Jaymer Veers – Poppies, Book One

28 04 2011

[Before Poppies, the Index came along, there was Poppies, Book One..]

It’s that time of the year again. Or is it? The lazy season, once associated with the depths of the summer and winter, has since spread its slothful mass over all our poor months. Sluggish journalism pokes a sleepy mole-like snout out of the ground every day or so now. The sprawling slough of indolence has lost its diary and seeps duly beyond much-needed precincts. Still, that’s not to say that the end of the year doesn’t bring with it a slew of waste with a quality all of its own. And it isn’t all bad. At the very least, this sort of cheap journalism has the ability to get us talking again; to unite the intelligentsia against a common enemy. What is more, it must be admitted that that much-discussed and often-derided convention – the list – has an uncanny knack, when used properly, for raising intriguing questions.

Here’s one I prepared earlier: one of those lists (or party games) which commits the crime of being, shock horror, passably interesting. Here goes: name ten great novels that have been written by translators. Read the rest of this entry »


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Xa Xov – Xenophobic Xavier

21 04 2011

I was once privileged enough to meet one of Europe’s greatest novelists – Kirios Quebec – in the men’s room of an expensive Parisian hotel. As he began to relieve himself in the next door urinal, I chanced to ask him a question, knowing that he could not escape with speed. Considering the length of his novels, his prolific journalistic output and his famously ‘loose’ style, I was hoping to discover whether he had ever had any trouble writing, or whether it had always come naturally to him. ‘Ah!’ he sighed, ‘Writing does not come naturally to anyone… If only writing was like peeing!’ I was content to echo this sentiment, but argued that surely he found it easier than most other writers. ‘Maybe’ he conceded, adding ‘I’m certainly no Xa Xov’. I did not know what he meant by this, and asked ‘who or what is Xa Xov?’. Quebec turned to me for the first time, furiously pulling up his flies as he spoke. ‘You are a critic and you have not heard of Xa Xov?’ I shook my head. Quebec’s frown filled the room. ‘You are good for nothing’ he said and marched off without even washing his hands. I was so humiliated that I managed to walk as far as the fourth floor foyer before realising that I had neglected to reconfigure my trousers.

The humiliation I suffered was well deserved. How could I call myself a literary critic without even registering the name of a writer indispensable to its central medium? My ignorance was foul: my career, I presumed, at an end. Only one thing could save me. Read the rest of this entry »


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Luis Funńel – San Estebon in Winter

9 04 2011

The age of innocence is behind us. Writing as entertainment, as timeless art, as unsullied by doctrine, as a harmless leisure activity – all of this is beyond us: lost like a daft dog in the fog of the past. It is now a given that novelists have a hidden agenda. What a dangerous gang of desperadoes these writers are! It is not writing that drives them: it is instead the opportunity to spray about the nascent dregs of their scrambled ideologies like so much farmer’s pesticide. The age of the organic ideology is far away in the future. Writing at present is contaminated by a plethora of mind-bending chemicals: a noxious fusion of confused creeds and damaging dogmas lurking beneath the ripe surface of every sharply printed book.

Cause for concern, certainly. But fortunately for us careful critics, these alleged ‘hidden agendas’ are very rarely as well hidden as they might at first appear to be. The majority of them, in fact, are about as well hidden as an elephant in an oak tree. Strip away the ornamental leaves and there it is: that great grey hulk, that superciliously long-nosed super-shit producer, held barely aloft by bending branches, quite ready to plummet, like the habitually defeated boxer, to the dusty ground below.

Can we blame a novelist for failing to conceal his or her agenda in such a way? Read the rest of this entry »


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Lucia Raus – When I Stepped Out, It Was Then I Saw The Sky

1 04 2011

‘When I stepped out, it was then – and only then – I saw the sky. Not before. Not in the master bedroom. Not in the bathroom. Not in that poor-excuse-for-a-kitchen. And certainly not in the upper room – as promised. Allow me to make my position clearer. The way I see it (or the way I didn’t see it) is this: from the east wall window the view is dominated by rooftops. In the top half of this window a small portion of skyscape is made available, but it is no more than a segment, which must not be permitted to represent the whole. From the west wall window, a charming landscape is visible; but it is mountains – and not the sky – that play the leading hand. As for the skylight, I accept that it may once have offered ‘great views of the sky’ but must insist that this is not presently the case. A mixture of dirt, some of it a gracious gift from the anuses of various incontinent birds, has more than obscured the spectacle of the sky that lies waiting patiently behind’ (pg. 3)

One of my favourite books cannot be found in your local bookshop. Nor can it be purchased via the drably wondrous world of the internet (that which offers almost everything you want, but really nothing you need). It is instead a unique work, co-authored by fourteen simple shop assistants. And it came to me – into my dear yet flaky hands – by even simpler means. I picked it up one day by the counter of a small boutique on the outskirts of Athens, thinking it to be a complimentary leaflet of some sort (oh all right, I admit it, I plain stole it). But as it has no appreciable value (certainly it was not for sale) I consider my crime to have been amongst the more diminutive of the order. It’s no more than a notepad, employed (it seems) for various petty tasks: noting down telephone orders, making sketches when bored, writing silly poems, spreading gossip, cataloguing ‘inspiring’ quotes etc. Despite this, I find it endlessly fascinating. But then that kind of thing has always shaken my water-bound vessel.

The Albanians have a good phrase for this: ‘rischtina koka mocacé zech’ – which roughly translates as ‘your nose is forever dangling over other dog’s dinners’. Read the rest of this entry »


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