The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

I've always been suspicious of the Booker Prize: a solid, stick-in-the-mud reward to literary doggedness and middlebrow worthiness that guarantees reading matter for the leafy home counties if nothing else. As a Nobel Prize lite it tends to award writers for what they mean rather than what they write. 

Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question has a central question that falls perfectly in the Booker court: what is Jewishness? And what does it mean to be Jewish in England today? It's a question that it signally fails to answer.

Jacobson's method in posing this question is to tell the story of three men and the women who orbit them (my language here merely reflects the novel's sexism rather than my own - I'm a new man , to quote Roots Manuva). 
The men in question are: Julian Treslove, professional double; Sam Finkler, media philosopher; and Libor Sevcik, a Czech emigre and schoolteacher turned gossip columnist. 

And that's where the problems start. These people are completely implausible, and live in a world that seems to exist at best in parallel to the real one, at worst not at all. Libor lives in a grand "apartment" looking out over Regent's Park (but who in England says apartment when "flat" will do?). Likewise Julian Treslove's "apartment" is not in Hampstead, but rather in a place that people merely claim to be Hampstead. Very funny to people who live in Hampstead maybe, but for people who couldn't even afford a terraced house in any of London's grottiest boroughs (i.e. most of us) the humour is pretty much academic. 
Yes, in this book we are in the charmed circle of the do-nothing, loll-about arty-farty rich - people who for no good reason have large "apartments" in St. John's Wood, take on and drop BBC jobs at a whim and for whom money is no object and no concern. 

Added to that, Howard Jacobson's powers of description at no point ruffle the slick surface of the verbiage. It's all talk. I longed for a brief passage of description, and curt, indicative sentence that telegraphically summarized a feeling, a state of mind, the overall tilt of the narrative. But there's nothing of the sort. It's all anecdote after anecdote. In fact I have to wonder whether it's a novel at all. 

The result is a storyline that meanders like a slow-moving river without the slightest danger of penury, dearth or excitement. We are in a world of talkers, or tale tellers, of babblers, whose telltale babbleologies are meant to make us laugh, make us cry, but leave us feeling rather…bored. Yes, Howard Jacobson has managed to take one of the most interesting and controversial questions of our time (the Jewish one that is) and make it dull. I suppose that that is also an achievement of sorts. 

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've never been a particularly fast reader and this book was consumed in the smallest of sips until I was stuck in hospital for a week and swallowed the last 300 pages in one gulp.
Jan Potocki sounds like a character that Jan Potocki would invent: nobleman (count to be exact), warrior, diplomat, poet, lover, etc., etc. According to legend he killed himself with a decorative strawberry from the top of his silver sugar canister. Each day he filed away at it for a few strokes and when he it was through he settled his bills with said silver berry.
Of course, this tale isn't part of the novel, but it might as well be. The whole story cycle is wrapped in various layer of narrative: a French officer who discovers the eponymous manuscript; Alfons von Worden, the young Flemish nobleman on whom the story centres; and the various other protagonists whose stories we are party to.
Initially the book delivers well on creepiness and ghoulish goings-on, but as it advances it becomes increasingly earthbound, or rather earth-scouring, because we are dragged from the mountains of Andalusia to Madrid, to the New World, North Africa, Sicily and Spain, the Hapsburg empire, Egypt, Palestine and beyond.
All the while what we hear are stories of the "I was born the first son of a grandee in the largest town in Murcia" kind. They are on some level formulaic, but also charming the lightness (or complete absence) of characterisation. Here action is all.
I don't know if the above qualify as reservations, but I would certainly not recommend this book to everyone. It packs a massive amount of stories into a relatively small space, has a density that might not be everyone's cup of tea, and follows a relentless course through metaphysics, cabala, islam, picaresque and adventure novel. It's also a fascinating meditation on romanticism and anti-modernity that only reveals its true colours very late in the game.
If that doesn't put you off, by all means give it a go. You could be pleasantly surprised.

