursday is a strange and remarkable work, earnest and funny and rich in philosophical thought. In its surrealism, its humor, its persistent questioning of reality, it it antecedent to everything from Kurt Vonnegut to Franz Kafka to Philip K Dick. I can think of only one author who serves as a clear inspiration, and I like to think Chesterton would agree, for he namechecks the man in the novel (the first of the moles to fall goes by the name Gogol).

The story begins with two poets in the park: the fierce anarchist Gregory and the logical but single-mindedly anti-anarchist Syme. Syme goads Gregory into revealing his anarchist club, at which point Syme reveals himself to be an undercover policeman charged by an unseen man (or perhaps entity is a better word) to root out anarchy. Through manipulation of Gregory, Syme is elected Thursday, one of seven figureheads of a European anarchist cabal led by the enormous and enigmatic Sunday.

One by one, Syme’s fellow figureheads are revealed to be other than they claim, until the whole conspiracy folds in on itself and becomes something of a metaphysical puzzle for its principal members. The ending felt a bit weaker than the rest, settling into convention for a novel that was otherwise totally unconventional, but I’m not sure how such an odd book could end.

Chesterton’s prose is exquisite, whip-smart and hilarious, masterfully contorting ideas into impossible forms that somehow hold firm. More than most authors, his intellect is on plain display in his writing, not because he is showing off, but because it was so fill to bursting in his head that it had to go somewhere, and the page was as good a destination as any.

I’ve already started Orthodoxy and will be reading a lot more of him in the near future.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari

I put a hold on Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind about half a year ago, after reading the first few pages of my father-in-law’s copy. Based on that sampling, I’d assumed the book was a work of popular anthropology, and would focus on the rise of Sapiens alongside the other Homo species alive in prehistoric times.

It turns out that is only the first chapter.

Sapiens is, in fact, a much broader and more ambitious book than I’d expected. Its goal is no less than to present an encapluated history of the whole of humanity, describing a few touchstone events, but focusing at its core of the nature of what a human first was ,what it is now, and what it might one day become.

I’ve read that academics have criticized the book as unserious and lightly sourced. There is some truth to this, but Sapiens doesn’t present itself as a detailed accounting of human history—how could it? there’s an awful lot of it for one book—but instead invites the reader to question a lot of basic assumptions about what humans are, and how they have become the dominant species on earth. One part I found particularly interesting was his suggestion of why Europe, and not the economically and numerically superior China, went on to conquer the world through empire (he suggests it was the scientific revolution, which was underpinned by the European midset that huamn knowledge is incomplete, and the shift to capitalist doctrine that celebrated growth).

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the book is that Harari’s writing is in no way strident. He sees humanity neither as a divine being nor pestilential evil. He simply recounts things as the yhappened, and draws no moral conclusions (with the slight exception of animal rights, where he shows his cards a bit).

One critic likened the book to dorm room chatter, and while I can see where he’s coming from, this is chatter form a very bright student indeed. Sapiens is well-written and it made me think. I can’t as kfor much more than that in a non-fiction book.

The Cloven Viscount - Italo Calvino

The Cloven Viscount is the first book in a trilogy called Our Ancestors. I read the second book, The Baron in the Trees, already, but the sequence of books doesn't seem especially important, as there is no connection between them in terms of plot or characters. Instead, the link between them is thematic, as each is set in a period of Italy's past and uses fantasy to explore the society found in that time.

In the Cloven Viscount, the eponymous nobleman Medardo of Terralba is cut in half by a cannonball. His two sides both live, with his right side encompassing all of the Viscount's evil, and the left side all of his good. Medardo's nephew narrates the story, but he remains so firmly in the background that you often forget he is a character.

The story reads as a parable, eschewing realism in favor of archetypes. The characters aren't psychologically complex, but the structure of the story is such that this feels like a deliberate choice and not a weakness. It reads a little like a fairy tale, in that the characters aren't meant to be seen as actual people, but rather as instruments to get at some deeper truth embedded in the story itself. The writing likewise reflects this approach, it simple eloquence belying its poetic richness and depth.

I adored The Baron in the Trees, and though Viscount didn't grip me with quite the same intensity, it was still excellent and encourages me to read the final book in the trilogy.

The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino

My god, I wish I came across this book when I was 13. I loved it at 33, and don't doubt I'll love it just as much when I eventually reread it (which I'm sure I will), but I think I would have loved it even more then. And not simply for its content—though as an avid tree-climber it would doubtless have gripped me--but for its melancholic whimsy. It reminds me in tone of Winnie the Pooh and, in a sense harder to define, of Louis Sachar’s Wayside books. Stories that seemed so fully realised that as a child I fell into them, walked about their pages for a while, and emerged at the final chapter ever so slightly changed.

