Author: Simon Hammond

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The End of Déby

Of Charles XII of Sweden, who was until 19 April this year the last head of state killed in battle, Voltaire said that he was half-Alexander the Great, half-Don Quixote. While in the trenches of Fredriksten, Norway, a bullet went through his head with the plopping sound of ‘a stone forcefully thrown into the mud’ (according to a witness). Death was instantaneous. Almost equally instantaneous were rumours that enemy fire might not be to blame, especially since the king’s death was followed by a coup d’état and a thorough reform of Sweden’s system of government. Kanem, a desert environment with temperatures averaging 40 degrees, is no Norway, but the demise there of Chad’s president Idriss Déby – reportedly from a bullet wound in the chest – bears a few resemblances to Charles’s Norwegian end. There are the rumours, the bullet wound, and the coup d’état – which is plainly what the rushed succession of Déby’s son Mahamat Idriss Déby is. But the deepest parallel is that, ultimately, Déby was a victim of his belief in the mythology of the warrior king, and in the indispensability of that mythology in what remains the fraying edge of France’s ghost empire in Africa. Déby would never have inspired Voltaire’s quip, but he quixotically saw himself as a Napoleonic Braveheart, a mix of French general and tribal captain. Last August, he anointed himself maréchal du Tchad, symbolically placing himself in the tradition of the maréchaux de France and holding, with a beaming smile, a baton modèle empire (the empire in question is Napoleon’s). But his army is tribal and colonial, not national.

Déby’s career began as part of Chad’s efforts to build a national army, but the country has long had a special bond with that of France. The lands France subjugated at the greatest cost during colonial conquest are typically those where its military’s influence remains strongest, and none took a higher toll than Chad. Commandant Lamy, leader of the French invasion, was killed in battle at Kusseri, in April 1900. Victory there only opened the way for further battles against the highly militarised northern tribal chiefs and sultans, who had easy access to firearms supplied by their putative sovereigns, the Ottoman Turks. It took France two decades to finally assume control, littering the land with ‘here…a Colonel, there a Captain or Lieutenant or an Adjutant, a Sergeant-Major, a Sergeant or a humble Corporal, buried under the sands of the Sahara’, to quote a litany from the British missionary Dugald Campbell. The military imprint was also onomastic. The French-built capital was named Fort-Lamy; Sahr, the country’s third largest city, used to be Fort-Archambault; and the oasis town of Faya was rebaptised Largeau, from the name of the conqueror of Borkou and Tibesti. Just a few years after it was considered ‘pacified’, Chad became the military base of the Free French. The Leclerc division which flew the tricolour on Hitler’s Berghof in May 1945, had left from here with 3000 African troops and 55 French officers. As a result of this feat, Leclerc was the leading figure in the final cohort of the maréchaux de France.

Chad became independent in 1960, though the French army did not relinquish control of its northern provinces until four years later. By then, Déby, born into the warlike desert tribe of the Zaghawa, where men must at all times carry a dagger, was entering his teens. The French military played a key role in the reckless administration of the area by southern Chadians. For many centuries, people in what became southern Chad were preyed upon by northern slavers who established their states on wealth from trade with the Middle East. But for French colonialism, the humid south was the ‘useful Chad’, where school education was expanded and from which administrative aides were recruited. In this vision, the north was a realm of restless nomads and fanatical Islam (in fact, the faith only became hegemonic there in the 20th century) where civilian rule and Western education had no place.

Inevitably, at independence power of administration devolved to the south. Chad’s first president, François Tombalbaye, was inextricably a southern nationalist, colonial collaborationist, and Chadian patriot. In these conditions, civilian rule in the north proved a perverse form of homegrown colonialism. A year after the French lifted their boot, the north revolted. A report which Tombalbaye commissioned from French experts, after a French intervention confronted the insurgency, exposed the extent of the ineptitude and insensitivity of southern administrators. Among other egregious details, the report revealed that women were disrobed and paraded in public and men fined for not cutting their beards, in juvenile attempts at imposing southern cultural norms. Tombalbaye mended fences, released political prisoners, and appointed a government half-composed of Muslims. Faced with France’s failure to quell the rebellion, he radically changed his foreign policy, broke diplomatic ties with Israel and brokered an entente with Sudan and Libya that cut the northern rebels off from their foreign bases and supplies. The rebels shrank from a threat to a nuisance.

Tombalbaye also became convinced that the solution to Chad’s problems lay in cultural renovation and threw himself into the building of ‘Tchaditude’ (‘Chadness’), a sense of national identity that embraced ‘African authenticity’ and rejected Christianity and Islam. That’s when Fort-Lamy became N’Djamena, and Fort-Archambault, Sahr. Tchaditude especially appalled Christians, until then a solid base of Tombalbaye’s regime, and it had no discernible impact on the country’s disintegrating economy. Tombalbaye was killed by a band of gendarmes in April 1975. Within a week, one of the perpetrators gloated on Radio Tchad that the slain president had paid ‘mercenaries’ to watch them, when in fact the mercenaries were working for them. The transparent allusion was to Camille Gourvenec and Pierre Galopin, former French military officers who headed Tombalbaye’s secret police, known as ‘N’Djamena’s Gestapo’. Gouvernec and Galopin had multiple loyalties, including to the French state.

Déby had begun training at the national military academy the year of the coup against Tombalbaye. The following year, he was sent to a castle in French Flanders to receive instruction as a military pilot. One day at the school’s cafeteria, a Chadian trainee had a fit of madness and attacked, dagger out, two of his Tunisian schoolmates. There was some bloodletting, but disaster was averted after Déby lunged at the attacker and subdued him. The attacker was expelled from France, and the peace-maker had to turn in his own dagger. But he had been noticed. Back in Chad, the post-Tombalbaye era had descended into a civil war between ‘Sudists’, under President Felix Malloum, and ‘Nordists’ under rebel chiefs Goukouni Weddeye and Hissein Habré. This wrecked the already tattered Chadian state, which was branded ‘un État néant’ by Jeune Afrique, the Francophone weekly of record on African affairs. (The phrase evidently stung, because Déby recalled it in his last interview with Jeune Afrique, forty years later, in November 2019). It also shifted the balance of power to the north. When Déby returned to Chad in 1979, he was co-opted by Habré who put him at the helm of the northern armies. But if the Francophile Déby’s position reflected French influence, Habré saw himself as the man of the Americans.

Taking advantage of the mayhem, Colonel Gaddafi had invaded a northern stretch of Chadian territory, the ‘Aozou Strip,’ over which he claimed Libyan sovereignty. The Reagan administration resolved to ‘bloody the nose of mad dog Gaddafi’ (in the words of Secretary of State Alexander Haig) and put up their first covert operation – before Jonas Savimbi in Angola and the Contras in Nicaragua – to bring Habré to power. Ultimately, it was French military support that secured the victory against Gaddafi. But for his own grasp on power, Habré relied on a ‘Gestapo’ trained by the Americans which proved far more lethal than Tombalbaye’s. Déby was at first a mainstay in that apparatus of control and repression, but its tribal structure made it inherently untrustworthy from the vantage of the man at the top. Loyalty to the putative nation-state, of the kind which Tombalbaye had sought to foster with Tchaditude, had failed to supersede allegiance to a tribe or a clan within a tribe (Habré himself is a Tubu Daza). As a result, a paranoid Habré lashed out all around him in what looked like genocidal mania, and stoked the very rebellions he dreaded would materialise. Moreover, he imprudently posed as an Americanophile in spite of having invited back the French military. Solidly implanted via the anti-Libyan Operation Manta that morphed into Operation Épervier in 1986, the French army was there to stay. Indeed, Operation Épervier was never terminated, simply segueing into the current ‘anti-terror’ Operation Barkhane. Meanwhile, Déby, who Habré once sought to defang by consigning him to a diplomatic sinecure in Paris, joined a movement of armed dissidents that trekked to Darfur, in western Sudan, and attacked the Habré regime from bases there. Shorn of French support and with the fickle Americans gone, Habré decamped to Senegal and Déby took power in December 1990.

To fully get rid of Habré, Déby mounted a commission that was given free rein to investigate the atrocities perpetrated under him. The official report, which established that upwards of 40,000 people had died in Chad’s gaols between 1982 and 1990, started a long-haul process against Habré – the Senegalese state strenuously resisted getting involved – which finally succeeded in the 2010s. But if the investigation-cum-report stoked hopes that Déby would be a different kind of ruler, disillusionment was swift. Deaths in prison, unrestrained police brutality, torture, ‘compulsory disappearances’ (the phrase is used by human-rights advocates) and other features of the Habré tyranny were soon restored. Compulsory disappearances are the result of inadvertent deaths occasioned by torture, when the damaged body becomes an embarrassment for the regime. This was apparently the fate of Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh, not seen since his arrest in 2008. The charismatic leader of the Party for Liberties and Development was respected across the country, and Déby held a bitter grudge against him after they fell out in the late 1990s.  

With Déby, the French had struck gold in Chad, or at least something that looked like it. Déby did not have the dreams of Tombalbaye, which ended up making the man impossible to ‘handle’, and unlike Weddeye and Habré he knew how to live with French control. If the democratisation of the 1990s was an opportunity to resume the task of building a sense of national belonging, this time through participatory rather than authoritarian methods, Déby was not one to seize it. His vision of Chad, shaped by his political experience, was cynically tribalist; democratic formalities merely looked like a way to fake legitimacy and get the necessary winks from the ‘international community’. This approach led him into the same impasse as Habré, and brought about similar rebellions. But the French always stuck by him and saved his skin more than once.

What did France gain in tirelessly propping up a dictator against the aspirations of his people? Such interests are at first sight hard to perceive. They are certainly not economic. Even when Chad became an oil producer in 2003, the players were US companies Exxon Mobil and Chevron, paired with Malaysia’s Petronas. The main explanation is instead that Chad is a prized chasse gardée of the military lobby within the French state, and that this accords with the Élysée’s belief that the French empire somehow survives in Africa in the form of ‘strategic interests’ and ‘responsibilities.’ It is this combination that led, for example, to French support of Hutu supremacists in the Rwandan genocide of 1993-94, even though France had no tangible interests in Rwanda. The only comparable situation is that of Russia in the lands formerly included in the USSR. Like many a Francophone strongman, Déby understood and fully exploited the equation.

But Chad is unlike any other Francophone post-colony, in that military and rebel violence have become the principal mode of political action. For most Chad specialists, this culture of violence must be traced back to the slave economy and to colonial militarism, but it was certainly at an unusually high point in the years when Déby entered the political fray. Déby mastered that culture, or so he thought. His thirty-year reign gave him the stability needed for the building of a Chadian army, if one of a very peculiar cast. Recruitment is national, but leadership is tribal, and is steeped in the mythology of the warrior figure rather than the professional soldier. The result is a brutally efficient fighting force, especially when deployed in fields of action where such an ethos is absent. In this way, Chad’s military became something of a glorified mercenary legion at the service of the French in their ‘anti-terror’ crusade in the Sahel, but also of central African despots and warlords.  

In March-April 2020, Déby enjoyed the glory bestowed on his leadership of a punitive expedition against Boko Haram, in the Lake Chad region. There he won his marshal baton, and perhaps gained a thirst for more such action. The rebel column that descended from Libya, ducking French drone surveillance by skirting into Nigerien territory and emerging in Kanem, looked like an opportunity for that. He may not have known Dugald Campbell’s litany, and did not think a dead marshal might be added to it.

The men who killed Déby in a barren field 400 km from his capital are members of the Front for Alternation and Concord in Chad (FACT), which reportedly has benefited from the largesse of Libya’s strongman Khalifa Haftar. They claim to be Chadian patriots. In propaganda dispersed on social media, they affirm that the trigger for their attack was Déby’s decision to remain in power for life, nullifying Chad’s democracy. They explained that the true target must be France, and the final objective, freedom. They referenced similar situations in other Francophone countries, and called for an anticolonial rising.

As if in response, Emmanuel Macron, who flew in to salute a ‘true friend of France’, vowed ‘not to let anybody put into question or threaten today or tomorrow Chad’s stability and integrity’. In a country that has been the definition of instability for its entire history, the word ‘Chad’ is a tag for the Déby regime. In 2017, at Déby’s request, France had frozen the assets of Mahamat Mahdi Ali, the leader of FACT, branding the man – a French-trained jurist, economist and long-time member of France’s Socialist Party – a terrorist. It must now help the nascent regime of Déby Junior get its bearings, which implies supporting a manhunt into adjacent far east Niger, where the ‘terrorist’ has retreated. As events unfold, one should keep in mind this is Tubu territory, and Mahdi Ali and most of his followers are Tubu. And there is the intriguing fact that last year, a similar Tubu-led politico-military group, the Union of the Patriotic Forces for the Rebuilding of the Republic, emerged in this part of Niger with an equivalent message of revolt against the perpetuation of single party rule in that country by means of fishy elections. But with the repressive apparatus in their hand and the firm backing of the French, there is little chance that such militarised but distant appeals to democracy will frighten rulers in the two countries into opening the political arena. Déby’s end will be seen simply as a lesson about what not to do. 

Read on: Augusta Conchiglia, ‘Ghosts of Kamerun’, NLR 77.

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The Parasite

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, thanks to a combination of cheap rent, easily available visas, the euro, infrastructure investment, budget air travel, lax drug enforcement, liberal sexual mores, a DIY political and artistic culture, a neoliberal-curious Red-Red ruling coalition, and a storied history, Berlin became a major post-industrial hub for tourists and expatriates, with all the splendours and miseries that entails for the people already living there. Although known abroad primarily for its electronic music and visual-arts scenes, the city also became a popular destination for Gen X and Millennial Anglophone writers, which is why it has begun to appear as a setting for their books, including, most recently, Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill (2020) and Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021).

Because it is Berlin, the ghosts of the twentieth century – of Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Cold War – are always present. Of these periods, the cloak-and-dagger city of spies seems to have cast the longest shadow on the Anglophone literary imagination, as both subject matter and ambient mood. Recent events – CIA spooks at the US embassy tapping Angela Merkel’s phone, Laura Poitras editing Citizenfour from an apartment in Mitte, Russian secret agents assassinating a Chechen rebel in the middle of Tiergarten, Alexei Navalny’s periodic visits to Charité hospital – have done little to diminish its reputation for international intrigue.

This is the Janus-faced city to which Englishman Robert Prowe, his Swedish wife Karijn, and their two daughters relocate in London-based short-story writer and literary critic Chris Power’s debut novel, A Lonely Man. Selling their house in ‘polluted’ London at the height of the market has enabled them to quit their respective jobs in advertising and HR in order to pursue their respective passions as a writer and an upholsterer full-time in the ‘cheaper, greener and less crowded’ German capital. They pay 600 euros a month for their rent-controlled apartment in bourgeois, international Prenzlauer Berg, send their children to state-subsidized day-care, maintain a small circle of friends drawn from Robert’s salad days spent clubbing at Tresor and Berghain and seeing World Cup matches, and summer at Karijn’s family dacha in rural Sweden.

Unfortunately Robert – the author of a well-received if modest-selling collection of short stories – has developed a bad case of writer’s block, which has kept his agent waiting to see the first draft of his novel for the better part of two years. He has had to lean on Karijn, and supplement his income by writing reviews and teaching for an English-language creative writing workshop. But Karijn has grown tired of his self-pity, which has begun to affect their relationship, as well as his relationship with his daughters, with whom he is often impatient and irritable, in part because he blames them for taking time away from his writing.

The stories in Robert’s collection ‘had come from episodes in his own life and anecdotes told to him by friends, family, and strangers he met while travelling. People he had been stranded with; got drunk or got high with. Back then he was always running into people who had stories to tell him’. But thanks to his domestic situation in Berlin, the stories have dwindled, except for one told to him by an Australian woman about her relationship with a man in Vietnam who turned out to be a secret service agent, which probably indicates the tenor of those in the collection. The reason for Robert’s writer’s block turns out to be quite simple. He believes that the value of a story can be measured by the drama of its plot; he believes his own life as an upper-middle-class expat father lacks drama; and he lacks both the imagination to invent a story he has not lived and (if the prose of A Lonely Man is any indication) the stylistic chops to compellingly render the one he has. He fancies himself a devotee of Roberto Bolaño, but this is how our book reviewer and creative-writing teacher describes his idol’s work: ‘It’s definitely not conventional, but that’s one of the things I love about him. He wanted to break the forms, you know?…He took what he read, and things he did, and other things he made up, and…mashed them together’.

Imagine his luck, then, when Robert reaches for the same book – Bolaño’s Antwerp – as a drunk Patrick Unsworth before a reading at the local English-language bookstore. This contrivance, which opens the novel, is the first in the series out of which its plot is constructed. Afterwards, Robert and Karijn run into Patrick again and break up a fight he has got into at a bar in upscale Kollwitzkiez. Patrick offers to take Robert out to dinner to thank him, and despite Patrick having shown himself to be a boorish, violent drunk, Robert accepts. Over dinner and drinks, Robert learns that Patrick has ghostwritten a bestselling footballer’s memoir. On the strength of its performance, he was hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of Sergei Vanyashin, a minor Russian oligarch living in exile in England. Vanyashin possesses information about Putin that he believes, when revealed in the book, will bring him down. There is only one problem: Vanyashin has been recently found hanging from a tree on his country estate. Patrick is convinced that Vanyashin’s death was no suicide and now he – the man who knows too much – finds himself on the lam in Berlin gushing to a total stranger. You can almost see Robert’s eyes widen as he realizes what his long overdue novel’s going to be about.

All novelists are parasites: just ask their estranged family members, ex-lovers, and former friends and acquaintances. If you have the misfortune to know one you should expect that details about your life will wind up as material – gallingly recognizable, gallingly distorted – in their published work, which is why the first fiction in every novel is to be found on the copyright page: ‘any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental’. Realist novelists in particular cannot help but operate in this ethical grey zone. Wherever the line is to be drawn, however, Robert clearly crosses it. Instead of using Patrick’s story as a mere premise – which he could have taken from the headlines of any major newspaper – Robert courts his friendship in order to pump him for information. It is necessary to A Lonely Man that Patrick’s account both is true within the world of the novel and that Robert does not believe him: without the former the plot would have no import; without the latter it would not be able to continue. But Robert’s initial belief that Patrick is inventing the story about Vanyashin makes what he does more, not less, like theft.

It is difficult to determine whether parasitism is at the core of Robert’s character, or whether he is simply an exemplary member of his class. Either way, his political and aesthetic attitudes, as we will see, work hand in glove. The year 2014, in which the novel is set, saw the first signs of the bubble that would make Berlin the fastest growing real-estate market in the world. The bubble was driven in part by migration from the wealthier Bundeslände in the South, but also by that from financial capitals with higher median salaries, stronger currencies and inflated property values like London. Robert knows well enough to express ‘regret’ for participating in the gentrification of neighbourhoods where he once did drugs and partied, but his regret does not inspire him to learn even the most basic German. As soon as living in Berlin becomes in any way inconvenient for him – and thanks to his behaviour with Patrick, it does – he leaves it. ‘This mess with Patrick only increased his sense of the city as a place to be abandoned’, Robert muses from his wife’s Swedish dacha. In these pastoral surroundings, he vows to ‘write in the early morning and take care of tasks around the property before lunch…He would be competent, patient and productive, every flaw – his negativity, his temper, his selfish need for solitude ­– sieved away, leaving only the good’. This is so improbable that the passage reads like a parody of an epiphany. But even if you were inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, one thing is certain: Robert will never learn Swedish.

Meanwhile, 2014 also saw the beginnings of a far more consequential movement of persons: the arrival of refugees and migrants to Germany from Syria, Libya, and Kosovo. Robert and Karijn take their daughters to see the protest encampment on Oranienplatz set up to draw attention to the atrocious conditions at Lampedusa, the Italian island that became the point of entry to the European Union for people fleeing and being smuggled from Northern Africa. Here, too, Robert knows well enough to lament the fact that the camp has become ‘another stop on the Berlin tourist trail’, while treating it just like that. Naturally, when one of his daughters asks whether one of the migrants can come and live at their house, he says no, though he is proud of her for asking, and feels guilty for declining. Robert’s politics are a politics of affect, not action, and as with his writer’s block, the affect is impotent self-loathing. The bourgeois household may take the blame for Robert’s failures of self-expression, but when the chips are down, it must remain inviolate.

Which is why it is unusual that Robert expresses genuine indignation when Patrick, who has discovered what he is up to, accuses him of stealing his story. Robert’s justification is telling. ‘Stories are like coins’, he thinks, ‘passed from one hand to another. When you tell someone a story, you give it to him’. The analogy between language and money is as old as coinage itself, and writers, who operate at the intersection between aesthetic and commercial value, have been uncomfortable about it for just as long. But not Robert, apparently. Perhaps that is because on top of being a parasite, he is also a snob. The reason he feels entitled to Patrick’s coin is that he is the lower-middle-class ghostwriter of a footballer’s memoir, that is, in publishing-speak, a downmarket genre. Robert’s real literary training, it turns out, comes less from his reading of Bolaño than from his decade as a copywriter at the advertising agency in London: he knows how to take someone else’s product and rebrand it for the desired market segment. The personal risk of being in the circle of a dead Russian oligarch may have fallen to Patrick, but to tell the story well, Robert implies, requires the literary techniques of a well-reviewed, prize-winning short-story writer such as himself.

Even if this were true, the writing presented in A Lonely Man would not justify such a claim. Although we are led to understand that the flashbacks describing Patrick’s work for Vanyashin are Robert’s handiwork, there is no stylistic, tonal, or vocal distinction with the rest of the novel. The prose is homogenous and – to use Robert’s preferred term – entirely ‘conventional’ throughout. Power’s transitions to the flashbacks are telegraphed with the subtlety of a cinematic dissolve, as though a future screenwriter were their intended audience. The characters are stock (beefy bodyguards, chatty factotum, barely legal model mistress) as are the scenes (a decadent party featuring ketamine, vodka, and mounds of caviar; a boozy brunch at Vanyashin’s country estate). The treatment of post-Soviet history is framed by Western fantasies/anxieties about Russia and is sometimes delivered in expository dialogue that reads like paraphrases of passages from the nonfiction titles listed by Power in the Acknowledgments. The foundational premise of Patrick’s story beggars belief: if you were a minor Russian oligarch with damaging information about Putin would you put it in a memoir – let alone one ghostwritten by your factotum’s old university friend who speaks no Russian and knows nothing about international financial crime? No, you’d leak it as soon as you could to the Russia desk at, say, the Guardian.

Early in A Lonely Man, Robert reads a novel by a ‘woman who had written about a strange real-life encounter with an ex-lover, and a sequence of subsequent conversations she had about it with her family and friends. She made it clear in the text where she had departed from actual events and where she returned to them, but did so in a way that made everything – the declared fiction as well as the declared fact – feel much more real and consequential than a conventional novel’. Power employs this template for Robert’s encounter with Patrick, but in his hands it produces the opposite effect. Because he uses close third- rather than a first-person perspective from the outset, the reader is unlikely to mistake Robert for an actual person, his meeting with Patrick as a ‘real-life encounter’, or anything either says as a ‘declared fact’. Parsing the differences between the ‘first-order fictions’ (what we are told directly about Robert) and the ‘second-order fictions’ (what we are told about Vanyashin via Patrick via Robert) draws attention to Robert’s status as a fiction and not away from it, which in turn diminishes the consequence of knowing what is real in the world of the novel and what is not. A Lonely Man is not, as its protagonist would have it, a series of ‘stacked realities’, but a series of stacked fictions, and with no formal differentiation between ontological registers, the stack collapses on itself. Ultimately the buck stops with Robert, who would do well to remember that just as with coins and stories, literary techniques that are passed between too many hands end up being worn featureless and smooth.

What about Power? Novelists generally dislike when readers judge the morality of their characters ­­– after all, to present a repellent worldview is not to endorse it – and this is often treated as a sign that the reader lacks the sophistication to know the difference. But the dirty secret of middlebrow literary fiction is that moral readings are just as often generated by its own genre conventions. In the absence of compensatory literary pleasures (e.g. an exemplary prose style, formal innovation, insight into the human condition or contemporary life) or compensatory genre pleasures (i.e. entertainment) moral judgment becomes a way of answering the question all novels must answer: why am I reading this? While there are indications that Power is aware how contemptible his protagonist is, hermetically sealing the reader in Robert’s oblivious consciousness limits his reader’s ability to view his novel as satire, or to enjoy sympathizing with the villain. Worse still, the novel’s structure reproduces the ostensible object of its critique – Robert’s parasitism – at the level of its form. In A Lonely Man metafiction is nothing more than the name for the process by which the conventions of a putatively tired upmarket genre (literary novel about the bourgeois family) can suck the blood out of the conventions of a putatively vital downmarket genre (spy thriller) without doing any damage to its status. There is, however, another, less flattering name for it: gentrification.

Read on: Ryan Ruby, ‘Reading the Room’.  

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Untangle Yourself

Aged sixteen, I read Gwendoline Riley’s Cold Water for the first time, inhaling it over the course of two days, and then read Sick Notes and then Cold Water again. Her first two novels detailed a world I knew well as a teenager: afternoons in Manchester’s Central Library; nights at the Star and Garter; short-lived flings. They felt important to me in a way that few others did at the time. Perhaps for this reason I’ve felt uneasy about writing on her work. At what point does familiarity shade into overfamiliarity; overfamiliarity into a critical handicap?

For example: up until re-reading Riley’s novels in quick succession for this essay, I believed them to be lyrical but basically realistic depictions of everyday life. Somehow, I’d never noticed just how narrow her focus is. None of the following (commonplaces?) appears in her novels:

  • Groups of friends
  • Sexual pleasure being experienced by a woman
  • Full meals being enjoyed by a protagonist or her friends (food exists in Riley’s work but only as an optional extra. Characters consider buying chocolate bars and then don’t; gaze into empty fridges; talk about the sum total of what they ate on the previous day: ‘half a cabbage, shredded’. Full meals are coded as either suburban – and so associated with the protagonist’s mother and tense restaurant scenes – or bestial, and so associated with characters the protagonist finds repugnant, such as the father in First Love (2017), who dies from overeating)
  • Queer women
  • White-collar work
  • Close relationships with siblings
  • Happiness for no particular reason, just because
  • Sport
  • Pets
  • Non-terrible holidays (i.e. for relaxation, not for escape/to pursue someone who is bad for you)

I could go on. Until her latest novel, My Phantoms, Riley has zeroed in on the same handful of themes: unhappy love affairs; life when books and films feel more real and more vital than the people and places around you; British cities (largely Manchester in the early novels); and the protagonist’s difficult relationship with her parents.

Riley grew up on the Wirral but published her debut, Cold Water (2002), while studying in Manchester in her early twenties. You get the sense in interviews that she doesn’t think much of her early work, but that short and sharp first novel set a blueprint for the next four. Cold Water, Sick Notes (2004), Joshua Spassky (2007), Opposed Positions (2012), First Love (2017) – each is told in the first-person by a female narrator who seems set to a different frequency than the world around her. She’s usually over-sensitive, preoccupied with questions of authenticity, bleakly funny.

Minor biographical details and supporting characters vary, but the novels all riff on what are effectively the same three characters (or four, if you read the American man in Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky and Opposed Positions as the same character, which I do). There’s the protagonist and there’s always the protagonist’s mother – an extroverted woman who was physically and emotionally abused by her first husband, the protagonist’s father. Then there’s the protagonist’s father, who is a dim-witted bully.

My Phantoms marks a radical break inasmuch as it strips this already minimal focus back even further: her usual handful of topics is slashed to just one. Placed under the microscope is the protagonist’s mother, Hen, ‘a person without bearings’. As per her daughter Bridget’s perspective, Hen is petulant, self-absorbed, incapable of an original thought, much less an original sentence, desperately insecure and allergic to the idea of therapy. Riley – always at her sharpest when writing about contempt – reaches blistering heights. ‘My mother loved rules’, she writes. ‘She loved rules and codes and fixed expectations. I want to say – as a dog loves an airborne stick’.

Unlike in previous novels, we are only granted access to the protagonist insofar as Bridget relates to her mother (for instance, we’re never explicitly told what Bridget’s job is – it is hinted that she’s probably a university lecturer). It struck me that this might be a clever reversal of the cliché that it’s disorientating for children to imagine their parents living before they themselves existed. As such, we only get the narrator-as-daughter, rather than a fleshed-out character. It gives the novel the sort of tidy claustrophobia typical of rooms devised by Bond villains, walls sliding in on each other.

It isn’t meant as a swipe when I say the outlook in these works is essentially teenage. It’s not that Riley’s work is emotionally stunted, only that her protagonists seem to operate much as Salinger’s do, within a strict self-imposed moral framework (if weaving in Salinger here seems like a stretch – as per a 2004 interview with Riley: ‘I love Salinger most of all’, ‘Buddy Glass…gives me a whole other kind of feeling, some kind of sense in my soul’). Of course, self-adopted rules – as opposed to the social ones followed by Bridget’s mother – are not in and of themselves teenage. But they often stem from that specific moment in life when you venture out into the world for the first time, encountering the inauthenticity and ugliness which governs much of adult life. Devising and imposing rules becomes a way to reassure yourself: I won’t be like that; I won’t become a phony; I won’t lose my dignity.

