Roberto Bolaño
Amulet
Picador, 2009
192 Pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-0330510486

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Roberto Bolaño’s reason for writing Amulet is unclear. Perhaps he wrote this short novel for the challenge of turning slightness into surplus, a literary loaves-and-fishes trick. Perhaps he wrote it because both premise and prose were partly ready-made: entire pages are ripped wholesale from The Savage Detectives, as is the setting, the self-mythologizing Mexico City poetry scene of the 60s and 70s. Or perhaps Bolaño meant to toy with the well-worn notion that everyone is the main character of the drama of his or her own life. We’ll never know for sure; Bolaño died of liver failure in 2003.

The author’s conspicuous absence from the now-global discussion of his works oddly mirrors his novels’ motifs of elision, disappearance, and other gashes in life and narrative. Originally published in Spanish a year after the magnificent, polyphonic The Savage Detectives, Amulet tells the story of one of the most minor Detectives characters, Auxilio Lacouture. It is a novel about black holes, voids of incredible attraction where even time and space bend before the gravity of a gaping zero. Through the recurrent metaphors of hellmouth and abyss, Bolaño attempts to argue that the gaps in a story amplify, rather than diminish, its overall force.

This novel’s holes are numerous, beginning with Auxilio’s narration, which is unreliable to the point of effacing other characters’ perspectives. Auxilio is irritating and delusional, a parasitic groupie who considers herself “the mother of Mexican poetry” but lives off the charity of poets, crashing their parties, their homes, and sometimes their dates. Here Bolaño retreads familiar ground, exploring the transactions and presumptions at the margins of literary culture.

Auxilio’s untrustworthiness is at least partly involuntary, a symptom of psychological trauma. Over the course of the novel, we learn that she was a student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a school with theoretical autonomy from the surrounding city and nation (it has been compared to Vatican City) which was brutally occupied by police and the military in 1968. During the horror now known as the Tlatelolco Massacre, Auxilio hid in a bathroom stall for 12 days as government forces killed hundreds of students. Her narration in Amulet, years after the massacre, enumerates the memories that floated through her head during those delirious hours in her bathroom prison. We are thus reading memories of memories of perceptions that were perhaps inaccurate in the first place. Through this startling remoteness from objective fact, Bolaño constructs an unsettling metaphor for collective national and Latin American memory.

Aside from these few scenes in the university bathroom, the bulk of the military occupation is unseen, unheard, and undiscussed. Instead, we sense its force through the derailment of Auxilio’s mind. It is a black hole capable of warping time itself; Auxilio claims that during the occupation she could “remember” the future as well as the past, that “the year 1968 became the year 1964 and the year 1960 became the year 1956. But it also became the years 1970 and 1973 and the years 1975 and 1976. As if I had died and was viewing the years from an unaccustomed vantage point.”

This sort of retrospective self-consciousness menaces Auxilio’s story from the novel’s opening scene, in which she is wracked by hysterics at the sight of an empty vase:

I saw my hand move forward, away from my body, and rise and hover over the vase’s dark mouth, approaching its enameled lip, at which point a little voice inside me said: Hey, Auxilio, what are you doing, you crazy woman, and that was what saved me, I think, because straight away my arm froze and my hand hung limp, like a dead ballerina’s, a few inches from that Hellmouth… I started crying… I know my vision blurred at one point, anyway, and my legs began to give. And once seated, I was seized by a violent shaking, as if I was about to have some kind of attack…

A different hellmouth looms in her final hallucination, in which crowds of ghostly children swarm, singing into “a bottomless abyss.” The children, Auxilio tells us with irksome over-explication, are emblematic of the young poets and “a whole generation of Latin Americans led to sacrifice” who are “united only by their generosity and courage.” It would be a mistake to assume that such heavy-handed assertions, typical in Auxilio’s narration, are Bolaño’s as well. She speaks from a dark void of her own (she is, in fact, missing her four front teeth) and her interpretation is another lure toward conclusions that obscure rather than illuminate.

Forget, then, the singing innocents; the novel’s most interesting black hole is poetry itself. Amulet’s preoccupation with what happens to time, memory, and history at the brink of a powerful void is largely a way of coming to terms with a nagging structural issue in much of Bolaño’s work: whether (and how) fiction about poets can make sense without their poetry.

