#465

England Expects…

dead flowers
soldiers

opium words
incensed like lambs
they to war go

acting out
pubic farmgirls
innate tensions

clinging corpses
hold guns like dolls

dirty bandages
bloody bits of men

bone white cross
wreath

forever


2 May 1977
 
 

I only subscribed to one poetry magazine in the seventies. It was called Poetry Information and it never published poetry. By that I mean you couldn’t send your poems to it. It only published articles on poetry. And I loved it. It was exactly what I needed in my late teens and early twenties. They talked about poetry. Long essays on the likes of Pound and Basil Bunting (the whole of issue #19 was devoted to him). But the one that really got me was a 1976 article by Tom Leonard entitled ‘The Locust Tree in Flower, and why it had difficulty flowering in Britain’ which introduced me to the poetry of the American William Carlos Williams. At school all I’d been given to read was English poetry; English, not British. A visiting student teacher read us something by Ferlinghetti once—‘Sometime During Eternity’ if memory serves right—but that was it. No Whitman. No Frost. No Dickinson.

The ‘Locust Tree’ Leonard’s referring to a poem entitled ‘The Locust Tree in Flower’. Two versions exist. You can read them both here but the one Leonard focused on was the second version, the streamlined one. Having read a great deal of Williams since I can tell you it’s a one-off. And it captivated me. I’d read nothing remotely like it. So shortly after I had a go and produced two poems. This is the first one and it was published in Street Games and Other Poems. The editor also fixed a typo: in the original I had ‘insensed’ and I recall a letter from another editor wondering if it was a verb coined from insensate. It wasn’t; it was a spelling mistake.

I know a lot of young poetry struggle to find their own voice and wind up emulating their heroes. I really never did that. There’s this poem and ‘Yesterday’ and then I dropped this approach and went back to what I was doing. This is the last poem too where you can see me being affected by Wilfred Owen’s work. I don’t think I wrote a war poem again for thirty years.

The bone-white cross comes from The Exorcist.

#495

The Pathologist

It was a strange meeting –
between Jones
and his successor...
one that neither could have
prepared for:
the old Doctor categorized
by his injuries and numbered.

No longer the processor
but the processed,
mortified, he lay there
and sighed –
in the manner of the dead.


31 August 1978

 

Sepia was an interesting magazine that ran from 1977 until 2002 as best I can see. It was one of the many small press magazines that were kicking around in the late seventies and the quality of the early issues left a lot to be desired but it was clearly a labour of love. Each one, at least for the first few issues, arrived in the post with a sepia-tinted postcard glued to the cover which usually fell off but what the heck? He didn’t just publish poetry. He produced wee booklets about Captain Beefheart too and something called The Cropthorne Camera of Minnie Holland, 1892-1905. The photo on issue 8 was of the switch station on the Ffestiniog gauge railway circa 1880 run by Mr and Mrs Will Jones from 1929 until 1968.

As best I can tell ‘The Pathologist’ was first published in Sepia 8 in April 1979. It also appeared in Effie 5; I don’t have a date for that but I suspect it was later. What was nice about Effie is they published it alongside ‘Stray’ with the correct layout and punctuation. The tone here is very similar to ‘The Venereologist’ but I think I’ve done a better job with the metaphors especially the double meaning of ‘mortified’. I was very pleased with that and it still makes me smile. Not quite sure why the new pathologist was called Jones other than the Welsh practice of tagging on a man’s job title at the end of his name to distinguish him from all the other Joneses out there: Jones the butcher, Jones the baker, Jones the pathologist.

I’ve been thinking about the first line and I suspect I borrowed ‘strange meeting’ from Wilfred Owen’s poem of the same name but I wouldn’t read too much into that.

#485

The Venereologist

How sad to see the Venereologist,
with his mistress tucked carefully
under his arm, emerging from
the doorway of her flat –

a rectangular orifice
exhaling ash and smoke.

The car door opens at the
turning of the handle –
a mechanical thing,
but less habitual
than what has foregone these lines.

His car moves away, down the street
like a germ in the bloodstream.


9 March 1978
 
 

‘The Venereologist’ was first published in The Urbane Gorilla 8 in the autumn of 1978. It was subsequently published in three other magazines because, circa 1978, I didn’t realise that once some magazine had published you it was bad form to send the poem elsewhere without telling them where it’d first appeared. It was the editor of Trends – the Paisley College of Technology literary magazine who pointed this out to me—nicely—when he accepted my poem ‘Punks’ noting that it’d already been published elsewhere. So I stopped—reluctantly. But by this time ‘The Venereologist’ had been published four times and this is now its sixth outing because I included it in an article a while back. I actually think Trends might’ve published it too but as they never sent me any contributor’s copies I can’t say for sure. They took a lot of my poems in the late seventies. The last time I was in the Scottish Poetry Library I had a look for old copies but they didn’t have any from its early years.

