Solos Seeep – AAA: The Lost Room

31 10 2010

Solos Seeep

The three ‘e’d creep

The bat-nosed freak

With blackened teeth…

And so the ditty goes…. A delusional desire for respectability stops me from quoting any more than this, but I fancy you may be able to imagine the rest. A line or two later we find a tremulously witty allusion to Robert Browning. Further on we see a needlessly detailed, sub-Keatsian description of the gaseous emissions that may or may not emanate from Seeep’s rectal passages. The search for maturity is, as ever, a search in vain.

There are, apparently, two versions of this crude and insulting rhyme. The first form can be found on the wall of the men’s toilets at the Strasbourg Institute of Arts, wedged in-between the proverbially spurious phone numbers, promising wild manifestations of the love that dare not speak its name all that softly any more. Its author, need I say it, is unknown. The same goes for the second form, the start of which is quoted above, and which has (in its unfortunate entirety) been doing the rounds at dinner parties and literary festivals for about fourteen months now, beyond the hour, as Poyet once put it, that ‘spirits are buoyed by spirits, as sense takes a dip in the winey ocean of absurdity’. Read the rest of this entry »


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Yoy Ijit – My Grandmother’s Pudding

28 10 2010

[Unequivocally, undeniably and quite obviously one of the best European novels of recent times.... A pretty fine review as well...]

‘A marriage took place; forthwith I was conceived. My birth took place but hours afterwards, to be followed almost immediately by a baptism of fire. In such a way I came to be: a product of the unique chemistry between my many parents, to whom I owe everything. If I could remember their names, I would thank them here. Alas, I cannot. Nevertheless, it must be said that they made me that which I am; that they sacrificed the best of themselves so that I may have all the ounces of life that I do possess.

I have every reason to be joyful.

And yet I feel sad.’

Reading the meritorious opening paragraph of Yoy Ijit’s readily edible novel My Grandmother’s Pudding inevitably reminds me of a sad episode in my own past, the relocation of which I am inclined to believe will go some way to help unfasten the buckles of the subsequent discussion, though it may well be misinterpreted as yet another example of solipsistic criticism. Read the rest of this entry »


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Ivan Zech – With Apologies to his Sister’s Parrot

28 10 2010

I was talking to Kurt Tens the other day. A large party had assembled in a small room, and there was, as Jean-Paul Sartre once put it, ‘No Exit’. Luckily I was crammed against a large plate of smoked-salmon hors d’oeuvre. It was something to behold; my lips almost leapt from my face in their enthusiasm. You should have seen it. And yet, for all the gifts that this sweet life of ours offers us, there is almost always a sting in the tail, a fly in the soup, a tiger in the bread bin. In this case, there were two. The first – and I’m still getting my head round this one – lay in the concept of ‘vegan salmon’ (What was it made of? My stomach and I will remain happily ignorant). The second, of course, was Kurt Tens, crammed in beside me and as keen as ever, perhaps even more than before, to ‘sound me out’ regarding the future of the Hungarian novel. Read the rest of this entry »


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Y Yippo – Why the Fig Leaves Fall

19 10 2010

When it was first published in 2001, it would be safe to say that most reviewers reacted to Y Yippo’s second novel with barely contained irritation. It looked too much like a mere repeat of his assured yet unappetisingly vitriolic debut Why I Married a Horse. Sure, few of us begrudged the young Turk the opportunity to resolve issues with his ex-wife in the pages of one novel (lord knows we’d all do the same) – but to stretch it over two? Write about what you know by all means, but not over and over again…  And to make so little effort to disguise this fact – was it not just a little bit facetious? Indeed, you would be excused for thinking, at first, that the second novel was no more than new translation of its predecessor. The opening lines are frighteningly similar. From Why I Married a Horse:

Only fourth months into our marriage, I noticed that my wife was unable to look me in the eyes without smirking. At first I took it as a compliment; within time I realised that she was doing it because she thought I was a joke. By that time I had already starting hating her in return and was well used to referring to her casually in conversation as ‘that horse at my house’.

And from Why the Fig Leaves Fall: Read the rest of this entry »


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Boris Yashmilye – Out Damned

14 10 2010

[Another Yashmilye review: not my work, this time. Over to you, Hans Belimus....]

Though I doubt that it came as any surprise to the author, it would seem to me that Boris Yashmilye’s failure to secure a deal for the English translation of his most recent novel, Out Damned, is not only symptomatic of the general malaise surrounding the industry, but of a universally ignorant attitude regarding the rights of the writer. Famous for his debut novel, the brash political comedy Flashes at Midnight, Yashmilye has since been the victim of those with unreasonable expectations of his career. Though the quality of Yashmilye’s prose and his engagement with his chosen subject never dropped over the course of his next two novels (The Musala Affair and Nuts Nuts Nuts) his reputation suffered severe blows. After the attractive Communist bashing of Flashes at Midnight, the hope was that Yashmilye would become the prime political satirist of his generation. It wasn’t that he had promised he would; the role was simply thrown upon him, as if he had a duty to fulfil it. And when he decided to shake off this duty, it only seemed natural that he should be punished for it. Read the rest of this entry »


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Boris Yashmilye – Flashes at Midnight

14 10 2010

[One of my own reviews, as you can tell from the presence of the word 'Vladivostock' in the first sentence....]