These self-imposed rules crop up a lot in Riley’s novels: ‘Lose your temper and lose the fight. That’s a life rule, but it’s hard to keep to’ (Cold Water). ‘I just can’t endure conversations which aren’t conversations. I won’t have any part of that’ (Sick Leave). On learning of the protagonist’s habit of not getting into relationships, her lover has the measure of her: ‘So, what, is that a policy decision?’ (Joshua Spassky). ‘Untangle yourself. Stop saying you love him. You’re wearing a groove in your mind. Say it when you mean it. Save money’ (First Love).

Arguably, the first rule of the Riley canon is this one: ‘leave the things that make you lonely. At all costs, leave’ (Sick Leave). Her novels are clear on how a self-respecting person should conduct themselves – this is a lesson imparted through Riley’s protagonists, who have a difficult decision to reach. They can make ugly moral compromises: have passive sex with men they don’t feel much for or escape to America or pursue someone who doesn’t treat them well. Or they can stay true to themselves and make peace with their loneliness, refuse to lower their standards, because what’s the point? As Natalie puts it in Joshua Spassky’s most third-whiskey-at-4am sentence: ‘When you hold another person, I think you’re only ever holding onto your own fathomless situation.’ 

This, I remember vividly from my own teenage years: some persistent hunch that connection was rare, that self-reliance was the main thing. Where did this stem from? Certainly not from inner grit – nobody would consider me ruggedly independent, nor was it contextual (I had and have a close-knit family; an instinct for intense friendships). All the same, the memories that linger from those years are of facing down strange and unsettling scenes on my own: after one ugly incident, buying a bus ticket so I could cry on the top deck – if I had cried in my bedroom, the friends I was living with would have wanted to know what was wrong. So maybe this was why Riley’s novels appealed so much. They deliver a very particular kind of happy ending: her protagonists typically end the novel alone, having achieved some sort of self-sufficiency.

But while the first rule leads to Riley’s version of a happy ending, it creates an issue for her mothers and daughters. They share one key characteristic: they’re lonelier than anyone else in these novels, all the way down to the marrow. The tension between them stems from their markedly different reactions to this loneliness. As per her rule, The Daughter curls in on herself, lives through novels and films and writing, tries to find a hard centre of self-reliance. In contrast, The Mother grows sadder and more desperate, looks for distraction in the form of second husbands, cocktails, new homes, holidays. Riley’s first rule has always meant The Daughter responds to The Mother’s coping strategies with a degree of contempt. In My Phantoms, it has blossomed into full-blown repugnance.

This is a shame. For me, the strongest parts of Riley’s canon on The Mother are the passages that function like that optical illusion which in one moment looks like a vase and the next you realize is two faces. The best passages are those where you think: The Mother is a monster! And, simultaneously: The Daughter is a monster! I love the part in Cold Water where Carmel tries to help her hoarder-mother by cleaning out the fridge, and her mother, who presumably has a better sense of the family’s finances, grows desperate and starts rummaging through the bin bag trying to salvage anything still edible, an image so offensive to Carmel that she pours the bin bag’s contents over her mother’s bed in a rage. Is the best moment of Opposed Positions the mother’s attempt to be ‘practical’ when child-Aislinn reports that she doesn’t have any friends, feels lonely, and suspects she doesn’t exist? When she tries to draw up a list of pragmatic solutions to these existential feelings on the cardboard from a packet of KitKats? Probably, though I also enjoy the exchange when Aislinn refuses to look at photos of the mother’s city breaks with her second husband: ‘“You’re so rude,” she’d say. “Why are you so bloody rude?” Once I came out and said it: “Because you terrify me and I can’t stand it”. “Well then”, she said, “then you must pretend to be interested, like a normal, civilised grown-up.”’

There are moments in My Phantoms when Bridget’s own moral failings in the relationship are implicated. But largely, the novel seems to flatten this complexity. Bridget is a Riley protagonist in outlook, if in not much else. All of the romantic struggles of before? Gone: Bridget has been with the same man for years. Money problems? None to speak of. Moments of desperate neuroticism or loneliness? Quite the opposite, she is quietly satisfied with her lot. Bridget, with her steady outer and inner life, seems largely above criticism.

In contrast, Riley has turned the dial up in creating Hen. Hen is The Mother, but in the worst condition we’ve seen her yet. She is now 68 years old, alone and simultaneously incapable of being alone; living in a ‘student block in a student area’ in Manchester, having been exiled from Liverpool by her brutish second ex-husband. She has a full social calendar and no real friends. She has health issues. She’s The Mother at her most fragile and most infuriating.

The novel also boasts a character who seems to have been invented purely to confirm to the reader – as if intent on winning an argument – that Hen’s awfulness isn’t Bridget’s delusion. On learning that a Riley protagonist is happily coupled up, the reader is agog: what is Riley’s idea of a pleasant man? The Riley canon has boasted approximately as many over the years as it has unicorns. So imagine the disappointment when you realize that John is basically a cipher. The only time you get to hear him speak at any length, it’s about Hen, and his voice is practically indistinguishable from Bridget’s. Conveniently, he’s a therapist, which means his thoughts (‘She’s clearly frightened of engaging. That’s a sad thing. A sad and defensive thing.’) are not just an opinion, but something approximating a diagnosis.

In the earlier novels, there’s a sense that the protagonist is deeply preoccupied with her mother, despite the mother’s failings. In Cold Water, Carmel’s brother suggests that their mum probably didn’t confide in her about re-initiating contact with an old ex-boyfriend ‘because you’d get all obsessed and weird over it’. There’s a sad passage in First Love about Neve trying to get close to her mother as a child, trying to kiss her mum’s bare feet, who reacts with horror (‘“That’s like what a…boyfriend would do,” she said. “Not your daughter. No.”’). That there’s none of this in My Phantoms doesn’t ring entirely true: why lavish so much attention on someone you despise so completely?

Maybe I’m being unfair. The position the novel espouses is an interesting, if chilling one: real connection is challenging, if not basically impossible with certain people. Conversation is 90% showboating, we talk at cross purposes, we make microscopic digs at each other. My Phantoms is a real book, as per that hoary Kafka definition (‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us’). I don’t care how healthy your connection with your mother is or was – it’s impossible to read My Phantoms and not feel something.

All the same. My Phantoms, which is largely composed of vignettes showing Hen at her worst, made me think of a trope from Riley’s earlier novels.

Cold Water: ‘Dad always seemed to photograph Mum when she was off guard; when she’d woken up, when she’d come in from shopping. He thought it was funny. He was trying to get one over on her. That’s why they’re ugly pictures.’

Opposed Positions: ‘He liked to take photographs, too. I know that was a craze for a while. Whenever she was harried or un-made-up would do: when she was cooking, or when she was ill. When she was on the toilet was a favourite (he unscrewed the lock from the bathroom door the day they moved in).’

It’s a brilliant novel, but it’s horrible, too – the book-length equivalent of photographing The Mother on the toilet (a scene Riley already wrote in First Love). Riley has always been especially skilled at psychological minutiae: at teasing out a character’s pretensions, self-delusions, desperations. To train that attention exclusively on The Mother at her lowest points makes for an uncomfortable reading experience. Presumably this discomfort was the primary mission of the novel? If so: Mission Accomplished. My Phantoms is impressive as a refusal to sentimentalize a relationship that’s commonly sugar-coated.

When I finished it, I felt out of sorts. I was either going to call my mother that night and the following night and every night that week, or I was going to never call her again. Our mothers are terrible, but I suspect we’re terrible too.

Read on: Emma Fajgenbaum, ‘Memoirs of an Undutiful Daughter’, NLR 120.

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Killer Prince

The Saudi offer of a ceasefire in Yemen on 22 March was an acknowledgement by Riyadh and its backers in Washington that they had lost the war. Biden signalled the grudging surrender in February, when he announced the US would end its support for ‘offensive operations’ there. After six years of bombardment and blockade, Houthi forces are poised to take the strategic central city of Marib. They demanded that the aggressors – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the US, UK and France – lift the stranglehold on the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, cause of a humanitarian catastrophe of famine and epidemics in the country, before sitting down to talk.

The Houthi alliance would most likely have taken the country in 2015, sweeping away the weak government headed by Saudi stooge Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, if Obama had not greenlighted the Saudi assault against them. The war on Yemen began as part and parcel of the celebrations that ushered in the young, ‘dynamic’, ‘modernising’ Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) as the de facto heir of the Kingdom. In January 2015, MBS’s doddering, octogenarian father ascended the throne as King Salman, and MBS was appointed Saudi Defence Minister. Obama indulged MBS’s itch for war as a sop to keep the Saudis onside while he pressured Iran to accept the US nuclear deal. On the eve of the 25 March 2015 Saudi invasion, the White House issued a statement supporting military action ‘to protect Yemen’s legitimate government’ – i.e. Hadi, who was hiding out in Riyadh, having been ousted by mass protests a few months before.

Two weeks into the invasion, Anthony Blinken, then Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State, announced: ‘Saudi Arabia is sending a strong message to the Houthis and their allies.’ He added that the US was expediting weapons deliveries. Billions flowed to Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, DynCorp and Textron (who provided the notorious, UN-banned cluster bombs which the Saudis dropped on residential neighbourhoods of Sana’a). The Obama White House signalled it would also provide logistical and intelligence support, including target selection. British intelligence operatives had already been despatched to assist Obama’s drone strikes in Yemen, identifying targets for the US bombing operations that killed an estimated 1,775 people on the thin pretext of ‘counterterrorism’ during the first decade of the War on Terror. Since 2015, the UK has supplied the Saudis with aircraft, weaponry, training and aerial equipment, as well as SAS fighters. The US has lavished high-tech weaponry and military aid on MBS, with Obama offering to provide over $115 billion worth of arms to the Saudis in 42 separate deals, and Trump signing a $110 billion agreement with the Kingdom in 2017.

The result? The worst humanitarian catastrophe since Iraq. Cholera and hunger on a scale that has not been seen since the last century, with some 20 million experiencing food insecurity and 10 million at risk of famine. An estimated 110,000 have been killed in the fighting, with a death toll of 233,000 overall, mostly due to indirect causes such as lack of food and health services. Few of the country’s medical facilities are functional.

The UK’s arms sales, approved by the High Court in 2017, are on the scale of £5 billion – while its humanitarian aid to Yemen has just been cut by nearly 60 per cent, to £87 million. In this context, it’s worth recalling John Major’s private remark to the late Sir Martin Gilbert that, after giving a footling ‘lecture’ to a tiny group of people in Saudi Arabia, he was surprised to find his hosts handing him a very handsome cheque. Most servants of the British security state understand that this is part of their retirement package. Compared to Saudi largesse, the consulting fees doled out to David Miliband by his Pakistani and Emirati patrons must be peanuts. Lucrative connections of this kind help explain the role of British politicians in the conflict.

As for MBS, Western media outlets swallowed the Saudi publicity, promising great things and new beginnings. The Kingdom was at last taking steps towards becoming a ‘liberal’ state with a ‘diversified’ economy. Notable cheerleaders were David Ignatius in the Washington Post and evergreen apologist Thomas Friedman at the New York Times. As the Saudi war in Yemen escalated in 2016, Ignatius gushed: ‘MBS proposes a series of sweeping reforms. Saudi Aramco and other big, state-owned enterprises would be privatised; cinemas, museums and a “media city” would be created for a young population starving for entertainment; the power of the religious police would be curtailed; and, at some point, women would be allowed to drive.’

When potential MBS opponents in the Royal Family were removed from key positions and placed under house arrest (albeit in a five-star hotel), the Western media treated it as a local peccadillo. ‘This is a man to do business with’, cooed the Financial Times editors in a leader of March 2018. The Economist published glossy ads for Saudi privatisation tenders.

As pointed out by the Saudi historian Madawi al-Rasheed (one of the few genuinely critical voices in exile) in the London Review of Books, this reception was backed by a multi-million-pound propaganda campaign, handled in Britain by Freud Communications and the strategic consultancy Consulum. Before MBS’s visit to Downing Street in 2018, billboards in London were plastered with his portrait, headlined ‘He is bringing change to Saudi Arabia.’ An ex-employee of one of the firms told a reporter that representing a client like Saudi Arabia was like being a defence lawyer: ‘You have to work to get the client out of trouble.’ MBS was duly given a red-carpet welcome and lunch with the Queen. As al-Rasheed noted: ‘No one thought to bring up his destruction of Yemen or his detention of political enemies.’

The killing of Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 made it more awkward for MBS and his state-funded gangsters to maintain this positive spin. Khashoggi, previously a stalwart defender of the Saudi Royal Family, was hostile to the interloper and wrote as much from his platform at the Washington Post. That was his real crime as far as the ‘liberaliser’ was concerned. The victim was lured to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul, tortured at leisure and bone-sawed into segments, which were packed into diplomatic bags and sent back to Saudi Arabia. All this was secretly recorded by the Turkish state, which duly handed over the snuff-doc to the US after leaking the most grizzly details to the press. The Americans sat on it until last February, when a declassified report by the intelligence agencies concluded that it was undoubtedly MBS who ordered the hit. Biden, Johnson, Macron and Merkel – quick on the draw when it comes to imposing ‘human-rights’ sanctions on enemy states – promptly agreed to forgive the Saudi criminal, imposing no consequences for his actions.

How has the Houthi alliance managed to prevail against the world’s most powerful states? The Zaydi Shi’as from Yemen’s mountainous north had long played an important role in the region, fighting both Ottomans and Wahhabis. (Zayd, the great-grandson of the Prophet’s son-in-law, Ali, had led a revolt against the Umayyad Caliphate in 740AD.) The Zaydi tribes were a dominant force under the Shi’a Imamate that ruled the country for centuries. After the fall of the Ottomans, a Zaydi monarchy ruled North Yemen until its overthrow in the republican revolution of 1962. Sixteen years later a Zaydi republican general, Ali Abdullah Saleh, succeeded in imposing a new dictatorship on the north. After 1990, his regime pushed through a take-over of Soviet-aligned South Yemen, later reinforced through civil war. (Yemen has long been more populous than Saudi Arabia, and – though officially Saudi Arabia now has 34 million to Yemen’s 30 million – may still be, if foreign workers are subtracted from the Saudi total.)

In the 1990s, Zaydi resistance to Saleh was spearheaded by Hussein al Houthi, leader of a small clan in the north. Radicalized by the US War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, the group founded Ansar Allah, or ‘Supporters of God’, and engaged in a tireless guerrilla war against Saleh, whom it excoriated as a puppet of Washington and Riyadh. Thousands joined the Ansar Allah’s ranks, taking its estimated number of fighters from 10,000 to 100,000 by 2010. However, clashes with Yemeni state forces were mostly confined to the Houthis’ mountainous home province until the following year, when the Arab Spring transformed the country’s political landscape.

In 2011, inspired by the Tunisian revolution, protesters flooded Yemen’s urban centres, occupying public squares and state buildings while chanting their demands for jobs, incomes and fair elections. This mass movement succeeded in forcing Saleh from office in February 2012. Yet the replacement ‘transitional government’ installed by the Gulf Cooperation Council was headed by Saleh’s Vice President Hadi, a Saudi-backed Sunni, and awash with figures from the old regime and the Islamist Islah party. Their corrupt and incompetent administration did nothing to quell the widespread discontent. Hadi further antagonized the masses by raising diesel prices at the behest of the IMF. The Houthis continued to agitate against it, expanding their military presence across the country and forming an alliance of convenience with their erstwhile enemy – the ousted Saleh.

Though Western powers threw their weight behind Hadi’s transitional government, it was no match for this new partnership. Saleh retained high levels of support within the security services, while the Houthis were able to mobilize their vast militias to march on the capital. Between late 2014 and early 2015, Saleh–Houthi forces stormed Sana’a, seized key political and military buildings, formed a ruling council and exiled most of the transitional regime – meeting barely an iota of resistance along the way. The Houthis’ decentralized command structure allowed them to draw in diverse actors and forge partnerships with Sunnis who oppose the central government. They would have gone on to capture the entire country if not for the Saudi-led bombing campaign, Operation Decisive Storm.

Intermittent clashes between Riyadh and the Houthi rebels on the Saudis’ southern border long pre-dated the outbreak of war. Saudi sectarians had always been determined to crush the Shi’a Houthis, whom they accused of being Iranian relays. In fact, the Houthis’ military training was the fruit of decades of struggle against Saleh, not from any foreign backer. By instigating the brutal bombing and blockade campaign against them, MBS hoped to assert his authority in the region, pose as Yemen’s saviour and impress the Israelis (who also regarded the Houthis as an Iranian pawn). ‘Liberated’ from Saleh–Huthi control, southern Yemen quickly deteriorated into a morass of competing militias under loose Emirati supervision. A military stalemate ensued.

Despite constant Saudi cluster-bombing – targeting civilian gatherings, schools, medical facilities, key infrastructure and ancient heritage sites – the Houthis held on in their urban strongholds. Hadi remained president in name only, living under effective house arrest in Riyadh. After two fraught years, the Houthis’ alliance with Saleh predictably unravelled. The former accused the latter of conspiring with the Saudis and Emiratis, and a series of clashes broke out in Sana’a culminating in Saleh’s assassination in December 2017. From this point on his loyalists were marginalized, leaving Ansar Allah as the only significant rival to the Saudi coalition.

Despite their shortcomings, the Houthis continue to enjoy more popular support than the Saudi-led forces of aggression for reasons that are both historical and immediate. Yemen is one of the oldest countries in the region, unlike the real-estate kingdoms and sheikdoms first set up by the British and later the US. The country has a distinctive cultural memory, visible everywhere in its astonishing early Islamic architecture. Much of the population views the Houthis as the sole defenders of this sovereign legacy. Their control of cities like Sana’a, Saada and Taiz – along with the country’s most densely populated governates – is based on this deeply rooted perception, as well as the more imminent necessity of resisting the Wahhabi Kingdom.

In their support for this murderous war, the US and UK have found a willing servant in the UN, which continues to recognize Hadi’s government as Yemen’s rightful rulers despite its non-existent mandate. The UN Security Council has imposed sanctions on the Houthis and Saleh, but not on Hadi’s forces or their foreign allies. It has removed the Saudi coalition from its blacklist of actors violating children’s rights, despite hundreds of children being killed each year by anti-Houthi airstrikes; winked at the Saudis’ obstruction of humanitarian aid; and steadfastly passed resolutions which call for absolute Houthi surrender as the precondition for any dialogue.

MBS would now like to achieve through a peace of the graveyard what he has failed to secure via bloody and ruthless war. His planes have been downed, drones have hit Riyadh, and his army – designed for show rather than for battle – has suffered serious setbacks. UAE ground troops were forced to withdraw in July 2019, whereupon the Abu Dhabi regime shifted to funding a political coalition based in Aden.

Though Biden has signalled the US will end ‘offensive operations’, it will continue to provide Saudi Arabia with ‘defensive weapons’, which appear to serve much the same purpose. His Administration has said nothing about halting technical, logistical and intelligence operations. By all indications, its plan is still to extract an unconditional surrender from the Houthis while maintaining its disastrous ‘counterterrorism’ operations in the country. To date, Biden’s promised ‘recalibration’ of the US–Saudi relationship is nowhere to be seen. 

In recent weeks, Foreign Office apologists and linked flotsam and jetsam have criticised the Houthis for turning down Saudi ‘offers’ of negotiation. Yet as even The Economist has pointed out, there is nothing new in these proposals. They are stale repetitions of yesteryear – calling on Ansar Allah to relinquish its military gains, surrender to the Saudi-led coalition and turn Yemen into a Western vassal state, while receiving nothing in return. As if to illustrate the vacuity of this ‘ceasefire plan’, MBS decided to rain bombs on several Houthi sites just hours after it was issued.

The brutal fact is that Yemeni lives – like many others – are expendable for US Senators and British MPs, who form part of a chain of imperialism that extends back for many centuries. Britain itself is a satrapy, prime ministers from Thatcher to Johnson little more than adjutants to the White House. Revelling in that status, they would like nothing more than to drag Yemen into their tent. So far they have failed. The costs of this venture have been high for the people of that beleaguered country, much higher than the profits accruing to the arms industries. Yet a permanent arms economy requires two, three, many ‘humanitarian wars’. Yemen will not be the last.

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Yemen’s Turn’, NLR 111.

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Dreamworlds of Catastrophe

Among the most affecting and disconcerting moments in Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the British filmmaker Adam Curtis’s six-part ‘emotional history of the modern world’, is the tale of Abu Zubaydah, the Palestinian national and alleged al-Qaeda operative who has been detained without charge and tortured by US authorities for almost two decades. We first encounter Zubaydah in the context of the Afghan Civil War as he tries to recover from a shrapnel wound to the brain, and the ensuing fragmentation of his consciousness, by writing a diary. This ‘vast collage of memories and feelings’ (amounting to some 10,000 pages) is a testament to a splintering of experience and the emergence of multiple personalities. Doubts about the path taken by the Mujahideen mingle with reminiscences of youth – the jihadist’s unlikely passion for Chris de Burgh is mined by Curtis as he plays the saccharine hit ‘Lady in Red’ over footage of Afghanistan.

Zubaydah is not just playing a bit part in Curtis’s latest survey of the making of our dejected present, he is also something like an allegorical figure conscripted to embody a collective condition, as well as refract Curtis’s own practice of archival storytelling. As the director observes in his voiceover, ‘there was no story that made sense’ to Zubaydah anymore, ‘he was trapped in a perpetual now, haunted by fragments of memory, with no way of moving into the future’. At his bleakest and most intransigent, this is not just what Curtis says, it is what he does, in the thousands of cuts and samples that make up this Gesamtkunstwerk of the archival film-essay, which replays and remixes sundry leitmotivs from the over three decades of work he has produced for the BBC. The wash of melancholy that accompanies distant footage of Zubaydah being led to and from his cage at Guantanamo, as Curtis intones ‘his fragmented memories are now starting to fade’, crystallizes the claims that Curtis has long been making for ‘our’ politically disoriented and perceptually destabilized condition. (The ‘we’ – generically standing in for inhabitants of depoliticized parliamentary capitalist states – is as ubiquitous here as ‘the elites’, ‘the politicians’, ‘the old system of power’ or ‘the bankers’, along with ‘the scientists’, ‘the white radicals’, ‘the revolutionaries’, etc.)

Born in 1955 to a family with both a political and artistic orientation – his socialist father was a cameraman for the documentarian Humphrey Jennings – Curtis abandoned a PhD at Oxford (about ‘how politics got taken over by economics’, he has said) in his mid-20s for the BBC. Initially a researcher for daytime television, he has since the early 1990s made political documentaries of growing ambition. This latest series marks something of a departure, or at least a heightening of recent tendencies. While the works that made his name traced the unintended consequences of world-changing ideas launched by particular individuals or groups – following the symptomatic career of James Goldsmith from asset-stripping tycoon to nationalist critic of globalized capitalism in The Mayfair Set (1999), the arc from psychoanalysis to the focus group through Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays in The Century of the Self (2002), or the political entanglements of neo-Darwinism in All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) – the multifarious protagonists of Can’t Get You Out of My Head are there more for the emblematic significance of their experiences than for their actual impress on events. This is even so for Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, whose counterintuitive figuration as the harbinger of a new individualism allows Curtis to delve into her early cinema career (and the virulent jealousies it seeded), as well as her promotion of the new revolutionary opera, but leaves the complex canvas of the Cultural Revolution painted in a predictable light (Mao’s power-grab, popular frenzy, and so on).

Thankfully, Curtis’s feel for the archive often overwhelms the representative tasks he has enlisted these individual stories for. The more he conveys a situated sense of their individuality – of the transgender activist Julia Grant’s struggles with a callous medical establishment, of countercultural prankster Kerry Thornley’s entrapment in his own conspiratorial fabulations, of black nationalist and enforcer Michael de Freitas and slumlord Peter Rachman as products and agents of a historical violence mainstream England wished to blot out – the more the grand narrative these biographies are meant to embody betrays its two-dimensional character. Whereas previous works sketched impressive if inevitably tendentious genealogies of the present – and were greatly aided in that effort by Curtis’s skill not just as a researcher but as an interviewer – the gain in affective texture in the new series is at the expense of its argument about how we got here.

Ever since The Century of the Self, Curtis has clung to a story that goes something like this: the failed revolutions of the 1960s accelerated the collapse of mass democracy into an individualism that left traditional political parties and elites without a people, sending them into the arms of financial operators and behavioural psychologists to manage and monetize these social atoms. The tale is rebooted here, bringing to mind an abridged version of the arguments that a Régis Debray or a Christopher Lasch were already making in the late 1970s, only with the dossier augmented by the unsparing group portrait of human rights interventionism (from Bernard Kouchner’s rescue of the boat people all the way to Blair’s vainglorious walkabout in Kosovo, not forgetting the unintended consequences of Live Aid on the Ethiopian Civil War). These fragments of our own political memory – as sampled, remixed and collaged by Curtis – are poorly contained by such a monotonous diagnosis, and are more compellingly experienced, especially through the mediation of Curtis’s compellingly curated soundtrack, as historical moods, whose cognitive potential remains at best ambiguous.

The ‘age of individualism’ has been greeted and its demise mourned at other junctures. For members of the Frankfurt School in exile, the America of the 1940s had already seen the demise of individuality and the surfacing of a ‘new type of human being’ – as Adorno wrote in a 1941 memo to Paul Lazarsfeld, his boss at the Princeton Radio Research Project, where the ‘like and dislike’ studies that anticipated the algorithmic manipulations of Facebook or Twitter were first conceived. Even in terms of Curtis’s own periodization, the ‘when’ of these mutations seems rather arbitrary. His animus against the Third Way notwithstanding, the idea that it was in the early 1990s that ‘the shift in politics had begun’ can easily be rebutted by turning to The Mayfair Set, which lingers on Callaghan’s 1976 Labour Party conference speech where, in reference to Keynesian state policies, he uttered the watchword: ‘that option no longer exists’. Curtis could just as well have turned to Carter’s 1978 State of the Union address (‘Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals. It cannot define our vision’). A dogged hostility to what he sees as the debilitating leftist academic narrative of neoliberalism (the ‘n-word’, as he dismissed it in a recent interview), and the effort to trace the mood rather than the origins or structure of our present, leaves an aesthetic of explanation without the required content or complexity – the capture of emotion without the current of history.

There are subordinate storylines grafted onto Curtis’s chronicle that are certainly more compelling, or at least suggestive, than his idée fixe. These include his excavation of the place of an invented folk tradition in Britain’s imperial and post-imperial machinations (which ultimately seems to draw a weird thread between the first Glastonbury festival and the rise of ISIS, while informing us that a biopic celebrating Saddam Hussein’s life shared a director with Dr No), and the adaptation of Timothy Mitchell’s thesis about carbon democracy that connects the geopolitics of the Gulf, the implosion of Appalachian mining communities and Sackler’s shift from medicating alienated suburban housewives with Valium to anaesthetising laid off manual workers with Oxycontin (the material history of emotions, as it were).

There is an irony, most likely intended, in the fact that much as a kind of mimesis takes place between Zubaydah, Curtis and the viewer, so there is a short-circuit between Curtis’s methods – scanning through hard drive upon hard drive of disparate digitized BBC footage – and the myriad projects of pattern recognition that populate this series. This is most evident when it comes to Curtis’s own emotional history of conspiracies, as he moves from Richard Hofstadter’s insights into the paranoid style, to a memo on pattern detection by Jim Garrison, the Louisiana District Attorney who tried to unmask the JFK conspiracy, and into Thornley’s ‘Operation Mindfuck’ and the unwitting birth of contemporary conspiracism from the spirit of the counterculture (the Illuminati presaging QAnon). Curtis also returns to the very real conspiracy that was the CIA’s MK Ultra programme, delving into the Montreal experiments overseen by Donald Ewen Cameron, whose brutal techniques of depatterning, so akin to Zubaydah’s torture, left behind fragmented rather than new selves.

The associative functions of montage, the contiguities of narrative (‘meanwhile’, ‘but at the same time’), the integument of ambient and pop music – all entice us to ‘spot the pattern’, but also to suspect that in the end the mapmaker cannot (and maybe does not wish to) extricate himself from his map. But pattern recognition is also crucial to two other interlinked domains – behavioural science, algorithmic finance – that flourish on the hollowed husk of ‘mass democracy’. Weaving in and out of the series (though not featured as protagonists as in earlier works) are the likes of the mathematician John von Neumann, the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman, the complexity theorist Murray Gell-Mann, with their invention of new ways of seeing what cannot be seen, the logic beneath the chaos. In Curtis, ever since his first series Pandora’s Box (1992), the scientific always spills over into the political. Here, Geoffrey Hinton’s neural networks or Michael Gazzaniga’s multiple selves are mined for their resonance with the shattering of selfhood that shadows the ‘age of individualism’, while the monetization of pattern prediction resurfaces in the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s and the collateralized debt obligations that seeded the crash of 2007-8 – not to forget the place of pattern recognition in the understanding of climate change that preoccupies the third part of the series.