As to where ‘The Venereologist’ came from, well, your guess is as good as mine. It was the first of a short series of doctor poems but I dried up after four and really only this one and ‘The Pathologist’ were any good. I always hated the line “turning of the handle” because in modern cars you don’t turn the handle—you depress a button and pull a handle—but I couldn’t figure out a way to say that in a way that pleased me. I suppose “press of a button” would’ve worked, sort of. If I was writing the poem today I’d not let “habitual” go either. I can see what I was getting at but it irritates whenever I read it. I’d’ve probably replaced “habitual” with “mechanical” and looked for a different way to say “mechanical thing”.

In Real Life

Real life is sometimes boring, rarely conclusive and boy, does the dialogue need work. ― Sarah Rees Brennan

“Hope and Michael are a married couple in their thirties, living in Philadelphia, and struggling with everyday adult angst. Michael runs an ad agency with his friend Elliot, whose marriage to Nancy is beginning to show the cracks of age, as is the friendship between Hope and her best friend Ellyn. Michael's best friend, Gary, on the other hand, is trying to get on with his womanising life, and get over the mutually-destructive affair he had with Michael's cousin, Melissa.” This is not the plot of Chris Killen’s second novel although it could’ve been. It’s actually the plot summary for the nineties television series thirtysomething. I mention it because I think this was probably the first time many of us started to think about being in our thirties as a problem. Up until then it was something to aim for. We’d hit sixteen and could legally have sex (at least in Scotland we could); we’d hit eighteen and could vote and drink; we’d hit twenty-one and could drive a heavy goods vehicle; we’d hit thirty and had we converted to Judaism we could be eligible to be chosen as a cantor to lead the services on the High Holidays. The world was our oyster and oysters are aphrodisiacs. Yeah, right.

Imagine if someone decided to remake thirtysomething set in contemporary Britain and not in some place fancy like London but in Manchester or Glasgow or Nottingham. In 2013, over 3.3 million adults in the UK aged between 20 and 34 were living with a parent or parents; the so-called boomerang generation. That’s 26% of this age group. “O brave new world that has such people in it!” Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture painted a portrait of a generation of nomads, born between the early 1960s to the early 1980s. These were the Baby Busts, the kidults, as opposed to the Baby Boomers (my lot, well, the second batch). Mitch Killen’s protagonists, on the other hand, were all born in 1984 or thereabouts. What shall we dub them then? Orwell’s Babies? Generation Y? As good an imagination as Orwell had methinks he wouldn’t have imagined a future quite as drab as this.

Do people in dystopias know they’re living in dystopias or do they write novels about futures even bleaker than the one they find themselves in? It’s what you’re used to innit? (Please tell me I used that correctly.)

But back to In Real Life. In 2004 Ian and Paul were flatmates. Paul was living with Lauren but they broke up; she wrote a pros and cons list and the cons won hands down. Paul and Ian drifted apart as often happens after uni. Lauren flies off to Canada for a while to try to get her life together; it doesn’t work out. Ten years later we meet up with them—this is a few months before they run into each other again for the first time in ten years—and it’s not a pretty sight. Successes they are not.

Paul’s published a novel that went straight into bargain bins; now he’s teaching creative writing unenthusiastically to a bunch of equally unenthusiastic students and supposedly working on a second book; at least that’s what he keeps telling his agent, Julian Miechowicz, who, for some reason, hasn’t completely given up on him:

        Julian is a transplanted American, a few years older than Paul, with a thick black beard and a pained, disinterested way of speaking. Every time Paul’s met Julian, Julian has at some point or other touched his beard and squinted and said a variation on the statement, ‘The publishing industry is a sinking ship; in ten years’ time people won’t be reading books anymore.’ At their last meeting, which took place in the back room of a small pub in Soho, Paul had promised Julian that he’d start a Twitter account, even though deep down, he suspects that Twitter is for arseholes. He also promised that he’d have a draft of his novel ready for Julian to read ‘very, very soon’. That was almost two months ago, and Paul’s getting worried that Julian might drop him if he doesn’t deliver soon.

Ian’s moved in with his older sister—six and a half minutes older but, boy, does she make those six and a half minutes count:

         ‘So, what’s the plan?’ [she says]
         ‘I don’t know. Find a job? I shouldn’t need to stay here too long.’
        Please don’t make me pay rent, I think.
         ‘I could ask Martin if there’s anything going at the call centre.’ she says. ‘He gets back next week.’
         ‘Yeah, maybe.’
         (I can think of almost nothing worse than working at a call centre with Martin as my boss.)
         ‘Have you spoken to Mum yet?’ she says.
         ‘Yep,’ I say quietly.
         ‘Well, you haven’t, because I called her just before I came to collect you and she knew nothing about all this.’
         ‘I’ll give her a ring later on.’
         ‘You’re going to have to help with rent and bills, you know.’
         ‘I know.’