This might be an unfair question—after all, most readers of a novel about painters do not demand illustrations. But since poetry and prose share the same medium, Bolaño’s exclusion of nearly all traces of the poetry that constitutes his characters’ lives is noteworthy and bizarre. (The only poem featured after the first chapter of The Savage Detectives is a wordless diagram.) Ultimately, Auxilio’s flirtation with the void mimics Bolaño’s own attraction to riddled narrative structures.

After reaching for the vase at the start of the novel, Auxilio asks herself: “Do poets have any idea what lurks in the bottomless maws of their vases? And if they know, why don’t they take it upon themselves to destroy them?” The bottomless maws in poetry and fiction—the alluring instabilities that resist easy conclusion and continually open onto new argument—can be deep and enthralling indeed, and Auxilio is probably right that we gamble with our serenity and self-assurance as long as these maws remain undestroyed. But of course, they remain intact and attractive as ever.

Laura Kolbe received her MPhil in American Literature from Jesus College, Cambridge. She lives in New York.

Colm Tóibín
Brooklyn
Viking, 2009
252 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-0670918126

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Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn is well and humbly crafted, though hardly magisterial. It is experimental neither in form nor in content, devoting a taut 252 pages to the progress of a young Irish woman, Eilis Lacey, who is delicately but inexorably coerced into leaving her beloved County Wexford in order to find work in Brooklyn, New York in the early 1950s. Eilis is careful, thoughtful, and polite to a fault, a combination that wins her a circle of admirers, bullies, and bullying admirers. She falls in love with an Italian-American named Tony, but with so many competing claims on her loyalty and kindness, Eilis must ultimately decide whom to please and whom to disappoint.

The trouble with trying to evaluate Brooklyn is that it is an exactly acceptable novel, a fine example of what John Banville, in a recent Paris Review interview, witheringly dubbed “middlebrow fiction”. I prefer a slightly less castigating label: “adequate fiction”. There are no obvious fumbles in Brooklyn, but, at the same time, it provides nothing new either for the craft of writing or for the average contemporary reader’s understanding of the psychological and historical terrain Tóibín covers—the experience of young single women, or of Irish immigrants, or of Brooklynites in the 50s. It is difficult even to find sentences to quote for particular praise or blame; most drive straight down the middle of the road. The characters’ speech is often interesting, particularly in the countless tiny idiomatic particularities of Eilis’s Enniscorthy home—“you’re best to go” or “it’s great gas”—but I assume that what sounds like neologising is simply an accurate rendition of Wexford English. Nothing about Brooklyn suggests that Tóibín had a single ambitious or reckless impulse during its composition.

Perhaps the bigger challenge for the reviewer, having arrived at this conclusion, is whether and how to judge “adequate fiction”. Tóibín is already the author of five other novels, a collection of stories, several nonfiction books, and countless essays, with no sign of slowing down. Brooklyn, a book with considerably less lustre than his previous two works of fiction (The Master, 2004, and Mothers and Sons, 2006) might signal the need to take the long view. Nearly all prolific writers produce work that varies in quality; the great ones are those who use their less enthralling literary offspring as occasions to learn something new—a technique, a psychological insight—which, reborn in some as yet unwritten book, acquires a honed force absent in its first incarnation. Few are in a better position to understand this than Tóibín, whose long fascination with Henry James (which culminated in the biographical novel The Master) focused on five years in the author’s life that were devoid of masterpieces. From 1895 to 1899, James took stock of his earlier career and struggled to achieve the breakthrough in style that would result in a new voice and, arguably, his best work, at the dawn of the 20th century.