The history of pattern recognition as behavioural management (and depoliticization) is ultimately traced back to the classification, mapping and measurement that undergirded colonial power. The afterlives of the British Empire have populated Curtis’s work over the past two decades – accelerated by the ‘War on Terror’ and reformatted here in the flickering light of Brexit. Whether in the dancing of folk revivalists, the tawdry meetings of the League of Empire Loyalists or the brutal footage of concentration camps and informants during the Mau Mau Rebellion, it’s an unflattering collage. A not very cool Britannia.

Curtis is far from the kind of film-essayism – from Marker to Kluge, Miéville and Godard to Sekula – that would reflect back on the powers of the image. In the British context, the preeminent exemplar is the work of Patrick Keiller. But the affinity between his method of storytelling and his subject-matter carries its own uneasy reflexivity. It is difficult here not to consider the archaeology of Curtis’s own medium. The practice of montage has always pivoted around a choreographing of emotions. Eisenstein, the greatest theorist of film montage, summarized his doctrine in ways that could easily be folded into Curtis’s narrative, just as they might unsettle a narrative that waits for behavioural psychology to foreground the manipulation of selves and feelings. The powers that Curtis explores in the domains of psychology and the various behavioural sciences were in a sense pioneered with the cinematic image (so that, following Jonathan Beller, we can even approach our digitalized attention economy as a cinematic mode of production). Eisenstein himself spoke of ‘cinema as a factor for exercising emotional influence over the masses’, while famously suggesting that film, like a tractor, should plough the psyche of the viewer in the direction of a new class consciousness. The rhythmic montage of attractions is both what makes the filmic or video medium ideally suited to an emotional history, but also what always risks the history collapsing into the emotion, the mood. Tellingly, Curtis ascribes his sensibility to an early epiphanic reading of John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy, along with Balzac and the nineteenth-century novel. It is Dos Passos’s ‘camera eye’, rather than Vertov’s, that informs his approach to the ‘great dialectic of our time, which is between individual experience and how those fragments get turned into stories, both by individuals themselves, and then, by the those in power above them’.

The danger of doubling down on fragmentation or mirroring our disoriented mood is not one that Curtis is unaware of – it might even be treated as a salient theme of his more recent work, from the installation piece It Felt Like a Kiss (2009) through to his last major film HyperNormalisation (2016). But it is very imperfectly offset by tying the tangled threads of history and biography that he has gathered into a refrain about how ‘we’ let the commodified promises of ‘individualism’ strip us of collective agency. Similarly, bookending this series with David Graeber’s optimistic dictum about our world-changing capacities sits uncomfortably with Curtis’s insistence, everywhere else, on the unintended consequences of passionately held convictions. That what progressive forces require is a good story, that the problem is not so much a deficit of power as one of meaning, is a hobbyhorse of Curtis’s, and may also be seen to fuel his abiding fascination with a supremely equivocal figure like National Bolshevik novelist and provocateur Eduard Limonov. In a recent interview with Jacobin, Curtis, no doubt in a bid to épater les gauchistes, provided a biographical clue for this inclination: ‘I used to be a skinhead when I was young because I loved reggae and ragga music. Skinheads are ambiguous characters, and I’m attracted to ambiguous characters.’

To turn to another of the work’s allegorical figures, the Black Panther militant Afeni Shakur (mother of Tupac, who in turn comes to represent the dead end of a rebellion in the domain of ‘culture’), it is when Curtis allows the framing narrative to fade that his emotional history allows us a glimpse of a politics, and of a political emotion, that refuses to be shoehorned into a story about depoliticizing individualism or hollow calls for the return of collective meaning. Questioning the undercover agent Ralph White as she was tried with the Panther 21, Shakur got him to aver that – though he was conspiring for the state and trying to lead the group into a murderous conspiracy – he had experienced their activism as ‘powerful, inspiring and beautiful’. Tarrying with the history and the everyday life of these political emotions, which no amount of elite depatterning ever fully eradicated, could prove a subtler and more powerful way to repair our fragmenting memories than the vague hope for a new ‘story’ that will lead us out of our ‘hypernormal’ present.

Read on: Alberto Toscano, ‘A Structuralism of Feeling?’, NLR 97.

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Signs Everywhere

Agustín Fernández Mallo is a radiation physicist who writes fiction about reality – or about his own pixelated, anti-realist perception of it. In the mid-1980s, when other students were getting legless at the post-dictatorship party of La Movida, he’d be writing all night with the TV on, guided, as he disarmingly recalls in Nocilla Lab, ‘by a ridiculous but not ineffective feeling of romantic superiority.’ He was on semi-automatic, filtering the world that reached him, pouring out fragments and fantasies distilled from TV, pop culture, science, history, the arts and just about everything else, not excluding literature. But he didn’t meet any writers until the age of forty, he’s claimed, evolving rather in his own mental Galapagos while working as a subatomic engineer. From this detachment he has castigated mainstream Spanish literature, especially poetry, for its failure to reflect global (post)modernity the way contemporary art has done – or even as well as the foreign authors on his altar, paradoxically retro figures from Borges to DeLillo.

Despite the striking novelty of his verbal installations, Mallo should not be accused of ‘originality’, a concept he quite properly rejects. ‘All Origin is a fallacy (in this I follow Nietzsche)’, he told 3:AM in 2017, justifying the right to appropriate. He is more of a beachcomber, though one who picks up less ‘low’ debris than you might expect from his assertion around the same time of the poetic equivalence of the Divine Comedy and a packet of Cheetos. The assimilation of Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, informs sly games with map and territory and allows him to call his storytelling ‘rhizomatic’, ramifying with a fluid spontaneity that relies on minimum research in favour of truth in the moment: many of the misquotes and almost-true facts derive from not looking up, apparently, though they come over as deeply artful. Who cares? For him, trained in systems both macro and micro, reality manifests in perpetual transformations of matter/culture throwing up capricious, quasi-mystical patterns; his fictions chart vast processes poking through on the intermediate, ‘human’ scale, with quantum uncertainty built in, free of psychological or sociological concerns. He considers himself ‘above all else, a poet.’ You don’t, in other words, read Mallo’s novels for the plot or the relatable characters.

The trilogy that so challenged the Spanish literary scene (Nocilla Dream, 2006, Nocilla Experience, 2007, Nocilla Lab, 2009 – Nocilla being Spanish for Nutella and referring to an iconic punk song) led to the instant media invention of a ‘Nocilla Generation’ that was furiously disavowed by the alleged members. What they shared was scorn for cultural supplements, loyalty to indie publishers and pugnacious introspection on select blogs. Then Mallo signed with the publishing giant Alfaguara, and his star rose. Another novel (Limbo, 2014), essays, and several books of poetry fill the interval between the Nocillas and Trilogía de la guerra (2018), now superbly translated by Thomas Bunstead into The Things We’ve Seen. If the Nocillas were disjointed and parataxic, expository of a method and a set of raw sources, this sequence of three books is closer to conventional narrative, in a neutral register allowing for deadpan dissonance, and narrated by three practically interchangeable voices; one of Mallo’s points is that we are interchangeable.

Book I is told by a Spanish artist invited, as Mallo was, to a livestreamed conference on the tiny islands of San Simón, site of a concentration camp during the Civil War. After a period of amnesia brought on by a strangely shaped biscuit, he reappears in New York, where he becomes obsessed with trash, the residues of life and time, and finally in Uruguay, following up a San Simón trail of two men and discovering that the one he’d thought was the prisoner was actually the jailer, there being no essential difference from far enough away. This book dwells on ideas of fossils, archaeology, the past – historical but especially organic. Early on, with grainy Sebaldian photos to prove it, the narrator tracks down the sites of old snaps of prisoners and retakes the now deserted scenes, causing him to meditate on ‘the disappearance of flesh’, something the evening meal does not distract him from: the menu ‘led me to reflect on the special nature of eating … a kind of ritual in which … we made something sacred disappear forever.’ (Or not: vomit will play a major signifying role.)

Not only the narrators proceed in chains of this-made-me-think-about. The people they meet talk the same way and notice the same sort of things at the same sort of length, and there is little dialogue: shades of Being John Malkovich, though the multiplication of flat, sententious POVs tests reader stamina to the limit. Still, with this device among others, Mallo’s structural rather than linguistic plasticity undercuts the linear nature of writing. Echoes, implosions and coincidences soon make us feel we are circulating in a single space-time of displacements and substitutions. Shapes, for example, repeat in different scales or contexts: the reservoir in Central Park has the outline of Iberia. The most bravura example of this form of paranoia – signs everywhere – is given to a Dalí avatar who establishes a connection between the Twin Towers, the twin girls in the corridor of The Shining, the two columns of the pause icon on a screen, and (the narrator’s later input) a line in one of Lorca’s New York poems. It stays with you.

Book II is concerned with the shiny idea of ‘future’. We’re in the mind of Kurt Montana, who grew up in the optimism of post-war America, enjoyed killing people in Vietnam, and after training as a pilot (cue aperçus about forms only perceivable from above) became an astronaut, despite having weak lungs. But he doesn’t appear in any of the Moon Landing photos, because he was the photographer. Always the loser, he is now an alcoholic working in a nursing home. As he rambles back and forth over his life, the future shrinks. Archaeological metaphors reappear, such as the bottomless layers of old carpet and lino lifted to clean a smelly apartment, which prompts a super-Mallo moment: ‘All that had happened was these things being moved to and concentrated in that single point … I fell asleep thinking of the universality of this flow of ideas and bodies.’ Subtitled with an inaccurate quote from ‘Life on Mars?’, this middle book is pretty funny, in a straight-faced way, because Kurt is such an absurd composite, and the writer’s audacity can thrill. At one point Kurt recalls a visit to his lottery-winning parents in Florida, to see their latest hopeful project – holiday timeshares. Nothing could dent their positivity, though the complex was falling apart faster than they could fix it. But just when I’d had enough standard satire on an American Dream always-already in ruins, Kurt describes chancing, decades later, on a Jeffrey Eugenides story  called ‘Timeshare’. ‘I could hardly believe what I was reading: nothing short of a blow-by-blow, word-for-word account of the time I spent in Florida that March, except one or two small circumstantial details’ which he goes on to parse at length, uncurious about the crazy main fact.

There are many such almost-repetitions, landmark nodes in a thickening net. In Book III, following an ex-girlfriend of Book I’s narrator (or of someone almost identical) as she retraces a Normandy hike they once did together, elements of the novel’s mythology can be spotted like beeping, unintelligible transmitters half-hidden in the litter of thoughts and things. They include golf balls in space, fires in Africa, ATMs, fainting, fractals, cookies in the shape of a pregnant dog, KFC, three-coloured pencils, and walking in others’ footsteps. Oddly, for an author who harps on the epistemology of the internet age, there is no social media. War itself, despite the Spanish title, is glancingly dealt with as an amoral mechanism, as much connector as disruptor. Avoiding the obvious, Mallo is after what he calls the ‘B-side of reality’: shadows and parallels, the errors and mutations that are most influential for occurring unseen.

One war-related image, hauntingly reworked – and surely the core of the book – links physical disintegration to a helplessly absorbed residue. For instance, the atomised matter of the Twin Towers: ‘It must be pretty strange knowing you’ve got particles of people’s spleens inside you, particles of pens and hair, of Turkish rugs and asbestos …’ Kurt is afraid he’s got a Vietcong man he killed inside him, after a flock of birds that were eating the body suddenly attack his head, Hitchcock-style. The Normandy beaches are full of ground-down bones, thinks the female narrator: ‘all those souls with phalluses surely still residing among the cockle shells, salt crystals and seaweed, sand too … later to be used in the construction of houses, bridges and motorways’; the stains appearing on cement are the extrusion of that human dust. At an exhibition in the Einstein Museum, she notices hunks of melted matter from Hiroshima, fused with the porcelain of a teacup, which already contains bone ash; this compound makes Hiroshima itself, whose people also took the disaster into their bodies, into ‘the great porcelain artefact of the West.’

At the end of Book II comes a version of this absorption of the other that is genuinely moving, because willed. In a side-story whose text has literally materialised on X-rays vomited by George Bush Sr (I simplify), we are in a future Spain turned desert, almost everyone evacuated by air, à la Ray Bradbury. A family survives on supermarket tins. The little boy, then the wife, disappear. Much later the man finds his son’s rubber ring. He puts the valve into his mouth and squeezes, ‘taking into himself all the remaining air, until not a single drop of what was his son’s breath remains.’

This entropic tendency toward the undifferentiated – first, high and low culture flattened and blended, then our very atoms – is not easy to embrace. After all, no less a philanthropist than Mark Zuckerberg recently crowed that ‘we are moving to a world in which we all become cells in a single organism.’ Perhaps we should set it in the context of something ordinarily existential that Mallo once said: ‘The only subject I really care about is loneliness.’

Read on: Owen Hatherley, ‘Post-Postmodernism?’, NLR 59.

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You’re Over

Among Bolsonaro’s first acts as president was a scorched-earth assault on Brazilian cinema. He eliminated all state financing of film production, had the Cinemateca Brasileira – home to one of the world’s five largest film archives – effectively shuttered, and suspended funding for film festivals at home and for sending artists to festivals abroad. Then came the pandemic to put the sector out of its misery: the cinemas were closed for much of 2020, and when they reopened, most of the public stayed away.

All that remained were the online film festivals. These draw support from the global circuit which, in recent decades, has swelled the worldwide audience for art films. Such digital events are modelled on the festivals at Cannes and Venice, but with a broader range of films permitted to define themselves as ‘artistic’ – usually resulting in an aesthetic conformism, even when the subject matter itself is not particularly commercial.

This is the case with experimental films and documentaries, both of which are so well-represented at these festivals that they almost make up an aesthetic category in themselves. Many of the former are positively yawn-inducing, awash with empty, self-indulgent images, submerged in a sensibility of false refinement that makes no real impression on the collective consciousness. The documentaries, meanwhile, provoke yawns for other reasons, characterized by the trudging alternation of archive images and commentaries from assorted talking heads. These works suffer from the same flaws that define the worst kind of journalism, compressing a complex reality into a worn-out rote formula. We are a long way from the shock of Chris Marker’s La Jetée or the anguished tenacity of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog.

In this context then, it is remarkable that Brazilian cinema has recently produced three films as creative and politically incisive as Carlos Adriano’s O que Há em Ti, Rubens Rewald’s #eagoraoque, and Bárbara Paz’s Babenco. All emerged through the festival circuit but refuse to be boxed in by its conventions. All were produced either after Bolsonaro’s assumption of the presidency, or in the immediate run-up to it, and each, in its own way, deals with the deeper conditions that gave rise to his ascent.