Lauren’s working for Cancer Research, not as a research scientist or anything cool like that; no, she’s running a charity shop:

         I could see the stack of bin bags from halfway down Bingley Road. There were even more than usual; piled up to shoulder height, glistening with raindrops, they filled almost the whole doorway, completely obscuring the ‘Please do not leave donations on the step!’ sign I’d made and tacked up on Saturday night. I had to drag the bags into the street to get the shutters open, and one of them caught on a shard of broken glass, spilled its contents into the road: Dora the Explorer pyjamas, stained soft toys, and a few cardboard baby books so damp they’d almost turned to mush.

This is a novel of bad choices, missed opportunities, lost causes and fumbled second chances.

The format took me a while to get my head around. The book is broken into three parts: ‘age sex location’, ‘first world problems’ and ‘be right back’. Each individual chapter focuses on one of the three protagonists. Mostly Lauren’s are set in 2004 and the two lads’ in 2014 although once we get into the second part of the book we get to find out what’s happening with Lauren now. The one anomaly is on p.65 which is headed ‘IAN 2004’; it’s a proofreading error but it did throw me off. As did the e-mails between Lauren and Ian. The first one appears on p.95 at the end of one of Lauren’s 2004 chapters. The next one follows (but does not appear to be a part of) the first chapter in the second part which begins ‘LAUREN 2014’ which I assumed was another mistake by an editor but, no, she’s now in 2014 but the e-mails, which appear periodically throughout the rest of this section, are all still from 2004. In the third part Lauren’s back in 2005 (and back in the UK) except where she appears in person in the book’s final chapter ‘IAN 2015’. Confused? Yeah, me too and I’ve got the book in front of me.

I was also confused by the two lads, Ian and Paul. I kept getting them mixed up in my head. There’re plenty of reasons not to but I struggled to keep them separate. I think the reason for this is I saw them both as abject failures above everything else; it didn’t really matter what they’d failed at or were currently failing at; the overbearing fact was the fact they’d reached thirty and not made anything of their lives. And they were both well into their individual quarter-life crisis. In fact on p.328 Ian does end up moving back in with his mum:

         ‘Nice to have you back,’ she says.
         ‘Nice to have me back, too,’ I say.
         ‘You know you can stay here for as long as you want.’
         ‘I know.’
        She heads down the small, creaking staircase and I hear the faint murmur of her and Carol’s voices in the living room. In the corner of the room is the single bed I slept on all through my childhood and teenage years, the one I lost my virginity on. I close the door to my room, then lie down on it, still in all my clothes.

The novel’s basic premise is simple enough: Lauren picked the wrong friend. She should’ve gone out with Ian rather than Paul—maybe she’d’ve been his salvation—but by the time she realises this she’s some four thousand miles away. Ian writes. She writes back. Things progress tentatively but peter out. Life gets in the way and, ten years on, it crosses both their minds that maybe that was their Sliding Doors moment. But what’re you going to do about it now? Answer: There’s nothing to be done. People lose touch. Chances slip through our fingertips. Shit happens. But what if Fate happened to be in a good mood one day at the start of, say, 2015? Now that would make a satisfactory ending to this book and, God, it needs it. We expect Lauren and Ian to run into each other in 2015—no spoiler there—but the real question here is: Why after rejecting Paul would she choose Ian? Is this history repeating itself?

Tao Lin, one of the authors roped in to say nice things about the book, writes:

In Real Life, is poignant, intricate, stimulating, and very funny. I wanted to stop around 30 times to show a friend a passage I'd just read. If forced to quickly describe In Real Life with names and percentages, I might say 86% Richard Yates, 14% David Lynch; or 100% Chris Killen.

Maybe he was thinking of another David Lynch because I didn’t see anything in this book that I’d describe as Lynchian, i.e. “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane.” Mundanity it has aplenty. So, maybe 7%, David Lynch. But there’s nothing remotely macabre here. And Yates, what I know of him (which is basically the film adaptation of Revolutionary Road), is too American. This felt a very British book. More Bruce Robinson (who wrote and directed Withnail and I) and Keith Waterhouse (who wrote the novel Billy Liar) than anything else though don’t ask me for percentages. And maybe a pinch of Dan Rhodes. I mention these three because it’s clear (he confirms it in this 2011 interview) the author has a fondness for cringeworthy moments. In an interview Yates said: “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.” If that’s what Tao Lin was getting at I can maybe see his point but although Chris Killen doesn’t go so far as to give us a happy ending at least we’re left with the possibility of a happy ending. In an article on Yates in Boston Review Stewart O’Nan writes:

