The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Politics In the World of Tintin and Asterix August 4, 2013

Those of you familiar with the Tintin and Asterix books might like this from Red Wedge Magazine… Politics In the World of Tintin and Asterix

2011 Books Roundup December 11, 2011

As we approach the end of the year, it seems appropriate to take a look back at some of the books of the year, consider which were good, which were not so good, which you might wish to give, or receive, for Christmas, and which should be avoided.  In this post, I’ve highlighted some of the books I’ve either enjoyed the most, or which have stuck with me since reading them.  It’s very much a personal selection, and not a ‘Best of 2011’ list.  But I’m sure readers will have their own thoughts and choices, and the comments below are open to everyone’s own selections and recommendations.

Firstly, my favorite books that I’ve read this year:

Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll (Luke Haines)

Post Everything is Haines’ follow-up to 2009’s Bad Vibes, his memoir of the Britpop years (covered by WBS here).  It takes up where the previous book left off, at the tail-end of the Britpop fad in 1997 and covers Haines’ adventures in the music industry up to 2006.

It’s a significantly less angry book than Bad Vibes, although it retains Haines’ tongue-in-cheek (I hope) self-importance.  It’s also marked with the same dark humor.  However, while The Auteurs played an important, if not central, role in Britpop (much to Haines’ horror at the association, which may explain the vitriolic nature of the attacks on his contemporaries) the following decade finds him an increasingly more marginal figure, with projects such as Black Box Recorder, Baader Meinhof and the Oliver Twist Manifesto.  Whether these represent an improvement over his work with The Auteurs is debatable (I actually like the second album), Haines distinct and unique voice is hard to ignore.  This book is worth reading for the account of the First National Pop Strike alone.

The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (Alana Lentin and Gavin Titely)

Lentin and Titely’s book (with a preface by the Guardian‘s Gary Younge) is a useful counterpoint to much of the received wisdom – from both the tradition right and soi-disant liberals – about multiculturalism.  Rather than attempting to provide a normative definition of multiculturalism, the book shows how the concept itself (or a straw-man version of it) has become a convenient whipping-boy for those who claim that it has somehow failed.  The books covers related debates across Europe, including France, the Netherlands, the UK as well as Ireland, and shows how issues such as integration, gay rights, the wearing of the burka – the very claim of the failure of multiculturalism itself – often serves to mask a contemporary, but no less virulent, form of racism (and, yes, islamophobia is racism under another name).

It’s an academic work, citing a wide range of sources, and it’s by no means an easy read.  However, as an examination of how racism operates in Western liberal democracies, it’s second to none.  Except, perhaps, the work of Ian O’Doherty, whose satirical impression of a lazy, sub-Daily Mail bigot never fails to raise a smile.

Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart)

Gary Shteyngart is one of the funniest and most interesting new young American writers to emerge in recent years.  His first two novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan both focus on the experience of young Russian ex-patriates (first and second generation) in either the U.S. (mirroring Shtenygart’s own upbringing – he was born in Leningrand, as was, and moved to the States when he was 7) or in the former Soviet Union.  Both include a satirical take on the corruption of post-Communist oligarchies, more pointedly in Absurdistan.

While those novels are set in an imagined present, Super Sad True Love Story pictures a near-future dystopia in the United States, as the institutions of government break down during economic collapse.  It’s Shteyngart’s most accomplished novel to date, writing in the voices of two different protagonists, middle-aged Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, a teenaged Korean-American.  Much of the novel is a satire on social networking technologies, and how it impacts on interpersonal relationships (which suggests that it might age very quickly, so enjoy it while you can).  What sticks in my mind most, though, is the description of large groups of economic protestors camped out in Central Park.  I read the novel in June, and a few months later see elements of it played out in the Occupy movement.  It’s not a particularly comforting thought.

The Enigma of Capital : and the Crises of Capitalism (David Harvey)

Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital, a Marxist analysis of the roots of the global financial crisis was originally published in 2010.  The paperback edition, published earlier this year, includes an afterward dealing with the euro crisis, although obviously events have moved on since January, when it was written.

Harvey attempts to show that the basis of the current crisis lies in the structures of financial capitalism itself.  The requirement for permanent growth, the need to continually expand markets and access to credit means that periodic crises are inevitable, and that after each crisis, capital becomes stronger, while the working class is increasingly impoverished.  This is a consequence of the socialisation of losses incurred during the crisis, via what Harvey terms the State-Finance Network  (which, incidentally, reminds us that the unsullied free market dreamed of by Adam Smith and certain disciples, unencumbered by state interference, is no less a utopian fantasy than the fevered dreams of anarcho-syndicalism).

Harvey doesn’t state that the collapse of capitalism is a given.  Indeed, at times he comes close to admiration of the achievements of the capitalist system, and he has no illusions about its ability to adapt and survive.  That said, he argues that the current crises offers an unprecedented opportunity to challenge the neoliberal consensus which has been dominant for the past 30 years.

The Enigma of Capital is an interesting companion to Conor McCabe’s Sins of the Fathers.  Both stand against the consensus view that the causes of the financial crisis – at global and nation levels – are simply under-regulation and the actions of a few corrupt individuals, but demonstrate that they are inherent within the structures of the economic system itself.