To start with Adriano’s O que Há em Ti, which is only 16 minutes long. A literal translation of the title would be, ‘What There Is in You’, although the play on ‘Haiti’ in the Portuguese allows it to be rendered officially as Brazil is thee Haiti is (t)here. A word on the director. Carlos Adriano is a rare, perhaps unique, case within the landscape of contemporary Brazilian cinema. He has made dozens of films, of varying length. He doesn’t go looking for success; he is an eminently personal, subjective auteur; highly educated, with two post-doctorate degrees, his raw material consists of cinema footage itself, specifically archive images. His artistic influences can be found in poetry, above all in formalist verse, and Russian constructivism, both visual arts (Malevich, Rodchenko) and movies (Dziga-Vertov, Eisenstein). None of his films is linear: what generally distinguishes them is their sense of abstraction and, in many cases, self-conscious aestheticization.

O que Há em Ti retains this general aesthetic framework, though the crux of the film is the politics of the present moment. It deploys a piece of found footage, whose motif is a two-word phrase: Você acabou – ‘You’re over’. On the night of 16 March 2020, a black man accosted Bolsonaro in front of the Alvorada Palace, his official residence in Brasília. This is where, heading out in the morning or coming home at night, the President stops to consort with his admirers (police ensure that nobody else is able to enter the area). That evening, however, a man came up to Bolsonaro and said: ‘You’re over.’ The President pretended not to have understood, whereupon the man completed his thought: ‘You are no longer president.’

Having said his piece, he disappeared. Nobody knows his name, his occupation or his motives. Was he an avenging angel, visiting from the future to share the good news of Bolsonaro’s downfall? All that is known of him is what he said that night: ‘I’m from Haiti, I’m Brazilian’. 

Adriano replays this scene with variations innumerable times: he provides close-ups on the hand gestures, puts the sequence into black and white, divides the screen, blurs the images, transposes them into negatives. It becomes a kind of visual mantra, with an accompanying musical mantra provided by the lyric ninguém é cidadão (‘nobody is a citizen’), from ‘Haiti’, a 90s rap track by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Both point in the same direction: Brazil and Haiti share a historical trajectory, their development arrested by the deformation of colonialism. The wider historical context appears through a series of references: Toussaint Louverture on the Haitian revolution and the abolition of slavery; the poetry of Aimé Césaire; Paul Robeson’s political interventions; the Black Macbeth of Orson Welles.

Suddenly, the screen turns black and the film takes a sharp detour to the recent past. White text appears onscreen relating the massacres perpetrated by the Brazilian military during its 13-year deployment in Haiti, authorised by the Workers Party government. On 6 October 2005, troops from MINUSTAH, the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, under the command of Brazilian generals, invaded the slum quarter of Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince and killed 65 people. The film gives the names of the officers responsible for these acts of barbarism, who were subsequently promoted to senior military positions by Bolsonaro. Is it ‘over’? Hardly. O que Há em Ti shows Bolsonaro at the height of his recent agitation for a coup d’état, when he demanded the closure of Congress and the Supreme Court, by force if necessary. Speaking at a demonstration, he roars: ‘It’s over, fuck it!’ The repressive impulse is still very much alive and has now been turned back against Brazilians.

Rubens Rewald’s #eagoraoque – #and now what? – contains a scene, only a couple of minutes long, which is so brutal that it seems to last a half-hour. A young black man starts caressing the face of a white spectator, whispering: ‘Buy!’ He gets closer and closer and, when the two are only a few centimetres apart, he roars – 204 times – the furious imperative: ‘Buy!’ You can almost feel the spittle.

In another scene, the same white man, who we now know to be a philosopher, speaks with two favela residents from the outskirts of São Paulo. He tells them that the intellectuals and the favela-dwelling poor can learn from one another and should join forces to revolutionize Brazil. He gets an unwelcome response: no chance. ‘What, us over here, and you tucked away over there?’, one of them asks. A black girl informs the esteemed intellectual that white academics are paternalists and ideologues, looking to manipulate the disenfranchised. The clothing of these young people almost seems like a uniform: T-shirt, piercings, tattoos, a hat or cap. They repeat, ad nauseam, a question that won’t be evaded: ‘Tá ligado?’ (‘You get me?’) ‘Perhaps what I meant to say didn’t come across clearly…’ ventures the philosopher, at which, there’s a hail of shouting. ‘What, you don’t think we can understand you?’ The philosopher falls silent; white as wax, bald and sporting a Lenin-like goatee. He bows his head.

Scenes like this give #eagoraoque a feeling of high voltage. The rather weak title is a gesture towards social media, an area that these filmmakers otherwise do not engage with. It is the work of a collective at the University of São Paulo, Brazil’s most prestigious university: the critic and writer Jean-Claude Bernadet, the philosopher and musician Vladimir Safatle, and the playwright and film director Rubens Rewald. All are part of the left intelligentsia, a category under attack from the Bolsonaro government and often deprecated as well by feminists and black activists from the favelas and poor neighbourhoods. As Bernadet and Safatle appear as themselves, the film elides fiction with documentary to the point of making it impossible to divide the real from scripted or unscripted dramatic enactments.

Bernadet, at 84, is an intellectual of the old-guard who, in his latest work, is returning to the themes that concerned him in the 1960s: the relations between aesthetics and politics, popular struggle and the petty-bourgeoisie. Belgian by birth, Bernadet was a leading critical theorist of the Cinema Novo movement spearheaded by Glauber Rocha. The 47-year-old Safatle, meanwhile, cuts a rather different figure: a philosopher of a newer generation, public-facing and cosmopolitan, attentive to micropolitical details, and eager to connect with the energies of Brazil’s disenfranchised peripheries.

In the very first scene of the film, Bernadet sees a girl playing an extremely violent video game. He asks her if she likes killing people. Quite candidly, she replies: ‘Yeah.’ Afterwards, we see Bernadet practicing marksmanship and then singing the Internationale in the shower. He ends up wounding himself in the breast with a knife. Safatle, meanwhile, against the backdrop of a shelf stacked with books in French, Greek, Latin and English, explains to his daughter that people’s assemblies are a kind of mechanistic political theatre, but nonetheless an indispensable element of revolution. Without missing a beat, the girl asks him: ‘How do you want to make a revolution without listening to other people?’

The film is full of philosophical exchanges between Bernadet and Safatle, but these frequently become the object of ridicule or contestation. In two of them, for instance, the interlocutors are inconvenienced by the intrusion of poor people: a cleaner vacuuming, and a waitress who serves them coffee. These women exemplify a different species of ‘alienation’ from that which the two intellectuals are fond of discussing. A simple device, but effective.

Equally effective are the snippets of dialogue from various popular Brazilian figures hailing from both the academy and the favelas, including the rapper Mano Brown (‘what’s killing people is blindness and fanaticism: you don’t understand the people anymore, you’ve lost it’) and the leader of the homeless workers’ movement, Guilherme Boulos (‘the people who were holding that space nine years ago have all got themselves a nice little place by now’). But the most damning line of the film is an inadvertent one delivered by the philosopher Marilena Chauí to an assembly of thousands of anti-Bolsonaro students: ‘Goodnight, USP!’ The line brings home that the scene is taking place within a bubble at the University of São Paulo, isolated from the lives of the mass of impoverished Brazilians.

The disorientating alternation between skits and non-fiction sequences underlines the fact that Rewald, the director, aims to foreground contradictions rather than to provide ready answers. Leaving the viewers to draw their own conclusions, #eagoraoque sometimes seems to flail without direction – and may itself provoke some murmurings about the gulf that separates middle-class intellectuals from the masses. Indeed, this is a classic subject of discussion in Brazilian culture, which Rewald, Safatle and Bernadet are seeking to exhibit in its contemporary form. They are principally committed to noting the differences in the language used by the two social strata. As in Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe (Entranced Earth), the great Brazilian film of the 1960s, the ‘trance’ of rhetoric supplants the firm ground of the real for many of the intellectuals depicted.

The third film, Babenco – Alguém Tem Que Ouvir o Coração e Dizer: Parou, is directed by the actress, Bárbara Paz. (The subtitle has been translated for Anglophone viewers as Tell Me When I Die, but a closer rendering would be, Someone Has to Listen to the Heart and Say: Stopped.) Although its apparent subject is Paz’s late husband, the film director Héctor Babenco (1946-2016), this is no straightforward biography; and though it has been selected to represent Brazil in the documentary category at the next Oscars, it is far from conventional Hollywood fare. Babenco does not concern itself with didactically imparting knowledge. Though the film reproduces scenes from Babenco’s films – Pixote, Ironweed, Carandiru, At Play in the Fields of the Lord – it does not identify them. It doesn’t proceed chronologically, nor give the names of those who speak about Babenco.

The film is deeply unconventional, just like its subject. Born in Argentina to a family of Jewish heritage, Babenco left the country in his youth and spent years wandering penniless in Europe. He read the Beats, worked as an extra in Italian films, frequented the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, before going to live in Madrid. Imprisoned in Spain for theft, he was convicted and served a sentence – an experience that he would draw on when filming Carandiru, his portrait of the Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo, Latin America’s largest prison, in 2003.

Eventually settling in São Paulo, Babenco began to sell cemetery tombstones and, for the first time, found himself with some money to spend. He fell in with people in the film industry, and started helping out on set as a lighting technician, a cameraman, a continuity supervisor. Eventually he got the chance to direct, and revealed himself to be a great talent. In 1980 he made Pixote, a powerful denunciation of the plight of impoverished children in Brazil. Hollywood opened its doors after he made Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), based on the novel of Manuel Puig, which won William Hurt the Oscar for Best Actor. Around the same time, at 37, he discovered he had lymphatic cancer, which would afflict him for the rest of his life.

The film, though, refuses to transform Babenco into a celebrity or a cult icon. As a narrator, he is aloof and elusive: he sees himself neither as Argentinian nor as Brazilian; he is not religious; he doesn’t believe in collective solutions to the oppression and poverty in Latin America. He appears – young, hirsute and robust – and discourses on the past and present. He appears – old, bald and with one foot in the grave – and continues dreaming of the future. When we hear him idly humming ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, we feel his presence in the here and now, yet we also feel that he is nowhere, a slippery and timeless figure. 

The images from Babenco’s films ultimately acquire a distinct value of their own in the documentary: that of laying bare this stateless man, this ‘wandering Jew’, this most rootless of artists. The film also lays him bare in a very literal sense – spotlighting the irreducible reality of his naked body. Paz’s camerawork roams freely across Babenco’s fragile form. With no sense of morbidity, she discovers his beauty as he rests on the verge of death. She has composed an elegy, which almost seems to be grabbing her lover by the shoulders, looking him dead in the eyes, and saying: ‘You’re over.’ Héctor Babenco might indeed be ‘over’, but this powerful film proves that – despite the best efforts of Bolsonaro – radical Brazilian cinema is not finished yet.

Translated by Lisa Leak.

Read on: Roberto Schwarz, ‘Political Iridescence’, NLR 75.

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Burning Bodies

The acute, tender personal essays of Megan Nolan have developed a significant online following in recent years. Her readers – myself included – look forward to the publication of her next piece, where we will no doubt find some aperçu that will illuminate things we knew to be true about ourselves but lacked the words to articulate. Nolan, born in Ireland in 1990 and now based in London, specialises in unflinching self-exposure: her articles for the New Statesman, the New York Times and elsewhere are assured exercises in introspection that tend to circle around the body, sex and relationships. The particular feeling or concern to be anatomized tends to be announced in the opening line. A recent essay on what lockdown has meant for those like her, for whom ‘social comfort comes from dating or from having sex with strangers’, begins: ‘In early lockdown, I spent most evenings in the front room of my mother’s house, drunk, staring at a computer, reeling at the prospect of my body being deprived indefinitely of touch’.

One of her most affecting pieces deals with her history of self-mutilation and compulsive biting of her fingers. It is a condition Nolan shares with the unnamed narrator of her debut novel Acts of Desperation. The essay, published in 2019, is typical of her writerly procedure: an event, in this case the engagement of her best friend, prompts her to focus in on an aspect of her life she considers shameful. Her ‘dermatophogia’, as she categorises it, is then traced back through her history – she notes how when single she would let the tearing of flesh become so bad as to grow infected, causing her to be ‘ashamed of what feels like uniquely, viscerally ugly behaviour, the mess of skin and bone and chewing, all so animal’. Violent imagery and polysyndeton are both characteristic of her prose. The essay concludes on a redemptive note – but it is not that Nolan has overcome her condition, only made peace with it: ‘There is no end to me, my body, myself; I am a problem there is no solution to’. It is an elegant ending, and one that evades resolution, lifting the reader from the specific concerns of the piece in a volute of thought.

I return to Nolan’s journalism so as to better understand her novel and its limitations. At the turn of the millennium, the critic James Wood proposed a new genre by which to assess Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth. He called it ‘hysterical realism’, also including within its rubric ‘big contemporary’ novels like those of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo. These novels were ambitious, the kind of work that ‘knows a thousand things’ but in Wood’s analysis ‘does not know a single human being’. So anxious were they to represent the complexities of the modern world that they neglected the individuals inhabiting it; a restless zaniness and propensity to caricature elided the complexity of human beings, when for Wood the novel’s essential domain is the realm of consciousness. Acts of Desperation, by contrast, might be considered as the polar opposite type of novel: a work that wishes to know nothing at all, but for a single human being.

This need not be a negative appraisal. Though willing to consign her own novel to Wood’s new category, Smith objected to his bringing every other ‘big contemporary’ novel down with her. ‘Whatever the weaknesses of the various writers Wood mentioned,’ she responded, ‘I don’t believe he would wish for a literary landscape missing a book such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or DeLillo’s White Noise’. Both polarities in truth offer rewards as well as risks. The attempt to contain the whole world inside the pages of a novel is a commendable ambition so long as the writing is good, so long as the reader feels the attempt has value. To understand just one person may likewise be a productive limitation, and in the broad church of contemporary authors bidding to do just that, there are some outstanding examples: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, to name a few. Whether such books are successful, then, depends on something much harder to articulate: the book’s ability to hold us, to last, to mean something.

Acts of Desperation shares the lineaments of the work by this crop of autofiction writers. Nolan has written of the profound influence of Knausgaard in particular – how his writing gave her permission to write of the ‘emotional minutiae’ she feared were ‘trivial, unintellectual and altogether too feminine’, how she read nothing but his work while writing her own book. The narrator-protagonist of Acts of Desperation resembles Nolan; as in her essays, the writing is intense and introspective, with the camera held so tightly that one catches little sight of the world beyond her own frantic mind. The novel is a confessional account of an abusive relationship that the narrator fell into in her early twenties, while living alone in a Dublin bedsit and regularly obliterating herself with drink. When she first meets Ciaran, she thinks him the most beautiful boy she’s ever seen. But as the infatuation develops, Ciaran’s unpleasant traits begin to accumulate. He is bad-tempered, mercurial and increasingly manipulative. And yet, she loves him so fiercely that his impression on her mind is like a continually erupting firework, burning with such intensity that, even when she tries to look away, she can see nothing but the afterimage of that brightness.

It is a promising starting point: an exploration of the way one’s sense of self might be annihilated by a toxic, all-consuming relationship. Her narrator’s manic devotion to Ciaran is movingly depicted, as every other aspect of her life becomes blurred and monochromatic. ‘If it was possible for me to have lived just like that, no other life coming in at the edges, no friends, no family, no work – if I had been successful in my attempt to boil my whole universe down just to us, burning bodies welded together in a cold bed – I could be happy there, still.’ Larger structural and stylistic flaws, however, prevent the novel from doing justice to its primary themes.

Its narrative takes place over two time periods: Dublin, between 2012 and 2014, and Athens in 2019 (where Nolan in fact wrote much of the novel). The Dublin sections proceed chronologically with calendrical headings (‘April 2012’, ‘November 2012’), while chapters from Athens are interposed periodically. Such a technique might allow for a distanced, reflective view of the main narrative. But tonally, despite the intervening years there is no shift from the voice of the Dublin chapters, nor a convincing change in psychological distance from the relationship. This is a novelistic requirement, different in kind to that demanded by the essay. Other novels might also have inspired more imaginative means of achieving the same effect. Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018) for example – which if contracted to a single question asks ‘Should I have a child?’, just as Nolan’s asks ‘Is it possible to live for myself?’ – embeds the narrator’s experience of flipping a coin to answer particular questions, in an adaptation of the I Ching, the Chinese divination device. ‘Is it that making babies is not a woman’s special task?’, ‘Is this book a good idea?’ Such moments provide welcome interruption from the anxious, tightly focused perspective of the rest of Heti’s novel.  

Often, the Athens sections begin with an aphorism: ‘Being in love feels like nothing so much as hope; a distilled, clear hope which would be impossible to manufacture on your own.’ These bear a close resemblance to the kinds of perceptions in Nolan’s journalism (Nolan has mentioned in interviews that the book in fact began as a work of non-fiction about relationships), but here they do not have the same effect. They stick up awkwardly, neither advancing the narrative nor being embodied or illustrated by it. Though some critics have drawn positive comparison with Knausgaard (something encouraged by his prominent commendation displayed on the novel’s back cover), these succinct lines are indicative of the distance between them. In Ben Lerner’s review of the third volume of My Struggle, he wrestles with the fact that ‘Knausgaard isn’t really quotable.’ The narrator’s thoughts are too digressive and circuitous; one would have to quote for pages on end just to illustrate a single idea. Such resistance to quotation is in fact part of Knausgaard’s mastery; his writing evades simplification. And, perhaps, the kind of thinking achieved in an essay would do well to be just as complex. Returning to Nolan’s journalism between readings of her novel, I found my relationship to it somewhat altered. I noticed more keenly the moments where my own experiences were seemingly condensed into the simplest of sentences. But what of those that aren’t ‘really quotable’?

While reflections within chapters tend to be short-lived and undeveloped, most chapters as a whole end so abruptly as to feel incomplete. I include one in its entirety below:

‘I remember the last meal I ever made for him, before everything changed for good, because it looked so pretty that I took a picture – crawfish and crab, arranged in neat pink scoops of lettuce leaves, lime juice and chilli, a spoonful of avocado, a sprinkling of black sesame seeds, and as I took the photograph, my phone lit up with a call from another man.’

There is nothing wrong with the writing itself. But there is not enough behind it. So brave in her personal essays, here Nolan seems to lack the courage to delve more deeply into the emotional texture of the story she is telling. For much of the novel, the narrator glides above memories of the relationship instead of entering into them for any significant duration – we tend to hear of them rather than witness or experience them. This again is symptomatic of the novel’s close relationship to the personal essay, which must be efficient and terse, providing fleeting vignettes extracted from the writer’s life. Of recent novels, perhaps Acts of Desperation’s closest stylistic relation might instead be the works of Jenny Offill. Reviewing Weather (2020), last year, Lauren Oyler mordantly suggested there was no reason why the narrator’s capsule-like paragraphs ‘should be organised as a novel and not a particularly literate Twitter feed.’ The implication was that there was something missing from the novel which might have given it life – the messy parts of experience that exist in the gaps between the short paragraphs and neat thoughts.

There are several longer chapters in the latter stages of Acts of Desperation though that indicate Nolan’s potential as a fiction writer, where the narrative is allowed to develop uninterrupted. The concluding section, after the narrator has fled Dublin for Athens in the wake of Ciaran’s last act of violence, is the strongest of all. A friend comes to visit, and she is again forced into sex against her will. More so than anywhere else in the novel, here one feels the presence of both bodies in a bed, the shifting power dynamics illustrated by what is said and what is not. The power of Nolan’s essays is transmuted into narrative. Afterwards, she finds ‘he was easier to listen to now, less grating. I was able to laugh along without it hurting too much.’ It is a heart-breaking moment. Sometimes it can feel easier just to let things happen. The novel ends in much the same way as Nolan’s essay on her dermatophagia. While so often it is the recognisable features of Nolan’s journalism that hold Acts of Desperation back, here this is not the case. Nolan refuses to offer a definitive answer to the question of how the narrator will live now, leaving a space for a future that is unfixed, but is at least more hopeful than the place from which she has come: ‘What would I think about, now that I wasn’t thinking about love or sex? That would be the next thing, trying to figure out what to fill up all that space with. But that was all right. That would follow.’

What might follow for Nolan? Might she widen her perspective a little, beyond that of a single human being? In a recent interview, she has suggested that her next novel will have ‘more of an expansive story, and more of a world’. One of Acts of Desperation’s epigraphs comes from the The Divided Self by R. D. Laing: ‘A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her’. It is an evocative quotation, and yet, in its original context, the image was contrasted with another, more disturbing vision. Laing continues, ‘That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from “reality” than many of the people on whom the label “psychotic” is affixed.’ The horrors the girl internalises are not of her own imagination; they are the product of those in power.

Read on: John Frow, ‘Thinking the Novel’, NLR 49.

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Hungarian Liquor

‘Are you a Soviet woman?’ asks Lyudmila Syomina in an opening scene of Dear Comrades!, the latest film by Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky. The question is more forceful than inquisitive. The person that she is interrogating is no enemy hostage, but rather Lyudmila’s local grocery store clerk, a kind, visibly younger woman who, when we meet her, is standing in the stock room, pulling one coveted item after another – a roll of salami, a bottle of rare Hungarian liquor – out of the fridge and off the shelves for Lyudmila to take with her. Outside, other shoppers coalesce into a small stampede around the cash register, buying whatever they can get their hands on. ‘People started coming at seven in the morning, all of this talk about prices going up’, the amiable clerk explains. ‘Are we going to starve?’ she asks Lyudmila, who reacts to the question with a stunned look on her face. ‘Starve? In the Soviet Union? Do you hear yourself? Keep your mouth shut.’

Communication failure between generations lies at the heart of Dear Comrades!, a film that is as much about the personal challenges of historic political change as it is about what happened in 1962 in the city of Novocherkassk, an industrial town located just over the south-eastern Ukrainian border, when price increases led to one of the most violently repressed strikes in Soviet history. Konchalovsky, amongst Russia’s oldest and most recognised directors, provides a clear-eyed reconstruction of this long-suppressed episode, but in doing so he explores the pull that even the most incontrovertibly evil forces have on ordinary people. Through Lyudmila, played by his wife Julia Vysotskaya, he tracks the crushing disappointment that people face when history tells them to move on, be happy, and never look back.

The end of a dark era and the beginning of another; winter thawing into spring: most would greet this with optimism either muted or unrestrained. Not Lyudmila. As the people around her talk gleefully of communism’s imminent arrival, the latest agricultural advances, and above all, the gentler, kinder leader in the Kremlin, all she can do is scoff. Not because of any scorn she harbours towards the Soviet state. Just the opposite. Early in the film we learn that Lyudmila – likely to be in her early forties when we meet her – is a proud party activist, and a member of her local party committee where she oversees the city’s production sector.

She would have first become involved in the party in her late teens or early twenties under Stalin. During the Second World War, Lyudmila went to the front as a nurse where she met the man who, before dying in battle, fathered her daughter, Svetlana, or Svetka. We learn that, for her wartime sacrifices, Stalin’s government bestowed upon her a handsome consolation package: an apartment large enough for her daughter and elderly father to share, a government job, promises of indefinite raises and promotions, and, of course, the material privileges to match her high-ranking position ­– specifically, access to rare consumer goods like those we see her stuffing into her shopping bag in the grocery store.

To show her gratitude, she hangs portraits of Stalin on her wallpapered apartment doors, laments the fact that Khrushchev ordered his body moved out of Lenin’s mausoleum, that holiest of sites, and defends his record whenever someone, above all her daughter, tries to remind her of all the terrible things that Comrade Stalin did. ‘He executed so many innocent people!’ Svetka insists during one particularly strained exchange with her mother. ‘What do you know about Stalin?’ Lyudmila snaps back.

Then comes May 1962. That month, Khrushchev signed off on an abrupt 25% increase in the price of meat and butter, a reform designed to stimulate government revenues and boost collective farmers’ incomes to offset stagnating economic growth. In Novocherkassk, the increases stung particularly sharply. The city’s workers, nearly a tenth of whom were employed by the Electric Locomotive Plant, built in the 1930s as the Soviet Union’s largest producer of train engines, had just learned that their pay would be slashed, in the middle of a city-wide food shortage that forced citizens to stand in line at all hours of the day. Many became accustomed to saving their potato peels to get them through to their next meal. When workers at the plant learned of the price increases, they organized a strike, something which, at first glance, should register as neither a shock nor a rare occurrence in a country that called itself the world’s first workers’ state. Yet as far as party officials were concerned, labour strikes had no place in a socialist country where class conflict – and classes in general – had ceased to exist.

When the factory strike develops into a city-wide strike, workers spilled out into streets holding portraits of Lenin, signs that read ‘Proletarians of the World Unite!’, and pamphlets with demands for ‘Meat, Butter, and Higher Salaries!’. In the film, Konchalovsky shows city officials, watching from their office windows, respond with confusion and derision. ‘A fucking strike in our socialist country?’ one party official gripes. The protesting workers eventually storm the city’s party headquarters and go on a smashing spree, marvelling with disdain at the rarefied foods which the party officials treated themselves to as the rest of the city goes hungry (‘Look what they’re eating! Hungarian liquor and ham!’). ‘Arrest them all’, Lyudmila recommends, unflinchingly, during a meeting of local party committee members, who are joined by a coterie of bureaucrats flown in from Moscow to monitor the situation. ‘These people are extremely angry at the Soviet government, you never know what they might do’, she warns her peers. ‘Arrest them and take them to court, to the full extent of the law.’ Stalin may have been dead, but his methods lived on.

The officials end up taking her advice. What happens next would come to light nearly half a century later in 1991, when Gorbachev called for an honest, moral reckoning with even the most unsavoury aspects of the country’s past, including what happened that summer day in Novocherkassk. As the protestors enter the city square, we watch as bullets begin to rain down on the workers and their supporters. To this day, it’s unclear whether the call to shoot came from the Soviet Army or the KGB, but we know that 26 people died (87 more were injured and 110 sent to prison for their involvement in the strike). Knowledge of the event remains scarce. When I told my mother, who grew up in the Soviet Union and emigrated to the United States in 1987, that Dear Comrades! was about the Novocherkassk massacre, she had no idea what I was talking about.

One of the most underappreciated and – not incidentally – insidious aspects of Stalinism was the moral simplicity it offered. Dividing the world into good and evil allowed citizens like Lyudmila to navigate the cataclysmic changes brought about by the First Five-Year Plan, the wave upon wave of political purges, an apocalyptic world war. Of the many things that Khrushchev overturned when he denounced Stalin in his 1956 ‘Secret Speech’, perhaps this simple code of right and wrong represented the greatest loss. Practically overnight, ‘enemies’ were rehabilitated as ‘victims’, ‘heroes’ turned into opportunistic collaborators, and ‘foes’ into ordinary neighbours, who, after years labouring in the gulag, returned home to haunt the people next door who had turned them in to save themselves. ‘It was so easy then’, Lyudmila reflects at one point, because it was clear ‘who was an enemy and who was ours’.

For a while, Lyudmila refuses to give in to the topsy-turvy moral universe of Khrushchev’s making. She continues to refer to former gulag prisoners as criminals, invests her hopes for society in the KGB, and advises the government to seek the death penalty for the strike’s organizers. But her world view is challenged when she learns that her teenage daughter, herself an employee at the locomotive plant, is planning to participate in the strike despite, or in spite of her mother’s protests. An enemy? In her own family? The possibility leaves Lyudmila visibly unsettled. When Svetka goes missing after the shooting, Lyudmila immediately embarks on a search for her daughter’s whereabouts, a search that continues for the rest of the film.

Her odyssey takes her to the city’s various agencies and offices, each with a portrait of Khrushchev hanging where a portrait of Stalin once rested, the sloppy mounting job visible. We see her visit a morgue, where she almost trips over the bodies of people who died in the shooting, their corpses strewn on the floor like clutter. We watch her visit the city’s army headquarters, where a gang of young soldiers conduct a rough search of Lyudmila, neglecting to pay her the respect that a war veteran, long-time party member and panicked mother deserves. Finally, we join her as she pays a visit to a cemetery outside the city, where victims’ bodies are rumoured to have been clandestinely buried in plots already occupied by the dead.

Like many features of the film’s plot, this one, too, is rooted in historical fact. Researchers in the early 1990s revealed that party officials – those whom Lyudmila would have called her own – had dumped the bodies of the massacre’s victims in nearby cemeteries. Reeling from the realization that her daughter’s body might have been thrown, anonymously and thoughtlessly, into another’s grave, Lyudmila breaks down, a moment that we are instructed to interpret as her loss of faith. In one of the last scenes of the film, we watch as she sips unceremoniously on a bottle of unlabelled Soviet vodka, a far cry from the Hungarian liquor we saw her purchasing with delight earlier in the film. In this way, she becomes, perhaps for the first time in her life, a true comrade.

Yuri Trifonov, a Soviet writer who made his career during the Khrushchev years, described members of the generation that preceded him as ‘people of the beginning of the war and people of the end of the war’, who despite their best efforts, ‘remain such to the end of their lives’. Lyudmila, by this formulation, is a child of the end of the war. Konchalovsky however, like Trifonov, is a product of the Thaw, and is no stranger to the need to move with the times. Born Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky in 1937, the year that launched Stalin’s Great Terror, into a family as close to royalty as possible in the Soviet Union – his father wrote the Soviet national anthem, and his relatives, the Mikhalkovs, were old Russian aristocrats who traced their lineage to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – his life’s trajectory maps neatly onto Russia’s long twentieth century.

His is a rare career that transcended not only the Soviet-post-Soviet divide, but also that between Russian and American film circuits (his brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, also an actor and director, accomplished a similar feat when he won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Burnt by the Sun (1994) about Stalin’s Great Terror). The seeming ease with which he’s managed these transitions is a testament not just to the strength of his artistic vision and its broad appeal, but his ability to acclimate, even thrive in political environments which others would find prohibitively hostile. In his more than sixty years of directing, writing, acting and producing, Konchalovsky has had to navigate institutional alliances with everyone from Communist Party bureaucrats to Los Angeles studio executives to Russian oligarchs. One of this latest film’s producers is Alisher Usmanov, a Moscow-based metal and mining tycoon worth an estimated $11.68 billion dollars – an unusual choice of funder for a film about a labour strike. This also helps to explain how and why he has embraced film styles as varied as socialist realism (1964’s The First Teacher), avant-garde (1962’s Andrei Rublev, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Andrei Tarkovsky), and Hollywood action (1989’s Tango & Cash, starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell). Lyudmila may have had trouble adapting to changing times, but Konchalovsky has not.

Or has he? A consistent theme that runs through many of the interviews, profiles and discussions of Konchalovsky is his refusal to accede to prevailing moral binaries, or to depict his own life story as a gradual move away from darkness and towards light, from unfreedom to freedom. When asked in 2011 whether during the Soviet part of his career he worried about his ability to express himself in the face of government censors, he responded with an automatic no. ‘Creativity’, he told the visibly confused interviewer, has nothing to do with ‘freedom of self-expression; it’s an illusion, for me’. He then consciously upended the interviewer’s assumptions about what the end of the Soviet Union bestowed upon artists like himself. ‘Russia got a lot of freedom in the nineties, and no masterpieces or great films appeared.’

In an interview conducted in 2018 at an election-night victory party held in Moscow to celebrate Putin’s ascendancy to his sixth term in office, a Russian news correspondent runs into Konchalovsky and asks him to offer his thoughts on the results. ‘Extraordinary joy, a realization of my hopes, and I was almost sure it would happen’, he told the reporter in perfect English. ‘And Putin will lead’, he added, a banner with the words ‘A Strong President; A Strong Russia’ strung visibly behind him. When asked what he thought about the thousands of anti-Putin demonstrators who were out on the streets that same night – many of whom were organized by the now-jailed Alexey Navalny – Konchalovsky did not mince words. ‘It’s not important.’ Like Lyudmila, he would not – perhaps could not – succumb to other people’s assessments of reality. For both of them, it’s too indecent, too unnatural, to bite the hand that feeds.

Read on: Sophie Pinkham, ‘Nihilism for Oligarchs’, NLR 125.

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Black Leaves

The German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck is used to living in pieces. Born in East Berlin in 1967, she came of age in a bifurcated city. But even after German reunification, in 1990, the country she inhabited struck her as clumsily cobbled together. When she meditated on reunification years later, she eschewed talk of repair and opted instead for the counter-intuitive imagery of breakage. ‘What was I doing the night the wall fell?’ she asks in her new book, Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces. ‘I slept. I literally slept through that moment of world history, and while I was asleep, the pot wasn’t just being stirred, it was being knocked over and smashed to bits.’ In many cases, the smashing was physical: the wall itself was torn down, while Erpenbeck’s erstwhile elementary school was reduced to rubble. But a form of life was also destroyed, and much of Not a Novel treats its author’s conviction that even now she remains riven, an occupant of both a place that no longer exists and its strange, shiny successor.

Though an uneasy inhabitant of present-day Germany, Erpenbeck is one of its most acclaimed authors. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Susan Bernofsky, the skilful translator of her five slim novels, she is now well on her way to prominence in the anglophone sphere as well. Not a Novel was released in Germany in 2019 as Kein Roman: Texte 1992 bis 2018 (literally, ‘Not a Novel: Writings from 1992–2018’). The translator Kurt Beals’s rendering of the book’s contents is elegant, but its original title might have been more accurate: it is in pieces, but it is not a memoir so much as a collection of essays. Alongside autobiographical sketches, there are lectures, prize acceptance speeches, literary critical musings, and feuilletons about everything from fairytales to the word ‘suction’. Though certain preoccupations (with ruins, with silence, with global injustice) emerge, what ties the disparate threads together is not their varied subjects but their common inflection. As in her fiction, Erpenbeck writes in an elegiac mode. Her sentences are long and sinuous, and she tends towards the incantatory repetition of phrases. She omits quotation marks and lapses into a present tense that smacks not of immediacy but of awareness that the past is eerily eternal, like a ghost flickering back to the site of its body’s death. Still, there are structural differences between Erpenbeck’s novels and her not-novel. Where the former are intricate contrapuntal constructions, the latter frays into straying strands.

In Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, which is very much a novel (and a good one at that), a woman in a nineteenth-century Galician village confesses to her husband that ‘as a child she had long been convinced the world was as flat as a palatschinke, and she herself—like all the other inhabitants of the border town she lived in—had been sprinkled on the outermost rim of this pancake like a grain of sugar’. When she neared the town’s outskirts, the woman recalls, she feared she would topple off into the abyss. Erpenbeck grew up as a grain of sugar on the edge of the East German pancake. Her family lived first in an apartment on a dead-end street cut off by the wall, later in a high-rise so close to the West that she could see its distinctive double-decker buses from her window. In Not a Novel she writes: ‘There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth’, then repeats the sentence, then repeats it again. When the wall fell, she tumbled off. Her recollections reveal that she is still struggling to pick up the pieces.

* * *

All of Erpenbeck’s novels are, in some sense, in pieces. Indeed, as she explains in the preface to Not a Novel, she once crafted a college paper by chopping the pages up and reassembling them: ‘whenever I wanted to change some part of the text, I would take scissors and cut it up into individual paragraphs, shuffle them around on the floor until the collage was just right, and then reach for the glue’. Traces of this approach are palpable in her novels, all of which are made up of chunks of text separated by strips of space.

For the most part, each unit of an Erpenbeck novel – they might be best characterized as stanzas – is shorter than a traditional chapter but longer than the Tweet-adjacent blips that appear in contemporary ‘fragment novels’. Her stanzas are not stand-alone pronouncements so much as invocations of a clastic whole. Phrases and objects break away from their native contexts only to recur as refrains, and what seems at first like fragmentation later paves the way for more complex holism, as in operas in which strings of notes resurface as leitmotifs. Erpenbeck spent her college years studying to become an opera director, and she writes in Not a Novel that her training gave her an ‘education in the principle of collage’. In Don Giovanni, a key influence, ‘three different pieces of music, played by two small ensembles on stage and by the orchestra in the pit, begin to tumble into each other’.

Like strains of music that become intelligible only as they twine together, individual snatches of Erpenbeck’s novels are often confusing in isolation. In her first two books, the revelation of a central secret prompts both her characters and her readers to re-interpret everything that came before. The Old Child (1999) treats a mysterious and apparently amnesiac girl who turns out to be an adult in disguise, while The Book of Words (2004) follows a character who discovers that her seemingly loving father is in fact a torturer. In much of Erpenbeck’s fiction, the idea that the end can alter the beginning plays out not just at the level of substance but also at the level of form. In The End of Days, her fourth (and in my view, best) novel, the characters are not named but defined relationally, for instance as ‘the mother’ or ‘the grandmother’, so that they are not fully comprehensible until their children or grandchildren are introduced. The book opens with the burial of a baby, yet her death is presented as an obliteration of her future selves – as meaningful only in the context of the whole of her prospective life:

Three handfuls of dirt, and the little girl running off to school with her satchel on her back now lay there in the ground, her satchel bouncing up and down as she runs even farther; three handfuls of dirt, and the ten-year-old playing the piano with pale fingers lay there; three handfuls, and the adolescent girl whose bright coppery hair men turn to stare at as she passes was interred.

These various iterations of the baby survive in four extended re-imaginings of her biography (each succeeded by short sections that Erpenbeck, ever musical, calls ‘intermezzos’). In the second iteration of the story, the girl moves to Vienna with her family and survives to adolescence, only to kill herself during the Depression; in the third, she decides against suicide but perishes in a labour camp in the Soviet Union as a young adult; in the fourth, she makes it to middle age in East Germany but trips down the stairs and breaks her neck before the fall of the wall; and in the fifth, she dies peacefully in a nursing home after reunification. Locutions, images, and objects carry over from each of these parallel worlds to the next. A clock and the complete works of Goethe are lugged from one place to another, until at last they end up in a pawnshop in the final version of the story. When the adult son of the protagonist glimpses these heirlooms on the shelves, he does not even recognize them, for an object uprooted from its context is no more meaningful than a sentence torn out of a book or a note yanked out of an opera.

Erpenbeck is intent on preserving the connections that so often threaten to fade into invisibility, for which reason her novels are all in the business of demonstrating how the ostensibly disparate pieces in fact hang together. Visitation, her third novel, is about a lake house near Berlin that changes hands over and over, passing from an agrarian homesteader at the turn of the century to a Jewish family in the thirties to a Nazi architect during World War II, and so on and on until its demolition in the present day. Each chapter is devoted to one of the house’s visitors or inhabitants, and in each there is a slogan that is repeated.  (‘I-a-m-g-o-i-n-g-h-o-m-e’, types an East German writer over and over; ‘humour is when you laugh all the same’ is the motto of the architect’s jocular wife, at least until the Red Army closes in.) Only one character remains in the orbit of the property as the others rotate in and out: the subject of every other chapter is the quiet, unassuming gardener, who performs the same tasks in the employ of various owners. For decades, he ‘waters shrubs and flowers twice a day, once early in the morning and again when dusk arrives’. Every time he plants something new, he digs all the way down to the ‘blue clay found everywhere in this region’.

Like the gardener, Erpenbeck digs until she reaches the substratum that underlies the shifting surface. She is after ‘what remains’, as another East German writer, Christa Wolf, titled one of her novellas. In Visitation, what remains is a house and the gardener who tends to it; in The End of Days, what remains is the single character who thwarts death in four different ways. What, if anything, remains in Not a Novel?

* * *

‘Many different eras are collected in this volume’, the book begins. Like Erpenbeck’s harrowingly historical fiction, Not a Novel ranges over decades, gathering Erpenbeck’s reflections on her youth in East Germany, the baroque music and Romantic fairytales she loves, the recent death of her mother, and the ongoing refugee crisis. Its contents are arranged into sections titled ‘Life’, ‘Literature and Music’, and ‘Society’.

‘Life’ is the most memoirist, the least in pieces, and by far the best. Its contents examine lives and deaths with reference to the orphaned objects they leave in their wake. In ‘Open Bookkeeping’, Erpenbeck makes an unsentimental but never unfeeling inventory of the items she finds in her dead mother’s apartment: ‘I inherit hundreds of slides and 3 projectors, inherit 8 ashtrays, 3 cartons of cigarettes, 1 old cassette recorder, 2 mirrors…’ and so on and on.  She discovers ‘10 bottles of shampoo and 10 tubes of conditioner’, which she uses for ‘the next year and a half’. In a later piece, Erpenbeck takes her mother’s pressure cooker to her country house to bury it. She ends up using it to melt dirty snow into water hot enough to thaw the pipes. Her parting observation is bleakly and guttingly funny: ‘my mother’s pressure cooker has become a pot once again: I am cooking – a soup of black leaves’.

But most of what Erpenbeck mourns has not left such tangible traces. The landscape of the German Democratic Republic has been razed, and in ‘Homesick for Sadness’, probably the richest piece in Not a Novel, she grasps at the few remaining remnants of the country she grew up in and, despite everything, cannot help but miss. She glimpses the ‘small blue tiles that covered the girl’s bathroom’ in the pile of concrete that was once her elementary school and recollects ‘the mechanical pencils that we unscrewed to make blowguns for spitballs’.

These images are conjured with novelistic vividness, and indeed, devotees of Erpenbeck’s fiction will recognize many of the details that crop up in Not a Novel from her other books: she recalls ‘a lacquered wooden clock with golden numbers’ that ticked throughout her ‘entire childhood’, an artifact reminiscent of the clock in The End of Days; she notes that her father was enthralled by a catacomb unearthed beneath a Berlin church, a discovery that delights enthusiasts in both Visitation and her most recent book, Go, Went, Gone; she relates that a Red Army soldier shoved her infant mother through the window of a departing train when her family fled East Prussia, an anecdote also included, in slightly altered form, in Go, Went, Gone.

But Erpenbeck’s oracular register is much better suited to fiction and autobiography, with their necessary forays into material reality, than it is to flights of theoretical fancy, which can so easily bloat into phatic imprecision. Many of the more philosophical meditations in the ‘Literature and Music’ and ‘Society’ sections of Not a Novel lapse into cliché by way of rhetorical questions. In a lecture about The Book of Words, Erpenbeck muses, ‘Can we exchange our history for another? Discard it? Retract it? … Can we unlearn what we have learned, unfeel what we have felt?’ Later, she asks, ‘Is forgetting our only salvation? Or are our stories the only baggage that no one can take from us? Are we our stories?’

Questions so baggy are unanswerable, and Erpenbeck’s half-hearted attempts to answer them are predictably unsatisfying. ‘Time has the power to separate us, not only from others, but also from ourselves’, she ventures. Later, she reflects, ‘When we read – and when we write, too – we have to live with the fact that the world can’t be divided into good and evil, into wins and losses’. This is about as pat a commendation for complexity as I can imagine. But no matter: Erpenbeck defies her own injunction seventy pages later in a decidedly moralistic lecture about the plight of refugees in Europe (a topic treated with more nuance and less sanctimony in Go, Went, Gone, in which a retired professor becomes enraged by Germany’s unjust asylum policies when he befriends a number of displaced African men). That her largely leftist diagnosis of the situation is, by my lights, correct is not enough to reconcile me to maudlin and meaningless talk of how ‘much we can lose without losing ourselves’.

In the end, Not a Novel is worth reading more because it sheds light on Erpenbeck’s ornate novels than because it coheres in its own right. It does not do justice to Erpenbeck at her most majestic. Sometimes it is sharp, and sometimes it is cloying, but the shattered pieces never quite come together.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘A New Germany?’, NLR 57.