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The Economist chastises the American right

Not ususally a fount of invective against right-wing thinking, The Economist is nonetheless a newspaper of considered opinions, and the following piece enlivened my ride to work with its mild-mannered obliteration of everything that the Amercia right is doing at present.

Take a listen. I think you'll find it illuminating and amusing in equal measures.

I just love the way that the two rather posh English chaps egg each other on until they come to a set of quite devastating conclusions.

John Adams, Youtube and stickiness: does the Google paradigm belong in classical music?

On a recent visit to the London, John Adams was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week programme. He was in town to conduct the British première of his City Noir symphony, but also mentioned the fact that Youtube had approached him to write a piece for the Youtube symphony orchestra. Unfortunately, they wanted something with a recognizable tune in the first two seconds. Oops, wrong composer!

Read more on High-C.com

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland: A Novel

After a strong start I found that this novel, which was lauded to the skies on its appearance a few years ago, begins to flag. My main problem here is the central character, Hans von den Broek, whose obscene wealth means that he has the kind of existential problems that only afflict the very rich: does my beautiful successful wife love me enough? What is the final meaning of this diamond-encrusted vacuum?

If there were any kind of ironic distance inside the narrative, this would not be a problem, but O'Neill appears to tell it pretty straight. Maybe this is what we should expect of a pragmatic Hollander, but with the weight of his self-searching ennui upon us, it would sometimes be a relief to get outside his head.

Hans is if course a sort of cipher for modern man and the dissolution of the American dream in the wake of 9/11, but it's hard to feel too much sympathy for someone who rents an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel for $6,000 a month and flies to London fortnightly for family visits. Correction: it should be possible for a good writer to either ironise or emotionalise the protagonist's situation effectively regardless of income or situation, but O'Neill's method produces a central character who is curiously flat, curiously incapable of anything but the shallowest feelings. Maybe that's intentional, but a writer like Evelyn Waugh or even Don DeLillo would have made more of it.

Overall a good read but not a great book.

Europeans are crazy and unhappy, but at least they're not dead

Rebecca Hall (Vicky) and Scarlett Johansson (Christina).
Also in this picture: Barcelona

Vicky Christina Barcelona fits well into the "Woody abroad" genre that
comprises pretty much any Woody Allen film not made in New York
(correction: not made in Manhattan). Spain is a series of attractive
tourist views, Spanish people are either having sex, looking steamy or
gustating in a sexy way, so watch out any bland, parboiled American
ingenues that happen to fall into this fragrant and meaty broth.

The film starts with the arrival of the eponymous heroines in the same
city, all of which is told to us by a flat, sardonic narration that
continues through the film, giving an air of Lars von Trier's Dogville
to the piece: whatever happens on-screen is provided with a stark,
dismissive description, the effect of which is to distance the action
(which is schematic at best) even further from the viewer.


The title song, too adds a sarcastic note to Woody Allen's Spanish genre study

What does happen is an absurd intertwining of lusts, doubts and
desires, which tease tall moody Vicky and blonde sexpot Christina into
a frenzy around the irredeemably macho presence of Javier Bardem. As
such it's not a bad effort: the girls loosen up under the Spanish sun,
and Bardem hams it up as the unshaven, bacchanalian stereotype of
masculinity. But the whole operation is so diagrammatic and so undercut
by the cruel narration that you have to start wondering what Woody
really thinks that he is doing.

That only really becomes apparent when Penelope Cruz hits the screen
and saves the film. My god, I am really turning into a big PC fan.
She seems to be capable of doing anything, saving anything, and here,
as Bardem's ex-wife Maria Elena she breaks through the film's study of
types with a performance that is as absurd as it is riveting. Somehow,
despite her unbelievably exaggerated manner, she seems to be the only
real person on the screen, while the others are just playing their parts.

So the film keeps going, people do stuff and the narrator's deadpan,
snarky manner reminds us that it's all ridiculous, all pretty pointless, like.
When the film does finish, the statement it makes appears to be
pretty bleak too. Vicky returns to America, to live with the husband
that she does not love, Christina goes back too, still searching,
having been unable to find satisfaction, even in a pre-lapsarian menage
a trois.