The main character is Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, who at the age of 12 has a fight with his father over dinner that leads him to climb into the trees and never come down. The story is narrated by his younger brother, who often relies on secondhand information and freely admits that certain passages are supposition on his part--a device that lends both uncertainty and verisimilitude to the story. The rest of the book is an episodic chronicling of Cosimo's life in the trees, with passages both prosaic (his inventive solutions for toiletry, sleep, and commerce) and heroic (battles with pirates and treacherous Jesuits). I loved the former as much as the latter, and the whole story flows effortless as a long campfire fable.

The prose is translated from the Italian, but retains a bit of Mediterranean flavour, evocative but not florid. It avoids the common pitfall of first person narratives where the narrator takes on the cadence of capital N Narration, losing the voice of the person who is supposedly telling the story. I never doubted the voice used here.

Italo Calvino is a name I'd heard for some time but never pursued, knowing nothing about him apart from that he was an author. I found The Baron in the Trees as a fluke, as it was mentioned in the comments of a Guardian article about a man who spent 2 years in a tree. Such happy accidents reinforce the value of always keeping an ear out for new titles. Sometimes the best stories come to you from unexpected places.

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

The Moviegoer is one of an assortment of books that I read in my early 20s and of which I retained basically no memory. Lately I’ve made a point of revisiting these books to get a sense of what I missed the first time. In some cases ,such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, I found myself surprised that they left so little an impression at the time. In the Moviegoer’s case, I’m less shocked.

The story, such as it is, concerns a New Orleans stockbroker named Jack “Binx” Bolling, the eponymous Moviegoer, as he passes an indeterminate period of time, primarily in the company of one of two women: his secretary, Sharon, a young Southern girl who has recently moved to the city; and his cousin, Kate, for whom he retains a complex romantic affection that is not exactly reciprocated.

There’s really not much more to say in terms of plot. The novel belongs to one of the more ponderous sub-genres of literary fiction, in which a well-to-do male protagonist in his early middle age undergoes some form of slumming—financial or, as in BInx’s case, intellectual—and Thinks Big Thoughts. It’s not a genre that appeals to me, as I prefer books that hew more towards story or style, and don’t park themselves so squarely in the realm of pure philosophy. It’s an aesthetic preference, and as such not a reflection of the book’s quality or lack thereof, but ti doesn’t change the fact that the story left me pretty cold.

The prose is strong for the most part, with rich imagery and a compelling voice. Percy pulls off a neat trick by having me buy Binx as a character despite the fact that no human being would really talk the way he talks. It’s a pet peeve of mine when authors select a first-person perspective and then write in a grandiloquent style that would have been much better suited to a third-person narrator, and while this decision still rankled on occasion, Percy gets away with it better than some (I’ve had to put down more than one book unfinished for that very reason).

Lastly, I can’t think of The Moviegoer or Walker Percy without acknowledging that he is the person who is second-most responsible for the publication of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (the most responsible person being Toole’s own mother). That buys an awful lot of good will from me, but it also invites an inevitable comparison between the two works, and in any match with Dunces, the opponent is going to come up short.

La Chute (The Fall) - Albert Camus

You can always find a reason to kill a man. It is, however, impossible to justify that he live.*

This was the first Camus novel I’ve read exclusively in French. I read The Plague (i.e. La Peste) several years ago in translation, and The Outsider in university before picking up the original L’Etranger. As such, while I would say La Chute is the most challenging of his books I’ve read, I’m aware this could be in part because I read it without a translation to fall back on.

However, I don’t think the complexity comes from the language alone. In his other novels, Camus manages to convey a nuanced philosophy, but he does so through a fairly straightforward narrative. La Chute, however, barely has a plot at all. The book takes the form of a series of largely one-sided conversations with an unnamed narrator, who lives in Amsterdam and works as a self-styled juge-pénitent. Through his musings, we catch snippets of story about his life in Paris as a prominent lawyer representing the downtrodden (widows and orphans, he calls them), and an experience in which he bears witness to a suicide takes a prominent thematic role. But for the most part, the text is simply a recounting of a meandering philosophy, touching on points as disparate as love, work, and the need to be valued.

Camus also plays with the concept of the unreliable narrator more so than in the other books of his I’ve read. The narrator of L’Etranger demonstrates a fair bit of odd behavior, but I didn’t doubt the veracity of what he said. In La Chute, however, it’s hard to say whether anything we’re told is true, as it’s being recounted to us second-hand, and the narrator even makes a point of telling us he’s lied on a couple of occasions. The uncertainty embedded in the narrative is hinted at in one passage:

Truth, like light, blinds you. Lies, however, exist in a twilight in which each object can be clearly seen.**

All in all, I enjoyed La Chute less than Camus’ other books. Likely, this is because of the genre in which it’s written, since I’ve never been a big fan of philosophical novels (I’ve still yet to make it more than 50 pages into Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). That being said, Camus remains a great writer, and his talent shines through here, even if I’m more likely to pick up La Peste or L’Etranger again in the future.

*il y a toujours des raisons au meurtre d'un homme. Il est, au contraire, impossible de justifier qu'il vivre.

**La vérité, comme la lumière, aveugle. La mensonge, au contraire, est un bien crépuscule, qui met chaque objet en valeur.