The Pale King (David Foster Wallace)

In 2008, on hearing of the death of David Foster Wallace, I wrote here that I was worried that his reputation would be defined by his suicide, making him just another angst ‘cult’ writer you get over by your mid-twenties, rather than by his work.  In the three years that have passed, hover, the opposite has happened.  Perhaps due to the renewed interest arising from his death, he is finally receiving his due credit as one of the finest English-language writers of the past 30 years.  And, to my mind, The Pale King is, or could have been, his masterwork.

It’s flawed, of course, uneven in parts, as you might expect from an unfinished work (editor Michael Pietsch deserves much credit for giving coherence to the reams of manuscript he was left with after Wallace’s death).  Set around an IRS office in the 1980s, The Pale King contains many of the hallmarks of Wallace’s style: postmodern self-referential trickery, long recursive sentences, fantastical humor, but there is a maturity to the voice where can see in its most realised form what, I think, he was trying to achieve in all his writing – in the short stories of Oblivion, in particular, in the characterisation of Don Gately and the other recovering addicts of Infinite Jest – what, in his own words, fiction was meant to show: ‘what it is like to be a fucking human being’.

Wallace wasn’t an overtly political writer, by any standards.  While he wrote a few pieces in The Atlantic and elsewhere in the wake of the 9/11 attacks which were highly critical of the Bush administration, his most well-known political work – ‘Up Simba’, an essay on the 2000 McCain campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination – is more a study of rhetoric and the political process than politics itself.  However, throughout his work we can see how he struggles with what is, ultimately, the most important political question, left or right – how can you live a basically decent life.

The Pale King is by far and away my favorite book of 2011, and the longest chapter, a 100 page monologue by a character called Chris Fogle, is one of the finest pieces of writing I have ever enjoyed.

Then, briefly, the rest of the best, the ones I’ve also enjoyed, without getting into the same detail as above:

Sins of the Father (Conor McCabe):  There’s little to add about this fantastic book that has already been written here, or elsewhere.  It would, obviously, have made the top five above, but if you’re reading this blog, the chances are you’ll already have read the book.  Indispensable.

 The Magician King (Lev Grossman): This is the sequel to 2009’s The Magicians, a kind of Harry Potter/Chronicles of Narnia for grown-ups.  Unlike it’s predecessor, The Magician King is more than just an enjoyable fantasy romp, but deals with themes of loss and death as movingly as any ‘mainstream’ novel released this year.

The Tragedy of Arthur (Arthur Philips): Although it treads a fine line between being great fiction and far too clever for its own good, this witty and technically brilliant faux-memoir and Shakespearean pastiche is ultimately an emotional study of the relationship between a con-man father and his children.  The fake (or is it?) play by Shakespeare, though, is a magnificent achievement.

Lockout: Dublin 1913 (Padraig Yeates):  Not a new book, of course, but, shamefully, I haven’t read it until now, prompted by the upcoming centenary.  It’s a brilliant piece of research, not just into the lockout itself, but also as a social history of Dublin at the time.  Despite the length (don’t try lifting it with one hand!), it’s also immensely readable.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes (Paul Murray): Initially published in 2003, it was recently reprinted to capitalise on the success of Murray’s second novel Skippy Dies.  While the latter is deservedly more famous, this is an extremely funny (albeit slightly uneven) book.  Although it’s a little dated, it works as a welcome antidote not just to the wild celebration of the boom years, but also to some of the po-faced ‘what have we become’ novels we now see emerging from that period.

And, finally onto the worst …

There’s one book I read this year that stands out more than the most, and not in a positive way.  I finally read the much, and deservedly, maligned, Atlas Shrugged.  To explain, earlier in the year, I was in the apartment of a friend, someone I admire tremendously and whose intelligence and breadth of knowledge I’m often intimidated by.  Looking through her bookshelves, I was a surprised, not to mention horrified, to come across a few Ayn Rand novels.  When I started to tease her about these, my friend replied with the reasonable point: how can you criticize the novels if I’d never read any of them (in her defence, I would hasten to add, my friend was by no means praising Rand).

So the game was on and, to prove a point, I subsequently spent two weeks ploughing through Atlas Shrugged, two weeks of my life I’ll never get back.

It goes without saying, of course, that the politics of the novel are appalling.  Whittaker Chambers was absolutely right in his famous review of the novel where he states: ‘From almost every page of Atlas Shrugged a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber – go!”‘.  But what surprised me about the novel was just how bad it was, how poorly written.  It’s utterly devoid of humour or wit, bogged down by long tracts of leaden, expository dialogue,filled with ludicrous coincidences and laughable characters and is completely overwritten – the less said about the tortuous 100-page John Galt speech, the better.

But, for all that, it can be unintentionally hilarious.  It’s impossible to open a single page without laughing at something in it.  If approached with the right mindset, it can be read as less a 1000-page paen to selfishness, appealing only to right-wing teenager boys who got bullied in school and want to revenge themselves upon the world, and more a demented classic of camp, an Objectivist Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Merry Christmas, and over to you!