As those who are fully acquainted with me should know, it has long been my habit to spend the months of June and July in my summer cottage outside Vladivostock. Though this tradition goes back as many as two years, a few mindless fools have this year been led to misinterpret my motives, giving air to the extraordinary claim that I am in hiding from some rampaging wannabe novelist. If such people shared a brain between them, they would no doubt have realised that this was not the case. I have not been hiding, nor indulging in any of the satanic rituals that have been associated with my name of late. No, I have instead been engaged in the most proper study of mankind. I have been reading.

‘Read, re-read and read again’ – so said my mentor, the late great Johannes Speyer. If you are lucky enough to know anything when you die, he would declare, it is that you will have never read enough. By this he did not mean that one should simply read a vast majority of books, but that one should also learn to get the best out of multiple readings of the same book. To read a novel just the once – as is the common practice these days – was to him like ‘a surfer spending millions to get to the best surfing beach in the world, before choosing to chase his sport in a puddle’ (curiously, for a man who was born, worked and died in landlocked Austria, Speyer was unusually fond of surfing metaphors… Read the rest of this entry »


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Reading Eva (or Publishing Eva Holubk)

10 10 2010

[Ever out to confuse my readers I present this article, written shortly before the article re-published below - i.e. early summer 2008]

Should or should not the writer be a ‘man of action’? A question, I would say, for another day (next Thursday perhaps?) I am, after all, of the Johannes Speyer school of thought; where the pressure is laid more firmly on the reader than the writer. The question most frequently in my mind is, thus, should or not the reader be a ‘man of action’? To which the answer is, invariably, yes.

One of the most common preconceptions surrounding the late great Speyer is that his thought revolved around the single idea of re-reading. Admittedly, death struck him down before he could go much further than this, but all those close to him knew that his intentions were always to explore the whole sphere of reading. This was also to take into account the multiple situations in which reading could take place. To scoop out the stuffing of this theoretical goose, I present to you a true story: Read the rest of this entry »


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Tales of Theft and Cowardice from The Crippled Bee

10 10 2010

[This was first published, I believe, in the summer of 2008. The author remains anonymous...]

No one even knew that Eva Holubk had a husband. After reading her poem Swimming in a Ship as a lesbian allegory, I had always been under the impression that she was in the habit of ‘picking raspberries in spring’ (as Barbara Susenbach puts it). After all, not only was she frequently pointing out the flaws of the opposite sex in her verse, but she had never been seen with a man in public. Not that this new evidence proves me wrong, of course (she could still be engaged in some seasonal fruit gathering) but it comes as a surprise nonetheless. Who’d have thought Holubk was married?

Not just married, but married to a man of some stature: a six foot eight part-time pugilist and full-time freak-of-nature from the rough end of some southern Estonian town; with brick-like fists and a stare capable of making even the sturdiest calves wobble from thirty or forty feet. Read the rest of this entry »


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Blumin Ek – The Incredible Expletive Shock

6 10 2010

Every job has its unwritten rules. As well as the specific rules of their respective games, sportsmen are also meant to obey invisible laws of conduct coming under the ambiguous (perhaps even tautological) heading of ‘good sportsmanship’. According to this ‘good sportsmanship’ malarkey, players are obliged to launch the ball beyond the pitch perimeter if a footballer’s head falls off during a match, thus bringing the game to a halt and giving said footballer the opportunity to reinstate his noddle (god only knows why he needs it). It is not written into law that they must do this – they could choose to carry on playing if they wished. Invariably they don’t.

There are similar laws within the world of criticism. One of the most famous goes along these lines: that a critic ought not to review a work of art if said work was produced by said critic’s close family member, well-known enemy or ex-lover. Read the rest of this entry »


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Ciambhal O’Droningham – The Dead Priest

3 10 2010

Is it sacrilegious to spill blood on a cassock? Does the amount of time I’ll spend in purgatory depend on how much fell on the priest’s clothes and how much on the floor? Does it make it worse that he was putting away a new supply of communion wafers at the time? I don’t need to tell you I’m in a whole mountain of trouble now, worse than that time when me an’ Mickey nicked off with the collection money from the Little Sisters of the Poor. What would you do if you were in my situation? I mean, I know you’re hardly likely to be committing murder in a church and that, what with you being quite involved with all that craic but a bit of empathy wouldn’t go amiss here.

Ah Jaysus, what with him sprawled out awkwardly in the vestry and this cold as death pew biting at my bones, I don’t really know of it’s helping me talking to you right now. What say we forget the whole damn thing, can we?

It isn’t the most promising of starts, I’ll grant you that. There’s humour, certainly and more than a faint suggestion of a pace-quickening plot about to develop before your eyes, but I must confess, when all the lambs have been counted, it ain’t my pint o’ porter. An Irish Catholic black comedy? I may be only two paragraphs in, but bless my guilty soul, I’m already tired. And there was my good friend Padraig thinking this were the best novel he’d ever set his little pigeon eyes on. That fellow owes me a drink – and don’t I know it. Read the rest of this entry »


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