Tag: Postmodernism

Salman Rushdie, ‘Quichotte’ Review

Salman Rushdie’s post-modern take on Miguel de Cervantes’ 16th century classic, Don Quixote, is comic, calculated and poignant in equal measures. It nods to the original but paradoxically remains distinctively modern, with the issues affecting contemporary US society taking centre stage: the opioid crisis, consumerism, pharmaceutical corruption and racism.

It is also a tour-de-force of pop culture, literary allusions and genre. Cultural references adorn nearly every page: from Alice in Wonderland to Oprah, American Idol and Madonna, Sonny Liston and Elvis. Through the main character Quichotte – a fictional creation of failed spy thriller writer, Sam Duchamp – Rushdie satirises America’s infatuation with junk culture and laments its damaging effect on the public psyche. A travelling salesman, Quichotte – formerly Ismail Smile – spends long hours watching reality TV in cheap hotels, falls in love with chat-show host, Salma R, and sets out on a long road-trip quest to purify himself before uniting with his ‘beloved’. Along the way, he dreams up an imaginary son, Sancho, battles mastodons, experiences small-town xenophobia and confronts his forgotten past. 

As aforementioned, Quichotte is a story within a story; a few chapters in the reader is introduced to Sam, who, disillusioned with his literary output, is attempting to write his magnus opus. Yet we are also given the perspective of Sancho, Salma R and Sam’s sister, just to confuse things further. While the layered structure appears quite disjointed in the first half of the novel, the second seems to work considerably better. The clear demarcation between author-character becomes increasingly distorted, and we begin to question what is fact and what is fiction: arguably one of meta-fiction key aims. As Rushdie settles in to his groove the connections between Sam and Quichotte’s worlds appear ever closer. 

“AS I PLAN MY QUEST,” Quichotte said, drinking from a can of ginger ale, “I ponder the contemporary period as well as the classical. And by the contemporary I mean, of course, The Bachelorette”.

For me, the text deliberated effectively on the connection between author and their output, and recalled memories of studying Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ theory in university. Rushdie’s interest in how myth permeates society and the boundary between fiction/non-fiction makes Quichotte a topical work in the post-truth world. 

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Julian Barnes, ‘The Sense of an Ending’

‘“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed”’ – that’s the fundamental idea informing Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winning work The Sense of an Ending. In one sense, the whole text is a meditation on memory and its shortcomings. Memories are subjective, they get remoulded and repurposed over time, Barnes contends. 

I spent a lot of time trying to summarise the plot in a short and concise manner, but really struggled – apologies for the elongated synopsis below. The text is divided into two sections (1 & 2) and told from the (unreliable) first-person perspective of Tony Webster. In the first section, Tony recounts his formative years. We are introduced to his friends (Colin, Alex and most importantly, Adrian) and their shared years at secondary school, as well as Veronica, his girlfriend at the University of Bristol, whose family house he visits during a summer break. After breaking up with Veronica, Tony soon finds out that she has become romantically interested with his school friend, Adrian. He sends an angry letter to her and breaks contact. The section ends with Tony returning home from travelling in America after university, where he finds out that Adrian has committed suicide. In the second section Tony, now in old age, is prompted to look back into his past and re-examine his imperfect memories. 

Although I found the pacing of the novel quite slow at times in the second section, the climax was absorbing and tense. The final revelations force the reader to reconsider Tony’s narrative in a whole new light, become a literary detective and piece together the various clues amongst the faded memories. I’m trying to comment without revealing any major spoilers, but a quote from a review by The iIndependent captures the mood well: ‘the concluding scenes grip like a thriller – a whodunnit of memory and morality’. It is to Barnes credit that we initially read Tony as a genuine, average – if not emotional protagonist, with Veronica the unstable and calculating antithesis. But memories are subjective, and once the repressed past surfaces, we draw closer to the causes of Adrian’s suicide and Veronica’s anxieties – Tony has a part to play in both. 

Sexuality is another major theme in the novel. Tony describes his clique of friends as ‘sex-hungry’, and the metaphor of the ‘holding-pen’, from which they are ‘waiting to be released’, denotes their desire for sexual, as well as social, liberation. Throughout the first section, Tony’s disdain towards Veronica is centred around her rejection of sex. Later, it is implied that Sarah’s (Veronica’s mother) sexual transgressions have stunted her daughter’s psychological growth. Issues in the private, sexual sphere repeatedly spill out into the public world and cause great pain, affecting both filial and romantic relationships. 

The Sense of an Ending is dramatically different in tone, style and register to England, England, the only other Barnes novel I’ve read – this attests to authorial scope and imagination. The real achievement of The Sense of an Ending is that it offers no concrete ending. Upon completion, it demands to be re-read and analysed further. This process mimics the text’s plot, in which Tony must confront and scrutinise his murky past from a new perspective, peeling away the layers of artificiality he has constructed in his head. 

Quarantine Reading

So I wanted to write a short post covering what I have been reading during quarantine. Being a furloughed worker during lockdown has given me ample time to tick off some of the novels on my book bucket list. That said, I have not been too formulaic, and often ordered a book on a whim, or been drawn to a particular/author genre after reading literary articles online. As a result, my list is quite eclectic, but this is true of my normal reading patterns. I’m always branching out and, perhaps like many others, daunted and impelled by the notion that there is still a lot out there I haven’t encountered. 