I might be completely wrong, but it seems that the wider point that
Woody is making is pretty unfavourable about his fellow Americans:
Barcelona offers both girls a glimpse of how life could be, and both of
them are too scared to seize it. The Spanish people in the film (who
are of course cartoon Spaniards) by contrast carry on with their
crazed, passion-filled existences. They might not be very happy, but
they are very much alive.

I have to declare that I'm a very big Woody Allen fan and would be
prepared to watch anything that he makes. Sometimes that leads to great
pleasure (as in the classics of the late seventies and early eighties),
and sometimes to confusion and boredom (as in the execrable Match
Point, which I really hated). Vicky Christina Barcelona is neither a
high water mark nor a low tide on that scale, but it is a work apart.
It seems to be that it's much darker than most of Woody's
output, a deeply alienated analysis of what is wrong with America (we're
talking tail-end Bush era here),albeit through the means of desultory
comedy. Without Penelope Cruz it would have been a lot darker still.
She's the star, or should be. Next time you take a trip abroad Woody,
why not kick back and let Penelope run the show?

Spoon's nano-rock

I'm not a music theorist and can't really explain this 100% to my satisfaction, but I think there's something very interesting happening in Spoon's music that isn't very present in most modern music, especially in the rock/indie rock pigeonhole, which is where they are usually categorised. So please bear with me and feel free to comment if you have another opinion.

What is it that makes Spoon different from the other 10,000 indie rock bands in America? My feeling is that it's something that happens at an almost molecular level, or, if we see the beat, the pulse as the smallest unit of rock music, it's the nano level. How does that happen?

A few weeks ago I got the change to find out in the flesh, when I went to see Spoon live. And what a show it was. I arrived with very high expectations and they were more than fulfilled. Well into their second decade, the band continue to hone their unique take on leftfield rock, crafting a sound that mixes dub inflexions with angular new wave sounds. But describing what they do as a mere mixing and matching is wholly insufficient. Because it seems to me that Spoon have managed to rebuild rock from the ground up, taking the lessons of dub and dancefloor music and applying them at the most basic level of their sound: the bass and the beat.

In jazz innovation has always begun with the rhythm section - the great breakthroughs of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane were all predicated on the interplay of the double bass and drums. Spoon's Rob Pope (bass) and Jim Eno (drums) do a similar thing with rock, whittling down the cage of 4/4 time to the singular pulse that is their signature sound. The result is a style which is minimalist, funky and inflected. Rather than plastering "dance" affectations over a standard rock track, it is this syncopated base motif that generates their subtle, swinging, but nevertheless rock-steady groove. A good example of this is I turn my camera on from the album Gimme Fiction

On top of this rhythm comes a pared-down take on indie rock, mirroring the pulsing substratum to the extent that it sometimes is reminiscent of both dance music and John Adams or Steve Reich. Put another way, they like staying on the same note for a long time; alternatively, individual figures are stretched and distorted through dub effects resulting in a similar trancelike repetition. The final touch is provided by Britt Daniel's vocals which can range from falsetto-pure to raw and emotional, and deliver often laconic and fragmentary lyrics.

And while the lyrics are sometimes of themselves oblique, their treatment as part of the overall sound further underlines their oneness with the sound, because they are distorted, arbitrarily cut off and otherwise manipulated just like the rest of the music. So you can leave your cigarette lighters in your pockets.

And that's maybe where Spoon also differ from their rock contemporaries. Most indie bands (take Sigur Ros, Fleet Foxes or Tocotronic) or their stadium equivalents (Coldplay, Radiohead) write songs that function on a rhetorical level, building up instrumentation, vocals and emotions in an architectural manner, creating an affective and narrative arc from the song's start to its end. Spoon songs don't usually work this way: the effect is immediate, the sound swallows you, the mood doesn't build in any architectonic sense; instead, as in dance music it circulates, brews and diffuses.