It’s his insistence on the blunt reality of failure that drew me to Yates. In my world at the time (and even now), failure was much more common than success, endurance the best that could be hoped for. Family and love were hard and often impossible. In the world I knew, no one was saved by luck or bailed out by coincidence; no understanding lovers or friends or parents or children made the unbearable suddenly pleasant. Fortunes didn’t change, they just followed a track into a dead end and left you there. To find a writer who understood that and didn’t gussy it up with tough-guy irony or drown it in sentimental tears was a revelation. Yates—even in the mid-’80s, when I first read Revolutionary Road—seemed to me a refreshing change from the false, cloying fiction that passed for realism. He still does.

This brings me neatly to the title, In Real Life. In the 1930’s the big new -ism on the block was escapism. During the Great Depression it gave people a way out of reality and into a world of fantasy that seemed dramatically more liveable than where they were. Somehow—amazingly—we managed to avoid the Big D. this time round (history will remember it merely as the Great Recession) but I don’t think the man in the street cares much about semantics. So why should he care about this book?

I’m not sure everyone will. (Angus Sutherland writing in The Skinny most certainly didn’t and kudos to Killen for publishing the link on his blog.) Despite the humour, despite the fact we Brits love rooting for an underdog these characters hit a bit too close to home for my tastes; this is a kitchen sink drama masquerading as escapist fiction. Like Paul my first marriage broke up in my early twenties and I ended up back at my parents’ and in my early thirties I was back there again. Like Ian my first novel disappeared without creating any ripples. I’ve never actually worked in a charity shop but I lived out of them for years. And yet here I am today twenty-odd years later and maybe everything didn’t work out as I’d planned but the important things did and, of course, there’s no guarantee that these three are going to make it or even any real reason that they deserve to make it—important point—but that’s why it’s good this book isn’t real life because even a half-decent fiction writer knows when to leave well alone and hand over the reins to his readers’ imaginations.

You can read two short excerpts from the novel here and here.

***

Chris Killen was born in 1981. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester and his debut novel, The Bird Room was published by Canongate in 2009. Wizard's Way, a film he co-wrote, produced and starred in won the Best Comedy Feature award at London Independent Film Festival, and the Discovery Award at LOCO. Remake rights have been acquired by Jack Black. He currently lives in Manchester and plays in a band called Hot Shots. I’ve no idea what they sound like but if they do cover versions of old Smiths songs I wouldn’t be too surprised.

He blogs here … occasionally. He’s also on Twitter. I guess he must listen to his agent.

#464

Chains

Reclining in the squalor of his own body,
The Fatman;
Morose and self-indulgent.

flaccid flesh-fantasies.
erotic hamburgers;

a numb pubic lust ...

A Wimpy whorehouse
lies in a corner and
strips tears from his eyes:
He wants to be repulsed by himself:

He's a junkie, returning to vomit
    like a dog, or a moth to light.
He's a pig, resplendent in mud;
     (some latent cannibal part of us):–

nude, base and free.


24 April 1977 
 

When I posted ‘Stray’ last week my friend Marion said that is sounded “exactly like you now!” So this one’s for you, Marion. I don’t have an exact date for ‘Stray’ but it must’ve been written only a few weeks before ‘Chains’.

Now ‘Chains’ is a strange one. It’s one of those where-the-hell-did-this-one-come-from? poems. I can see myself working on it whilst walking down Buchanan Street in Glasgow but that’s as much as I can tell you about that. The only Wimpy I can recall ever eating at was the one at the side entrance to Glasgow Central station and the last one I ever remember seeing was on Ingram Street but it’s gone now too. In 1977 Wimpys were still fairly common; McDonald’ses existed in the UK (since 1974) but it wasn’t until the eighties that we really started to notice them. Now there’re apparently only 93 restaurants in the UK compared to McDonald’s’ 1300. (I wonder if Richard and Maurice McDonald had a clue how many problems they’d create for grammaticians when they included that comma? My wife spent an hour poring over The Chicago Manuel of Style trying to decide on these two and we’re still not sure what’s right.)

I’ve nothing particularly against fast food restaurants. Or fat people. So I’m pretty sure I’m using this as some kind of metaphor. The punctuation’s weird too but I’ve left it as I wrote it. For a while I did some odd things with punctuation but I’ve completely forgotten what my rules were, if, indeed, I had rules because I suspect I just went down the whatever-feels-right-must-be-right route.

That said I’m still surprisingly fond of this one; for all the differences it has a similar tone to ‘Stray’ and I get a comparable feeling when I read it today.

‘Chains’ was first published in Street Games and Other Poems and, yes, the editor “fixed” my punctuation.

#420

Family Life

Little boy sat on his own,
headphones on:
jamming his mind full of Bowie
to drown out his screaming parents.

Sister’s putting on her war paint:
Friday Night…
Alex Harvey concert at The Apollo.

Baggy-eyed newsreader
mouthing goldfish words.

Father to the pub…
Mum to the bingo…

Little boy to the sherry bottle
and the cigarette packet.


14 August 1976
 
 

‘Family Life’ was first published in Words 6. I seem to recall is was affiliated in some way with Aberdeen University but I can find no evidence in the journal to that effect. This was the first poem I ever had published. It was also the first—and for the longest time the only—poem I was ever paid for, the grand sum of £1.50, the value of two issues of the journal. As much as that delighted me I was disappointed when I received my contributor’s copy and noticed they’d omitted the poem’s title.

It’s not remotely biographical. My dad never went to the pub, not in the same ways that other dads went to the pub (I’m not suggesting that he never went inside a pub but it was a rarity), and my mum certainly never went to the bingo. They did on occasion have a drink at home but it was more likely to be martini; Christ knows why I made it sherry. I don’t think my mother ever smoked but Dad had certainly given up long before I showed any interest in having a drag. And no, I don’t have a big sister. But I think I might’ve quite liked one.

I’ve always liked Bowie and he definitely was on a roll in the seventies but he was just one of many singers I listened to. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were a Scottish band. I had their single ‘Boston Tea Party’ which I still think’s a great song but I didn’t really know them apart from that. He did play the Glasgow Apollo many times. In an article in The Glasgow Herald David Belcher recalls a famous show in 1975:

During one of those shows, Alex reached the usual dramatic denouement of the song ‘Framed’, portraying an innocent man fitted up by the polis. The band stopped playing, leaving Alex a broken figure in the spotlight, looking up pitiably to some higher power, pleading: "Ah didn't do nothin'." From the darkness, a Glaswegian voice insisted: "Aye, ye did—ye shagged ma sister."

 

#453

Stray

You can't always tell a
dog by the person
pulling its lead;
some dogs are
stray: they don't wear collars,
and answer no one's

call save that of the Wind.
They're searching for space
in archaic
tenements,
chasing after the scent
of a bitch called Dream.

When I decided to post mainly poems this year I had to choose a starting point and, for me, the obvious place was #453. I began numbering my poems when still at school and that’s how I’ve continued to save each new poem, under its number rather than its name. Yesterday I wrote #1087.

‘Stray’ is a significant poem for me. I’ve always regarded it as my first adult poem, the first poem in which I recognised my “voice”. It was first published in Street Games and Other Poems by the Curlew Press probably in 1978 in a slightly different layout; I was young and so pleased to see my work in print I let the editor have her way. It’s a rather sorry-looking pamphlet (the quality of some small press stuff back then left a lot to be desired) but published is published.

2014 in books

There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter — but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer. – Vladimir Nabokov

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions but at the start of 2014 I decided to see if I could read one hundred books over the course of that year, a modest enough goal seeing that I normally get through about fifty anyway. As an aside I decided to read a rather vague “more” books by women not because of #readwomen2014 which I only learned about about halfway through the year but simply because I was very conscious of the fact that the only books by women I tend to read are those sent to me for review and most of those are books I’d never look at normally. I’ve never set out to avoid books by women but very few I’ve looked at over the years—even by the famous and highly regarded—ever appealed (maybe it’s the covers, maybe I’m as shallow as that) which both embarrassed and puzzled me. Of course, having a goal and wanting to ensure I met my target, I found myself picking the shortest books I could lay my hands on and soon it became obvious I was going to smash my target so I upped it to a hundred and forty without telling anyone; I’ve never been very good at working with people peering over my shoulder. I also noticed another pattern emerging: I was reading more and more world literature. So I decided to add that into the mix: let’s see how many books from different countries you can read, too.

In the end I finished and reviewed 160 books (non-fiction – 4, poetry – 7, science fiction – 4, short story collections – 9, fiction (mainly literary fiction) – 139) half of which were written by women. In total I read 145 different authors from 39 different countries if I count the UK as a single country: Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain (a representative from each of the four countries), Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain (Catalonia specifically), Sweden, Switzerland and the United States of America.

Twelve of the authors were Nobel Prize winners. The average number of pages was 187. The oldest book was written in 1899. In decades the rest were:

1900s	1
1910s	1
1920s	1
1930s	5
1940s	4
1950s	3
1960s	12
1970s	14
1980s	14
1990s	12
2000s	41
2010s	51

There was no plan but I am surprised so many books were as recent as they were. But there you go. A number of books were, I found, written later than I’d imagined. Clearly I show a marked preference for British and North American authors: 37 Americans, 1 Anglo-American, 29 English, 1 from Northern Ireland, 8 Scots, 2 Welsh, 4 Canadians, a Welsh-Canadian, a Canadian-American and two Russian-Americans. A number of authors were peripatetic and it was really hard to say what nationality they should come under. I’ve treated Ayn Rand, for example, as Russian-American since she lived in the States from February 1926 until her death in 1982 but she never lost her thick Russian accent; Beckett, on the other hand, spent most of his life in France but I’ve still treated him as Irish. Nabokov was also born in Russia but lived for extended periods in Germany, America and Switzerland but I’ve listed him as Russian. Doris Lessing was born in Iran but she’s English through and through. Herta Müller is generally referred to as a German author but I’ve listed her as Romanian; she’s as Romanian as Lessing is English.

In a number of cases I was restricted by what was available in translation but as I was trying to read as many books and as widely as possible I had to steer clear of a number of authors I would’ve liked to have had a crack at like Kenzaburō Ōe and Halldór Laxness whose works tend to be on the long side. There was also the matter of what I could lay my hand on and it’s obvious that in the UK I’m going to have an easier time finding short English language novels than I am finding the latest Iraqi bestseller although Frankenstein in Baghdad sounds like it might be worth having a look for.

One of my goals this year was to try to answer a simple question: Why do I prefer books by men to books written by women? Like most questions it’s easily framed. Not so easy to come up with a decent answer. If you asked me to list all the writers I’m keen to read (or read more of) I can give you a list an arm long and the vast majority would be male. I had to force myself to keep reading women’s books because there were so many books by males I wanted to read. Throughout the year I kept writing notes and pasting links to articles I intended to check out but the closest to an answer I came up with is this: Women tend to be storytellers and I’m not big on stories. Men can be and many are—Ron Rash, for example—but it’s much easier to list women who are great storytellers. But isn’t a storyteller the same as a writer? If they write the story down then, yes, of course; it’s semantics really. I think by ‘story’ I’m thinking ‘plot’ not that I’m saying plotters are inferior to pantsers or even that women tend to be plotters but I clearly prefer books where the structure’s buried. And I like adventurous writers. Standouts (among the women) were Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller and Julie Otsuka’s wonderful The Buddha in the Attic, but it’s worth noting that I gave five stars to The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, If I Could Tell You by Jing-Jing Lee, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Spare Room by Helen Garner, Old Filth by Jane Gardam and Latecomers by Anita Brookner, so I’m not saying that women can’t write, although maybe I was a little generous with Jing-Jing Lee as a debut novelist, but I did like the book and I’m not going to take it back.

Here’s the thing, though: the books I want to rave about were all by men despite the fact many didn’t get the full five stars. I seem to have a thing for flawed masterpieces because even though I gave What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver and Seize the Day by Saul Bellow five stars and deservedly so I was far more excited by You & Me by Padgett Powell, The H-Bomb and the Jesus Rock by John Manderino, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers and A History of Books by Gerald Murnane, although I gave some of those five stars, too, I now see.

What I didn’t see was a “woman’s voice”. Half the time I’d forgotten who the writer was I was reading. Jane Gardam and Pat Barker (in Regeneration) mimicked men perfectly. And Among Women Only by Cesare Pavese could just as easily have been written by a woman. That said, in my review of Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill I noted:

Aphorisms run shoulder to shoulder with anecdotes—the ghost of Erma Bombeck hovers—and existential angst leaks out onto every page. Fetch a mop! I’ve been thinking a lot about the female voice in literature; quite resistant to it I am and yet I have to wonder if a man could’ve written this book and not simply because the book is written from a female’s point of view.

In Elizabeth Costello (which technically I read in 2014 but as the review won’t be published until next year it doesn’t get counted) J.M. Coetzee writes:

        'But my mother has been a man,' [Elizabeth’s son] persists. 'She has also been a dog. She can think her way into other people, into other existences. I have read her; I know. It is within her powers. Isn't that what is most important about fiction: that it takes us out of ourselves, into other lives?'
        'Perhaps. But your mother remains a woman all the same. Whatever she does, she does as a woman. She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man.'
        'I don't see that. I find her men perfectly believable.'
        'You don't see because you wouldn't see. Only a woman would see. It is something between women. If her men are believable, good, I am glad to hear so, but finally it is just mimicry. Women are good at mimicry, better at it than men. At parody, even. Our touch is lighter.'
        She is smiling again. See how light my touch can be, her lips seem to say. Soft lips.
        'If there is parody in her,' he says, 'I confess it is too subtle for me to pick up.' There is a long silence. 'So is that what you think,' he says at last: 'that we live parallel lives, men and women, that we never really meet?'

What goes on in the mind of a dog? Was Kerstin Ekman’s dog any more or less of a dog than those imagined by Richard Adams?

I only abandoned one book last year, Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. And by ‘abandoned’ I mean I read more than a page or two before deciding I couldn’t be bothered finishing it. I actually got about fifty pages in and it was a book I really expected to enjoy having worked in offices all my life but maybe that was the problem. It bored the pants off me.

Of those I did finish that were disappointments: I Am an Emotional Creature by Eve Ensler (I guess I was hoping for another Vagina Monologues but this was tame); Anna Kavan’s Ice and Sheila Heti’s Ticknor both confused me; Voices from the Other World by Naguib Mahfouz and Out of the Dark by Patrick Modiano, both Nobel Prize winners, failed to excite me and Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf which I find I gave three stars to but can remember absolutely nothing about. Had I run into you in the street I would’ve sworn blind I’d never read anything by her.

Broadly speaking I didn’t get much out of the African and the Middle Eastern writers; I struggled to get much out of the Indian and Oriental writers; the South Americans were a little better but my favourites are all from America, the UK, the EU and Russia. I’m not saying I’ll restrict myself to… I suppose it amounts to the bulk of the North Temperate Zone (I wonder if temperature has anything to do with it? no, don’t be daft, Jim) but I won’t be picking books willy-nilly like I did last year even if they are short. Some of my choices really were quite arbitrary.

This year I’ll still be reading of course—can’t stop reading for a whole year (actually I can and I have but I’m not planning to)—but I will be focusing on longer books by authors I really want to read and skipped over in 2014 for whatever reason. And there will be some women in there too. I really ought to give The Golden Notebook a go. The list of authors, both male and female, I’ve not read and ought to have read is still far longer than it ought to be.

Here, then, is my complete list in alphabetical order by surname. Click on the book title to access my review.

		Speedboat		Adler, Renata
		Varamo		Aira, César
		The Saliva Tree		Aldiss, Brian
		The Handmaid's Tale		Atwood, Margaret
		Cold Soup		Aubury, Nic
		Oracle Night		Auster, Paul
		Winter Journal		Auster, Paul
		Stone in a Landslide		Barbal, Maria
		Regeneration		Barker, Pat
		Echo's Bones		Beckett, Samuel
		Bitter Like Orange Peel		Bell, Jessica
		White Lady		Bell, Jessica
		Seize the Day		Bellow, Saul
		Smut		Bennett, Alan
		The Laying On of Hands		Bennett, Alan
		Concrete		Bernhard, Thomas
		The End of the World		Biss, Andrew
		Hunger		Blackwell, Elise
		A Little Lumpen Novelita		Bolaño, Roberto
		Latecomers		Brookner, Anita
		Strangers		Brookner, Anita
		My Biggest Lie		Brown, Luke
		Factotum		Bukowski, Charles
		The Game		Byatt, A.S.
		If on a Winter's Night a Traveller		Calvino, Italo
		Into the War		Calvino, Italo
		Marcovaldo		Calvino, Italo
		The Fall		Camus, Albert
		What We Talk About When We Talk About Love		Carver, Raymond
		My Two Worlds		Chejfec, Sergio
		A Jew Must Die		Chessex, Jacques
		The Awakening		Chopin, Kate
		Slow Man		Coetzee, J.M.
		A Slight Trick of the Mind		Cullin, Mitch
		A River Dies of Thirst		Darwish, Mahmoud
		Reasons She Goes to the Woods		Davies, Deborah Kay
		Schoolgirl		Dazai, Osamu
		The Artist of Disappearance		Desai, Anita
		Blue Nights		Didion, Joan
		The Year of Magical Thinking		Didion, Joan
		The Tiger In The Grass		Doerr, Harriett
		Gone are the Leaves		Donovan, Anne
		The Millstone		Drabble, Margaret
		The Pure Gold Baby		Drabble, Margaret
		Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?		Eggers, Dave
		The Dog		Ekman, Kerstin
		I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World		Ensler, Eve
		Visitation		Erpenbeck, Jenny
		Under the Skin		Faber, Michel
		The Days of Abandonment		Ferrante, Elena
		The Bookshop		Fitzgerald, Penelope
		Aliss at the Fire		Fosse, Jon
		In the Memorial Room		Frame, Janet
		Au Reservoir		Fraser-Sampson, Guy
		Atmospheric Disturbances		Galchen, Rivka
		Old Filth		Gardam, Jane
		The Spare Room		Garner, Helen
		Thirst		Gelasimov, Andrey
		Get a Life		Gordimer, Nadine
		Scrawling		Gould, Jonathan
		The Ministry of Fear		Greene, Graham
		Falling Out of Time		Grossman, David
		Under the Autumn Star		Hamsun, Knut
		Sleepless Nights		Hardwick, Elizabeth
		Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War		Harris, Mark
		The Wall		Haushofer, Marlen
		People in Glass Houses		Hazzard, Shirley
		The Blind Owl		Hedayat, Sadegh
		The Book of Unknown Americans		Henriquez, Cristina
		Ticknor		Heti, Sheila
		Maybe This Time		Hotschnig, Alois
		Bed of Coals		Hutchison, Joseph
		The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly		Hwang, Sun-mi
		That Smell and Notes from Prison		Ibrahim, Sonallah
		Dogma		Iyer, Lars
		Half Life		Jackson, Shelley
		We Have Always Lived in the Castle		Jackson, Shirley
		The Listener		Jansson, Tove
		The Murder of Halland		Juul, Pia
		Twilight of the Eastern Gods		Kadare, Ismail
		Ambiguous Adventure		Kane, Cheikh Hamidou
		The Tiny Wife		Kaufman, Andrew
		The Waterproof Bible		Kaufman, Andrew
		Ice		Kavan, Anna
		Comedy in a Minor Key		Keilson, Hans
		Mo Said She Was Quirky		Kelman, James
		Guff		Kennelly, Brendan
		The Bean Trees		Kingsolver, Barbara
		Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes		Konnikova, Maria
		Diary of the Fall		Laub, Michel
		The Lathe of Heaven		Le Guin, Ursula K.
		If I Could Tell You		Lee, Jing-Jing
		Adore		Lessing, Doris
		Briefing for a Descent Into Hell		Lessing, Doris
		The Fifth Child		Lessing, Doris
		Black Vodka		Levy, Deborah
		Days in the History of Silence		Lindstrøm, Merethe
		Doppler		Loe, Erlend
		A Million Ways to Die in the West		MacFarlane, Seth
		Voices from the Other World		Mahfouz, Naguib
		An Imaginary Life		Malouf, David
		The First True Lie		Mander, Marina
		The H-Bomb and the Jesus Rock		Manderino, John
		Cocktails from the Ceiling		Mannix, Aoife
		Reader’s Block		Markson, David
		Chronicle of a Death Foretold		Márquez, Gabriel Garcí­a
		The Land of Decoration		McCleen, Grace
		Everybody lie down and no one gets hurt		McGuire, Colin
		Nekropolis		McHugh, Maureen F.
		Docherty		McIlvanney, William
		The Kiln		McIlvanney, William
		Ways of Dying		Mda, Zakes
		Screwtop Thompson and Other Tales		Mills, Magnus
		Out of the Dark		Modiano, Patrick
		He Wants		Moore, Alison
		Buddhaland Brooklyn		Morais, Richard C.
		Marcel		Mortier, Erwin
		The Hunger Angel		Müller, Herta
		An Unofficial Rose		Murdoch, Iris
		A History of Books		Murnane, Gerald
		The Eye		Nabokov, Vladimir
		Lost Paradise		Nooteboom, Cees
		Hygiene and the Assassin		Nothomb, Amélie
		The Third Policeman		O'Brien, Flann
		Dept. of Speculation		Offill, Jenny
		The Diving Pool: Three Novellas		Ogawa, Yōko
		The Housekeeper and the Professor		Ogawa, Yōko
		Beside the Sea		Olmi, Véronique
		The Buddha in the Attic		Otsuka, Julie
		After Claude		Owens, Iris
		Soumchi		Oz, Amos
		Among Women Only		Pavese, Cesare
		There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories		Petrushevskaya, Ludmilla
		The Bell Jar		Plath, Sylvia
		Next World Novella		Politycki, Matthias
		Edisto		Powell, Padgett
		You & Me		Powell, Padgett
		Anthem		Rand, Ayn
		Adam Haberberg		Reza, Yasmina
		Good Morning, Midnight		Rhys, Jean
		Pursued by Well-being		Russell, Mark
		Death with Interruptions		Saramago, José
		The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil		Saunders, George
		Rue End Street		Sexton, Sue Reid
		Pink Mist		Sheers, Owen
		Girl Meets Boy		Smith, Ali
		The Hothouse by the East River		Spark, Muriel
		Moving Parts		Tulli, Magdalena
		Noah's Compass		Tyler, Anne
		The Ministry of Pain		Ugrešić, Dubravka
		The Mussel Feast		Vanderbeke, Birgit
		My Real Children		Walton, Jo
		Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen		Weldon, Fay
		The Necrophiliac		Wittkop, Gabrielle
		Monday or Tuesday		Woolf, Virginia
		Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather		Xingjian, Gao
		Third Class Superhero		Yu, Charles
		Bonsai		Zambra, Alejandro
		Burning Secret		Zweig, Stefan
		Chess Story		Zweig, Stefan