Slow reader

Recent books and meaningful reads in ’24

I’m a slow reader and like to read out loud. It makes reading in public a little tricky. Most of the time I’m mumbling to myself. Some of the best things I’ve read this year have been an exercise in patience, rereading passages I stumble through to fully appreciate their impact. Denis Johnson is an incredible writer. His novella Train Dreams is set within the American West, extraordinary changes witnessed through traumatic events across tough terrain. His novel Angels goes a step further beginning with a greyhound bus and a chance encounter which ends with a robbery that goes horribly wrong. He is such a lyrical writer. Maybe one of my favourite. Ágota Kristóf’s The Illiterate is a very thin book but one that embodies a lifetime of experience; her struggles with language, with memory, and with being a writer while fleeing communist Hungary in the 1950s. Yoko Tawada’s Where Europe Begins is also about being caught between cultures; in her case German and Japanese. It is also about small observations which describe the bigger picture of mixed emotions some of which are erotic and some banal. I picked up Brian by Jeremy Cooper partly because I’d been thinking of an uncle of the same name but the brilliant title makes more sense as the novel follows its protagonist and namesake navigate his own awkwardness through an encyclopedic love of cinema. Fassbinder, Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman marries the author’s experience of the late 70s early 80s with films by RWF, German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Both Brian and Thousands of Mirrors move at a glacial pace but reach a joyous conclusion, which when expecting the worst to happen caught me off guard. Both are brilliant pieces of writing. Ian spent years as a music writer which shows in what is part memoir, part film criticism, part fiction. At times he and Fassbinder seem to trade places with every passage mirroring their very different lives merging. My favourite book this year though has to be This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan. This was his first novel and was published in 2017. It came my way just as I thinking about what the past meant and how I might best revisit it. The glory years. David’s novel is a mix of correspondence; letters and interviews with people who were there to witness firsthand the appearance and then sudden disappearance of a made-up band from Scotland. But what is a Memorial Device? asks Ross Raymond the narrator collating memories of the band that never existed. “Is it like a pocket watch you’ve inherited … or is it more like a dictaphone? Is it like a marker in the sand? I think it’s like a pen knife… ”

Recently I went back to the UK for the first time in years and wondering what had become of the places I used to kick around. It was an odd experience. I had missed many of the moments of recent history like the pandemic, the death of Queen Elizabeth, and Brexit — no love lost there. Much of what I do remember remains, or persists, least of all that sense of aggravation found on the tip of everyone’s tongue, mixed with an occasional “thanks mate, cheers mate, nice one.” I travelled the length and breadth of Britain, everywhere from the South coast of England to the Scottish borders but London appeared to hardly change even though it clearly had. Alongside the books read this year, I picked up three zines which reminded me of how and why the city was so belligerent. Writer Jon Savage referred to London in 1977 as a forgotten city. In some respects it still is. Even with the relatively new Elizabeth Line, which manages to feel more exhausted than any other underground line, London away from the city centre remains a liminal zone where things happen and grow away from the glare of mass communication. Indeed what’s happened to the area surrounding Centrepoint, at the heart of the city where the old Astoria theatre once stood, has grown beyond the glare of others to cast its own disheartening glare. It speaks of the forgotten quarters which Jon recalls in his book Uninhabited London featuring a single roll of black and white photographs taken in 1977, picturing West London quite literally as an area lost and abandoned. Centrepoint at the top of Charing Cross Road has become the image of a black hole, with video screens inside and out swallowing everything in their wake. New Romantics London 1980-81 by Virginia Turbett and Soho, London 1990 by Barry Lewis rewind neighbouring areas of the city to describe the years that follow on from West London in the 70s, lost and half demolished. Despite their own colourful exuberance, the 80s and 90s as distinct as punk and new wave decade or so before, made the city limits places where everything felt possible and impossible at the same time. At least that’s how it felt up until 1999.

The trip home was turbulent and the trip back to Japan was just the same. Carefully rerouted through parts of Europe, our plane flew smoothly over the Caspian Sea but not before lurching violently left and right as it passed over Turkey and the Armenian Highlands. Announcements interrupted inflight entertainment promised passengers that the plane was more than safe to handle the violent air lifting off the mountains below, my sweaty calms gripped either arm rest and Yoko’s leg bracing for the trip across the Caspian Sea which in the end passed without a single jolt or shudder as an air stewardess and passenger vomited in each other’s direction. My memory of that trip had the same impact as the books I was slowly reading. A deep and meaningful experience that was difficult to shake. This Is Memorial Device may well be a flick knife, sudden and sharp in the way it recollects the past, swerving in and out of fact and fiction, before announcing the need to let things go and move on. We invent endings … is how David puts it. In the end these are nothing more than moments passing; braving the Armenian Highlands or driving through the Scottish borders. Perhaps it simply paves a way for more of the same in ’25. Happy New Year everyone.

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Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Angels by Denis Johnson
The Illiterate by Ágota Kristóf
Where Europe Begins by Yoko Tawada
Brian by Jeremy Cooper
Fassbinder, Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman
Uninhabited London by Jon Savage
New Romantics London 1980-81 by Virginia Turbett
Soho, London 1990 by Barry Lewis
This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan