Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Zadie Smith wrote somewhere that with a lot of novels, the first few pages or so, maybe the first chapter, is kind of fussed over by the author, as s/he tries to find the shape of what the book is going to be, a quality that may be just as much further reinforced as smoothed out in the editing and rewriting process. It kind of felt like there was a bit of that with the first chapter of Fates and Furies, which sets up a deliberately self-conscious depiction of Lotto and Mathilde, young, beautiful and in love, on a beach, married in secret just that morning; I remember reading the first few pages in Readings a couple of years ago and being struck by the visuals and the language but not being especially tempted to keep reading. And, if anything, that impression was reinforced once the novel started really pulling - and I began really feeling it - from the second chapter, which races at just the right pace through Lotto's childhood, charmed and at the same time marked by trauma and loss, and then into the third with its succession of parties pulling still further forward through time (then chapter four: same trick, with the plays), and by then I was convinced.

But the trick - and it's not a cheap one, but rather one of real literary art - is the way that the building succession of events and perspectives continually sheds retrospective light on the earlier sections, about the central marriage and the layers to both the people in it, and many of those around them. It's there writ large in the two main sections, 'Fates' and 'Furies', and in so many smaller ways (it's not actually a small thing, but in a less good novel it could have been overlooked: I was very glad when the book returned to Gwennie and gave us her perspective near the end - retrospectively validating the Lotto-centric narrative speed with which she was disposed of, off-stage no less, in the earlier section). And it's also not overly cute in how it lays out those perspectives and voices; it matters, for example, that we see some of 'Fates' from Mathilde's - and others' - perspectives, rather than being locked entirely into the narrative that's been written for Lotto, so that the transition isn't any kind of cheap 'twist'.

It's funny. Many of the books I most admire, and which most speak to me, are those that stick fiercely to the interiority of the main character, often in first person: I've followed Murakami, Siri Hustvedt, Scarlett Thomas, Rivka Galchen, Rebecca Lee (collectively, most of my current favourites) far down those roads. But some of those that have most moved me are deliberately staged with a multitude of voices, giving the reader direct access to the inner lives of even some of the more minor characters. (Here, some of the characters, like Antoinette and Sallie, could so easily have existed only in relation to Lotto in particular, but Groff insists upon their personhood.)

I did feel that the tautness of the novel was lost a bit in the 'Furies' section. It gets a bit choppy at times, without that same sense of there being a thread tugging ever forward (of story) that marks 'Fates'. I expect that to some extent that's deliberate (since part of the point is that Mathilde's story is much more discontinuous and less apparently fated than Lotto's) and partly flows from Groff's determined avoidance of some of the simpler, more black and white choices she could have made in depicting Mathilde's choices and what they've meant for her happiness, but still, some of the air went out of the sails for me over the back end. Nonetheless, this is a quite wonderful novel, which has touched me while making me think about how we come to be who we are, and live the lives we do.

(I came to it after reading Groff's wonderful story "Ghosts and Empties" in a New Yorker back issue.)

2017 cd: "Turn it into something new"

The usual end of year mix cd:

1. Burn The Witch - Radiohead 
A Moon Shaped Pool (XL, 2016)
So I caught up with The King of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool at the start of the year and it turns out Radiohead still have plenty to say to me. This song sounds, as Yorke sings, like a low flying panic attack.

2. Do You Need My Love - Weyes Blood
Front Row Seat To Earth (Kemado, 2016)
What an epic. The album is full of these, dramatically, sweepingly on the verge but never quite tipping into being too much.

3. Heartache Is An Uphill Climb - Tift Merritt
Stitch of the World (Yep Roc, 2017)
Merritt has been great for ages, and Stitch of the World might be her best yet. In some ways this song is pretty straight-up, but I can never resist this kind of flowing, rootsily golden thing when it’s done as well as it is here.

4. Bad Reputation - Haley Bonar
Last War (Memphis, 2014)
Speaking of things I have a weakness for, hello more brightly sulky and 90s alt-y sounding pop from the excellent Haley Bonar.

5. Sweet By And By - Miranda Lambert
Southern Family (Elektra, 2016)
This winsome, sweetly lilting track on someone else’s project got me paying attention to Lambert again …

6. Runnin’ Just In Case - Miranda Lambert
The Weight of These Wings (RCA, 2016)
… which led me to this super-impressive double album, 24 richly emotional but very rarely sentimental songs which pretty much all land right in the sweet spot. “Runnin’ Just In Case” is the first track and it sets the tone.

7. The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness - The National
Sleep Well Beast (4AD, 2017)
The National, so reliably great.

8. Don’t Pass Me By - Laura Marling
Semper Femina (More Alarming, 2017)
This has been one of the really big ones for me this year (along with the Tift Merritt and Miranda Lambert records); on it, Marling taps something very spectral, very human, and never more than on “Don’t Pass Me By”. A special song, delicate and powerful.

9. Finish What We Started - Jessie Ware
Glasshouse (Island, 2017)
This latest smoothly heartstruck record from Ware is her third wonderful soulful modern pop album in a row, and the thing about “Finish What We Started”, the thing is that it soars.

10. Over Everything - Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile
Lotta Sea Lice (Matador, 2017)
Delightful throwback rock-y songwriter collab. First heard during a cheeky ‘writing’ session at the Grace Darling one sunny weekday afternoon — it turns out, the perfect circumstances for it.

11. Mountain - Holly Throsby
After A Time (Spunk, 2017)
This is the second time that I’ve been ambushed by one of Throsby’s melancholy Australian-summer tunes at the end of a year. The last time was in 2011; some things have changed since then, some things have stayed the same.

12. Strangest Thing - The War On Drugs
A Deeper Understanding (Atlantic, 2017)
Arriving with immaculate timing the day before I set off for Zanzibar and beyond, the wide open roads sounds of this one have soundtracked this trip so far — especially “Strangest Thing” in all its expansiveness.

***

And the ones that I nearly included, but in the end didn't: Jen Cloher, The xx, Spoon, Aimee Mann - four excellent albums by existing favourites of mine, all of which I listened to more than at least some of those that actually made it onto the final mix, but there you go.

[edited 31/1/18 with a track order tweak]

Wakefield

A riff on Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic metaphysical short story via a latter day rewrite by E L Doctorow, told from the perspective of the husband who disappears. Had some interesting angles, and making him as unsympathetic as he is (very, for the most part) worked well and in a feminist fashion. But it kind of dragged as it went on, the close-mic noirish narration starting to grate, the internal journey he goes through not entirely convincing or satisfying, even though Bryan Cranston seems well into it.

(plane viewing #4)

The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding

I started listening to this in earnest on the skybus on the way to the airport and it's been my main soundtrack since, in airports, on planes (thank you noise-cancelling earphones) and here in Zanzibar, including often on the starry beach at night - all of which is very apt, as maybe even more than Lost in the Dream this is music for expanses and journeys and the figurative wide open road.

Sure, at times it can begin to sound just a tiny bit formulaic - yearning verses, windswept atmospherics (at times there's a hint of the Church there), epic electric guitar, probably some 'woahs' or 'yeahs' in the back end - but it stands up to repeated listening and besides who cares when the lane they've found for themselves is so great. "Strangest Thing" is the one that I get stuck on, the whole sweep of it undeniable, and then there's the little details like the repeated single pinprick pulse that makes me think of lights dotting landscapes moving far away. But the three songs that come before it (and open the record), "Up All Night", "Pain" and "Holding On" are basically just as good, and so is the emphatic rock and roll of "In Chains" a bit later.

All in all, the right kind of record not only for travel, but for ringing out a year - what luck for me to have come to it at just the right time.

Atomic Blonde

Super fun! Electric and instantly iconic. Charlize Theron has definitely got something. Great period soundtrack too (1989 and thereabouts).

(plane viewing #3)

North by Northwest

Filling one of my many Hitchcockian gaps. I don't think I could quite say that it didn't feel at all dated - but it did feel at once fast-paced and stylish, and I didn't feel much was lost in the translation from 1959 to today - except, maybe, in a certain suspension of disbelief required to accept Cary Grant's 50s-besuited and drolly dry advertising guy as the ladykiller that he is in the film. Also: the iconic Eva Marie Saint, and the iconic crop duster scene.

(plane viewing #2)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Well Luc Besson, he always goes for it, and often what he's going for - as here - is spectacular science fiction, and in this case actually based on a comic book, which I think works in its favour in giving it a readymade stock of visuals, characters (notably of course the wonderfully - and comic bookily named - galactic federal agents Valerian and Laureline, although, as interesting-looking and frequently charismatic as Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne both are, sparks don't exactly fly between them), species, settings and so on. It's fun the way Besson really commits to showing his outer space happenings, which always risks tipping into being a touch hokey but he pretty much pulls it off in Valerian, aided by a typically pacy plot.

(plane viewing #1)

Cesar Aira - The Literary Conference

A slim and no doubt deliberately puzzling little novella that appears to wear its literary and metaphorical conceits on its sleeve ...

In part due to the requisites of clarity (poetic fog horrifies me), and in part to my natural preference for an orderly exposition of the material, I deem it most appropriate to begin at the beginning. Not, however, at the beginning of this story but rather at the beginning of the previous one, the beginning that made it possible for there to be a story at all. Which in turn requires me to switch levels and begin with the Fable that provides the tale's logic.

... but proves considerably more slippingly elusive than it at first leads the reader to believe, from the Macuto Line to Mad Scientist introspection, engineered not-really wasps to cloned genius authors, lost love to a curious play emerging from the past, and finally the revelation that "colossal blue worms were slowly descending from the mountain peaks" ...

The solution is none other than the greatly overused (by me) "escape forward." Since turning back is off limits: Forward! To the bitter end! Running, flying, gliding, using up all the possibilities, the conquest of tranquility through the din of the battlefield. The vehicle is language. What else?

St Vincent - Masseduction

Well who knows what pop even means any more but, still, Masseduction has gotta have a claim to being the best pop record I've listened to this year. I liked her last one but this one is just super tight.

The immediate impression is more textural and hook-y, but with more listens the sharpness of the songs punches through - exhibit A being "Pills" and the way it gradually reveals itself as a complete epic, unspooling from the very Fear of Music-y opening through crunching guitar, an increasingly insistent baseline, an extended slowed-down outro and then, why not, some spacey saxophone to take us out. She's terrific when sketching out zig-zagging stretched-out melodies (e.g. "Hang on Me", "New York" - though that latter reminds me a touch of Regina Spektor, "Slow Disco"), terrific when putting her foot down and stomping (e.g. the title track, "Sugarboy"), and terrific when doing both at once (e.g. "Los Ageless", "Young Lover"). For all of its veers, this album feels kind of like a hug.

"Larissa Rogacheva - Nostalgic Grotesquery" (BSG)

Last week I wandered into the Brunswick Street Gallery as I do from time to time and was particularly drawn to Larissa Rogacheva's colourful and somewhat dream-like paintings (mostly watercolours). I suppose you just never know - while the general colour palette and mood are certainly well in my strike zone, overall I wouldn't have said it was especially the 'type' (or any of the types) of thing that I usually especially like. And yet I did especially like many of these, especially those with a mythological dimension, which included my two favourites, "The Fox" and "The Trojan dream #5" (alternately titled "Helen of Troy" on her website).

In fact, so much did I like them that I bought the Trojan dream to hang in my room. If anything, I thought "The Fox" was even better, but I suspect the Trojan - which also happens to be larger at a 60 cm diameter - will be a better choice for looking at day in, day out. Looking at it now (I picked it up today), I can more readily disentangle the entwined threads that drew me to it; in addition to the colours and general atmosphere of delicate dreaminess, there's a pop drift which is a touch Sandman-esque coexisting with a dash of the type of surrealism that takes its markers from de Chirico and his classical Greek and Italianate reference points (including, of course, the mythological), and put like that, there's little wonder it struck me so, taken, of course, with all of the work's own essential qualities in itself!

Samanth Subramanian - This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

A good complement to Running in the Family - in covering a completely different aspect of the country - and a top read in its own right in terms of educating me about Sri Lanka and setting the scene of its more recent history and social context.

Subramanian, a Tamil Indian, writes clearly, without taking sides (indeed, bringing out by showing rather than telling how futile, absurd and destructive has been the war between the two self-designated sides of the Sinhalese government and the LTTE), and with an impressive level of access to participants and those affected at seemingly all levels of Sri Lanka society - members of the army, former Tigers, their family members, members of parliament, Buddhist monks (including the first of them to go into parliament), the Muslim population (about 10 per cent of the country's population so not insignificant) and many others, most of whom come across as somewhat larger than life and certainly vividly.

What emerges is a portrait of the country today as fundamentally shaped by the long-running war, from 1983 when an LTTE ambush and killing of 13 soldiers triggered riots that killed probably thousands of Tamils and dislodged many more from their homes to the brutal ending in 2009 when the last of the LTTE fighters in the far north east were broken down amidst many thousands more Tamil civilians killed by one or both sides, as well as the unconscionable acts committed by both sides through those nearly 26 years. Subramanian's approach of facilitating the telling of stories or sharing of worldviews and ideologies (or, in some cases, both) by those he meets is effective and often powerful, and all told this struck me as a balanced and clear-sighted account of an incredibly harrowing and awful period and set of events, enormously increasing my understanding of it all.

"The Father" (MTC)

Powerful stuff.

Made me feel it from the perspective of both the elderly father (John Bell) who's suffering dementia and his adult sister (Anita Hegh) who has taken on the thankless work of caring for him. The subjective reality experienced by the father was done very well - it's difficult to stage the kind of slippages through time (ellipses, back and forths, repetitions), indistinguishable mixings of reality and fantasy, and identity confusions that afflict the father here, and that was done largely effectively here.

Reading a couple of the glowing reviews of the play from overseas makes me suspect that much of that is down to the play as written (Florian Zeller) and that this production might be more workmanlike than inspired - although Bell's turn is very real in the best way - but even still, it was well worthwhile.

(w/ Erandathie, Cass and Tamara (and Laura F's sis, Ness))

Feist @ the Forum, Friday 1 December

A very good show. Live, Feist is engaging and a strong and charismatic singer, her voice coming through with plenty of variety and dynamism and without shying away from the swoops, cracks and other quirks that litter her recordings of them. I liked that she obviously had a real relationship with each of her songs and enjoyed performing them, especially those from Pleasure, in a set that led off with, I reckon, a solid hour or so from that newest album - which made me feel I understood the record a lot better, in hearing the stripped-down rock and sometimes bluesy elements at the fore - before switching to a run of older songs, beginning with "My Moon My Man" (way more exciting live than on record) and taking in a healthy number from my personal favourite Metals, including "The Bad in Each Other".

(w/ Hayley, and also Jon + Sam)

(Let It Die, The Reminder, and oh look, I'd completely forgotten about seeing her live before albeit only through part of a festival set)