Isn’t it strange how people often start sentences with the question ‘isn’t it strange?’ before going on to describe something that, whilst not always easily explained, is in fact a phenomenon of shockingly common proportions? Luca Maria-Mosa’s novel, the brightest interruption, takes its structure from songs written by a fictional Norwegian band called those edible mechanics. One of these songs, we are echoes only, is read by the narrator as ‘expressing the simultaneously reassuring and discouraging fact that hardly anything anyone says is in any way original’. It’s a dark number, apparently, ‘a little heavy on the bass’, but with a charming ‘glockenspiel-led outro’. The vocalists are Jens (in the verse) and Olaf (in the chorus). I ought to say at this point that these two are brothers, one of two pairs of siblings in the band. Ingrid and Lene are the other pair, with Steffen (their cousin) filling the fifth spot (though what Steffen actually does is something of a mystery). Steffen is married to Lene, incidentally, who used to date both Olaf and, briefly, Jens. Ingrid is currently with Olaf, though she has also been associated with Tord, the keyboard player from another band. Jens is, at the time of the book’s writing, single. As Northern European pop bands go, it’s a mildly complex set-up. Read the rest of this entry »
Luca Maria-Mosa – The Brightest Interruption
23 10 2011Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: eva holubk, luca maria-mosa, music and literature, norwegian music
Categories : Greatest European Novels
Koira Jupczek – Death Charts
6 10 2011Regular readers may be surprised to find me writing this review. Aren’t my overly large sequined boots stomping over ground that rightfully belongs to my respected editor, Monsignor Georgy Riecke? After all, death has always been his ‘thing’. You only need to see the fellow’s face when a new study of suicide rituals appears on his desk at the publishing house. He salivates, he shakes, he sweats. He can barely wait to get his grubby paws on it. It is not for nothing that his list of greatest novels is liberally sprinkled with suicides, genocides and elephanticides (see Roc Quarrét’s Hewn). Had he not had the humility to allow other members of his critical fraternity to submit their own ideas, then one suspects that every novel there would have involved some strange sort of murderous activity. For this is undoubtedly Riecke’s pride and joy: fatality – in all its curious forms. Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this both foul and (apparently) funny. I am reminded of what Riecke calls the ‘crushingly tender and disarmingly droll’ book by French writer Emile Gofrank (A Sentence or Two about You) where the reader is rather tediously (in my opinion) expected to follow the actions of a man determined to be killed by a falling watermelon. One of the editor’s favourites, I’m sure, alongside Nate Laami’s Flaws in the Plan (an infamous collection of suicide notes by the same man) and, more recently, Olav Blomquist’s macabre fantasy Groaning Pixies – both of them notoriously deathly tomes.
It says something about how busy Riecke must be, therefore, that he has permitted me to review this book. For as novels about death go, this would seem to be the pick of the bunch. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: czech fiction, georgy riecke, heidi kohlenberg, koira jupczek, suicide in literature
Categories : Greatest European Novels