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is a novel that has been on my reading bucket list for a few years. During my first year at university, I delved into a lot of Russian Literature in my spare time (Gogol’s Dead Souls and Grossman’s Everything Flows are memorable), and this is perhaps where the desire to read The Master and Margarita sprang from. At the beginning of lockdown I was looking for a comic novel and Bulgakov’s work fitted the bill. In Will Self’s introduction to the translation I read, he alludes to the novel as a precursor to the magic realism popularised by Latin American authors like Jorge Luis Borges. This analysis really stuck with me throughout: Bulgakov’s Moscow is simultaneously ordinary and realistic, as well as fantastical and supernatural. Woland’s (Satan’s) party and Margarita’s flight across USSR stand out as particularly magical episodes. From a purely comic perspective the novel did not disappoint. The magic show at the Variety Theatre, where Bulgakov critiques the greed and materialism of the Moscow elite, was another highlight. 

I read Julian Barnes’ England England alongside The Master and Margarita. I don’t want to go into too much detail because I dedicated a whole post to the novel, but it was my first experience with Barnes and I enjoyed it so much that I recently ordered The Sense of Ending, his 2011 Man Booker Prize winning work. 

Next up was Chuck Palahniuk’s cult classic Fight Club, another on my list. I’d watched the film a few times and loved it, and a lot of people had suggested that the book was even better. I found the book actually triggered a more emotional response – Palahniuk writes in direct, graphic, savage and visceral prose. The narrator – Tyler Durden – is despairing and distant, and his thoughts capture the generational psychosis that Palahniuk was so perturbed by. I also enjoyed Tyler’s ruminations on IKEA furniture (“I want to be that type of person, so I buy products that cohere with that sense of image”) and the attack on consumer culture. The book is short, punchy and damning, and achieves a lot in only 200 odd pages. 

Since finishing my English Literature degree last year I have been reading a lot of non-fiction, a conscious break away, I think, from three years of studying fiction. I’ve tried to fill in gaps in my historical knowledge by reading texts on specific historical events/peoples (lately I’ve turned my attention to the Vikings, the Medici and the Egyptians). A limited understanding of the Normans and   the subsequent Norman colonisation of England impelled me to read Marc Morris’ The Norman Conquest. This is a great piece of historical fiction – Morris’ vast narrative is accessible and moves at an appropriate pace without compromising on essential details. It pays close attention to contemporary evidence, demystifying popular assumptions about the Normans and their involvement in England. Upon finishing, I had a much better understanding of the historical process and the staggering impact that William the Conqueror’s fated journey across the Channel had on English secular and religious society. 

I’ve now moved on to the daunting prospect of David Foster Wallace’s acclaimed work Infinite Jest. My former colleague, also a friend and science fiction fan, gave it to me as a secret santa gift at last year’s work Christmas party. I started it soon after receiving it but became disillusioned after 50 or so pages and moved on to different pursuits. Now, with time in abundance, I’m ready to give it a second go. 

Julian Barnes, ‘England England’

After fittingly revisiting Albert Camus’ The Plague at the start of quarantine, I next wanted to read an overtly comical novel that was lighter in tone. After some research, I ordered Julian Barnes’ England, England; having never encountered Barnes’ oeuvre before, I was not disappointed. I actually read England, England alongside Mikhail Bulgakov’s seminal work The Master and Margarita, and whilst I enjoyed both, Barnes’ novel resonated more with me. 

England, England loosely follows the life of Martha Cochrane from her adolescence, through to her working life and later years. Martha, a Special Consultant, is employed by the heavily satirised newspaper magnate, Sir Jack Pitman, who dreams up the idea of creating a microcosmic, mini-England on the Isle of Wight for wealthy tourists to enjoy. Martha and her co-worker turned love interest, Paul, eventually blackmail the megalomanic Sir Jack and assume control of the island, only for scandal and betrayal to deprive her of her job. In the third and final section of the novel, Martha returns to a nostalgic ‘Old England’, which has regressed to a pre-industrial state. 

On reading Barnes for the first time, what stood out to me immediately was his range and mastery of language. The prose was rich, evocative, symbolic and, at times, shocking. It could also be visceral and sexual: ‘With Christine he burst into a world of condom-unrolling and menstruation, of being allowed to put his hands anywhere’; ‘she slid a finger into her mouth, and then into the top of her cunt’. His characters engage in witty and calculated conversations (Paul and Martha’s bedtime conversations are a real highlight) and the entire novel is deeply satirical. But whilst it is undoubtedly a ‘funny’ book, there are poignant moments and strands that infiltrate the narrative, particularly when Martha philosophises on her childhood, gender and sexuality. 

The prominent themes relate to national identity and national myths. When Sir Jack asks his Concept Developer, Jeff, to come up with a list of the fifty quintessences of Englishness, he bemoans the ‘character assassination’ of the English that the survey implies: ‘snobbery’, ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘whingeing’ are all traits that potential visitors to the island consider integral to Englishness. Throughout, Barnes deconstructs, subverts and re-interprets powerful ideas about the nation and identity. Attractions and historical figures are simplified and caricatured. Myths are re-imagined so that they are purged of any perceived impurities and made accessible for the doting visitors. Nell Gwynn (mistress of Charles II), for example, is presented in pure and unthreatening terms as a friendly, elderly lady selling juice: ‘her essence, like her juice, had been concentrated’. Yet later in the book the actors playing Robin Hood and his Band of Merry Men adopt their roles so readily that they literally become outcasts, stealing livestock and shooting arrows, ‘rebelling against the Project, against .. [the].. repositioning of the myth’. 

England, England is a complicated and multi-faceted novel that is both unwaveringly critical and farcical. I will definitely be returning to Barnes in the near future.