Time will tell what Tóibín will glean from Brooklyn for future novels, but for now we can posit a few hypotheses. Brooklyn’s author seems interested in using conventional, almost prefabricated plot outlines: a young person from Europe comes to America, finds it scary but ultimately exciting, falls in love and in the process begins transforming into an adult and an American. The grooves of this well-worn narrative path are perhaps Tóibín’s way of trying to borrow for his fiction what he professes to admire in poetry, the flint edges of form against which the writer’s voice can spark and ignite. In an interview posted on his website, Tóibín says that as a teenager he had hoped to be a poet, and that even now he reads and learns from the genre, particularly from “poets who take an inordinate interest in form”. When a fiction writer uses a plot “form”, though, the sturdy predictability of its structure should allow the manner of its telling to be more daring. The writer must challenge or rework the fixed form, or at the very least, explode it with innovation or depth. The stereotyped plot of Brooklyn, though, is only rarely ignited by linguistic imagination.

Besides trying to work within the constraints of an established plot type, another kind of self-education that Tóibín pursues in the course of Brooklyn is an oblique examination of the writer’s  profession. Although Eilis is gifted at maths, she sometimes appears to be a stand-in for the novelist, adopting the words and personalities of others:

She found herself thanking him in a tone that Rose might have used, a tone warm and private but also slightly distant though not shy either, a tone used by a woman in full possession of herself.

As Eilis realises, this new voice she relishes is not quite her own but a persona. And, again like a novelist, her watchful gaze upon other characters is usually unreturned. No-one around her, not even her eventual fiancé, comes to know her more than superficially. Yet she takes in their words and gestures hungrily:

Tony, Eilis saw, had ceased to have any interest in her at all…. He spoke at some length to the people behind him and conveyed what they had told him to Frank, ignoring her completely as he leaned over her to be heard…. Out of the side of her eye and sometimes directly she started to watch him, noticing how funny he was, how alive, how graceful, how alert to things. She did not mind, indeed, she almost enjoyed the fact that he was paying her no attention.

As Tóibín’s The Master has demonstrated, the novel can be a powerful medium for explicitly depicting the novelist. In Brooklyn, Tóibín seems to be attempting a more veiled portrait of his profession, though again the bland diction and the lack of material detail (what does Tony say that’s so “funny”? what does his voice sound like when he speaks “at length”?) makes the scene fall flat.

“Flat” describes much of the novel’s language as well as its three geographic landscapes: Enniscorthy, the sea, and Brooklyn. It also describes the fallow field that Brooklyn seems to mark in Tóibín’s career. Raised in an agricultural county in Ireland, Tóibín would understand that describing a field as “fallow”—that is, left temporarily unproductive so that the soil can yield a better crop in years to come—is less an insult than a recognition of the pause that often precedes a regenerative change.  Compared with earlier efforts, Brooklyn does not show Tóibín to be wrestling with a difficult or innovative subject matter or style.  Nonetheless, it still reveals a writer thinking carefully about the work of the novelist and about the resources and lessons available to him from the idea of form.

Laura Kolbe is an MPhil student at Jesus College, Cambridge, where she is studying American Literature.

Jonathan Littell
The Kindly Ones
Chatto & Windus, 2009
984 pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-0701181659

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Natural immunity is one of the great puzzles of epidemiology: for reasons not fully understood, certain small populations seem resistant to HIV, whereas for most people, exposure inevitably means contracting the virus. Max Aue, narrator of Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones, argues that succumbing to the temptation of evil is also a matter of statistical chance: some are born in circumstances of contagion; others are blessedly (and, Aue thinks, self-righteously) immune. “I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did,” he berates the reader.  “Always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person.”

By now, dozens of articles have been written on Littell’s fictional memoir of ex-SS officer Aue, first published in French as Les Bienveillantes in 2006 and released in Charlotte Mandell’s English translation earlier this month. Most critics have taken passages from Aue’s prefatory apologia, like the one cited above, to mean that anybody could have been born into Aue’s position, and that therefore Aue is supposed to represent everyone (or at least everyone coming of age in interwar Germany).

Then the scorecards are raised: The Kindly Ones is a daring achievement because it portrays Nazis as credible and possibly sympathetic human beings. The Kindly Ones fails because it continues to make people like Aue into ghouls and perverts, inaccessible to rational inquiry. Or, most smugly, The Kindly Ones fails because it portrays Nazis as plausible human beings, which they’re not. These three categories of response all imply that Aue’s insistent wish to be seen as Everyman (“I tell you I am just like you!” he later cries) must also be Littell’s wish for Aue. In fact, not only will nearly all readers find Aue impenetrably foreign, nearly all Nazis probably would have as well.

Aue’s early life reads like a concordance of psychoanalytic case studies. He was born 15 minutes after his twin sister, whose infant wrist was tied with red string to mark her primogeniture; he was allergic to his mother’s breast milk, but with envious memories of his sister’s nursing; he was abandoned by the father he adored; he was in love with his sister; he was furious with his mother and stepfather for their betrayal of his father’s memory. In another writer’s hands, this background might have become a source for dark comedy, but Littell has Aue dwell on these traumas with such violent longing that the potential for humour usually collapses long before the would-be punch line.

Littell surely does not intend Aue to be a representative sample either of humankind or of Nazism. This is clear from the way that Littell plucks at random from Freudian and tragedian sources. Aue as personnage de fiction is an overt construction, a collage of allusions—a creature we’re neither meant nor able to imagine without simultaneously picturing Littell right there beside him, making him, willing him into being.

Aue’s appearance is only hazily described; precise portraiture is instead reserved for his fixations. Take this statue, Apollo with Cithara, which Aue sees during a brief trip to Paris:

One detail struck me: regardless of the angle from which I looked at his eyes, painted realistically directly on the bronze, he never looked me in the eye; it was impossible to capture his gaze, drowned, lost in the void of his eternity. The metallic leprosy was blistering his face, his chest, his buttocks, almost devouring his left hand. [...] Looking at him, I felt overcome with desire, with a wish to lick him; and he was decomposing in front of me with a calm, infinite slowness.

Aue maintains throughout the novel that we are obsessed with the beings who are nearly our reflections, but not quite: one’s twin sister, for example, or, for Germans, the Jews. The statue that attracts Aue, then, is perhaps another case of near-likeness—like Aue, a fabrication, and increasingly “impossible to capture” because of the leprosy of history.

Littell delights in classical reference, whether implicitly (as in the Oresteia borrowings that critic Dan Mendelsohn traces so well) or explicitly (as in Aue’s repeated use of the adjective “homeric”). Even naming his narrator Aue, so close to the Latin greeting “hail”, suggests continuity between Aue’s impeccable classical education and his daily life in the SS, peppered as it is with Heil Hitlers and Sieg heils.

While Mendelsohn has traced The Kindly Ones’ Aeschylean conceits, the novel’s aspirations to epic form help articulate the difference between Aue and his creator Littell. Whereas Aue fashions himself as a latter-day Achilles, as often antagonised by his supposed allies as by his enemies, a more apt analogy would make Littell, not Aue, the besieger: after a near-thousand page attempt, we feel that Littell has never won access to the core of his character. Littell has imagined Aue as Homer imagined Troy: strong, handsome, almost impregnable. And whereas most readers know from the start that the Achaeans ultimately win, the drama of The Kindly Ones lies in watching its author try a succession of strategies to get inside the character he has somehow envisioned and yet not really known.

The author’s siege on his character, not a simple prurience, prompts many of the grotesque and bizarre sexual and scatological scenes that have garnered so much critical disapproval. They are notably repulsive, overly frequent and far too long, but one can imagine their having been part of the fiction-making process, albeit a part that perhaps ought to have been set aside by the final draft. We can picture Littell, early in writing, wondering how on earth to understand his character and deciding to start with the one thing that every killer, victim and bystander irrefutably have in common: a body. And then, having found that slender and fragile bridge, writing his way into every possible sensation that body might experience or desire. The process may well be helpful to the writer, but the result for the reader is a brutalisation of the notion of empathy: “feeling-in” becomes “forcing-into”.

Because this struggle towards interiority dominates Littell’s efforts, the novel is less convincing as a portrait of an age or a milieu; inflated critical appraisals comparing Littell to Tolstoy and Flaubert will inevitably disappoint readers. But for envisioning one of the most alien and most alienating characters in recent literature and trying doggedly to make him somehow penetrable and recognisable to human understanding, Littell deserves to be commended. A book that tests the limits of our capacity for empathy—even if, in the process, the book and the empathy fail—helps in some small way toward our definition of the human.

Laura Kolbe is reading for an MPhil in American Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge.