Category: European Literature

The Best Kind of Modern Life – Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection

I now cannot recall how I came across Perfection, a short novel by the Italian Vincenzo Latronico translated this year by Sophie Hughes, but once I, an uprooted cosmopolitan type in Germany, learned it was about some uprooted cosmopolitan types in Germany, I considered myself duty-bound to read it. In fact, I’ve already read it twice. (Occasionally I have to stop imagining I am the hero of a Russian novel and instead admit my real-world reflection might be a little less flattering.) What we have here is a short novel – but this word feels wrong, when the work feels more like an extended observation, almost anthropology – of a couple who move to Berlin to work in the creative sphere when young, watch the city and themselves change, and wonder with a little sad dismay at the shape their lives have taken. And all this without a word of dialogue, in a style that is numb yet perfectly, patiently, observant. 

For these are the heroes of Perfection – style and detail. The goal of this book is not to turn Anna and Tom – our couple – into people we might shed a tear for as individuals, but to display their life choices and their consequences with such clearsightedness that any implied assessment of their lives, whether by themselves or the author, has the crushing finality of a prison door clanging shut. From the first section, where we see an image of their existence as a series of snapshots on a holiday rental booking for their Berlin apartment, the details are so overwhelming that we feel they must be true. The houseplants are named, the furniture, the board games, the magazines. The impersonal narration itself – “the life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated” – seems to suggest we look no further, that the objects of a life are sufficient for extracting all its meaning.

Things. I do endless, hopeless, battle against them. Perhaps I fear that I myself can be identified in my entirety by them. Perfection is not some anti-materialist novel, but by leaving out the dialogue and individual scenes – the habitual “would” is an extremely important word in the novel, giving a weightless generality to any event and action it mentions – we as readers are forced to find meaning in these details, rather than in those things that otherwise might be the key to understanding character, intention, and novelistic work.

Often with literature we talk about the dichotomy of “show” versus “tell”, and Perfection provides an example of why this is a simplistic approach. The novel tells us everything in declarative paragraphs dully consistent in length and weight, yet enhances the telling by showing it through the details chosen. It tells us who Anna and Tom are and then finds its proofs in the materiality of their world, whether it’s the details of what they do at the weekends, their sex life, or the social media they consume. Whole sections might have been lifted from some report with titles chosen according to the part of their lives that are in focus: “gentrification”, “money”, “sex”, “social groups”. Only vaguely do we sense that in the background time is passing.

Talking about the book sensibly is hard because the action and characterisation is so light. There are no ambiguous gestures to interpret, no action to set our heart hammering, nor even any real personality on Anna or Tom’s part to make us care about them. We care, if we do, because they are like us, and not because they have earned our love. The narrator, observing them from behind the glass, does not try to make us feel for them too much. Another key word in Perfection is “if”, used in a kind of characterisation by absence. “If they had ever thought it through” – but the couple had not. Or else “…looking like a young professional couple in Berlin, which is exactly what they were.” Brutally, mutely – because all dialogue is differentiation – they become the types that they are. Even the country in Southern Europe that they are from is not named.

Without cares, without interpretation or ambiguity, we can only judge – them and their world. This is how such an anthropological novel works, and it seems that this is how Perfection aims to work, given its narrator speaks with enough distance to encourage us to judge them. Anna and Tom are uprooted, just as passive as the narration of their lives. They live in Germany, but do not speak the language or work with German clients, and their social circle is a series of people like themselves passing in and out of a revolving door. “They inhabited a world where everyone accepted a line of coke, where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher.” They are ultimately isolated. Reading, it’s like we are following these two people as they push their way through a thick fog, clinging mutely onto each other.

Isolated as they are, they are also part of a kind of community. Except that it is a community of appearance, rather than reality. Loose connections, comings and goings. The scene shown in an Instagram post is more significant than the memories of a bad day that the photo came from. They live in anxiety about their sex life, because they are not polyamorous or getting off at sex clubs or using toys when they know that others are. They have to lie to their parents about how much money they make. As the city becomes ever more gentrified, they realise that they haven’t got the money to keep up. At the same time, they have no idea how to change things because they have never worked in an office.

There is a dark well at the centre of Perfection which it slowly lowers us into alongside the characters. Things start well enough, then get steadily worse. Young and in Berlin in the early-mid 2000s, Anna and Tom have a good life. But using only clients from back home, not integrating or learning the language, they become trapped. When an opportunity for real action appears during the beginnings of the European refugee crisis in 2015, Anna and Tom discover that the lives they have led have not given them anything that would actually allow them to help. They use their house as a base for gathering donations for onward movement to the refugees camps, but when they try to help at the camps themselves they learn they have no in-demand skills, nor even enough German to communicate properly with the police.

At last, they try travelling, but find that the world they left behind is simply following them. In Portugal helping a new hotel set itself up they realise they are just importing the same design aesthetics from Berlin with only the slightest Mediterranean twist. Even the people they find on the street, the early harbingers of gentrification, are like ghostly echoes of the people they knew when they first came to Berlin. The people they themselves were when they first came to Berlin. Travelling lets them see nothing new, and there’s a real hopelessness that settles in on the text as it approaches its end.

Then, just when we are fearing the worst, they have a moment of luck. In a section entitled “Future”, using that tense rather than the “would” of the rest of the novel, we witness a redeeming vision. Anna and Tom inherit a farmhouse in their country, and are able to turn it into a large holiday rental. Using a PR agency they are able to get influencers to stay the first few nights, and positive initial reviews ensure that theirs will be a going concern. Away from Berlin, which they had outgrew, or which perhaps had outgrown them, the ending seems to promise something new, solid, rooted, compared to what came before.

That the novel ends with what is just a stroke of good luck is not unreasonable within its own rules. Throughout it we get a sense that Anna and Tom have not the agency or fortitude to lead lives that are not determined for them. Without language, without enough money, without enough strength of will to fight against conformity, they are blown around by chance, helpless against their changing world. Even their choice of career is an accident – something formed from “teenage obsession” with the early internet and then monetised, rather than coming from any real intention. This ending, too, comes from things happening to them, not because of them. But at least this thing is a positive one. A little bit like the changing fortunes of Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, driven by the randomness of the stock market, here too do we have a sense that one of the essential features of modernity is precarity, a total exposure to forces, good and bad, that we do not influence ourselves.

Anna and Tom’s “good life” is not the “perfection” of the novel’s title, and there is much missing in it. But it is interesting for me, as a young mildly rootless person myself, (albeit admittedly one who speaks German at a high level and volunteers locally partly to ensure I integrate), to see its overlaps with my own life and those of my friends. While it’s easy enough to dismiss the two Berliners’ lives as failing because of, say, their failures to integrate, the evidence of my own circle of friends and acquaintances, spread across many countries and professions, seems to point much more towards a more general malaise, rather than some gentrification-specific one.

People coming out of good universities and feeling entitled, perhaps, to good jobs, when they have missed the silent signals that the pathways to such jobs are the “spring weeks” and internships. People who have come from good families and are determined to maintain the positions of their birth by forcing themselves into jobs they hate in law or banking. People refusing all that and working in the fields only to feel a growing distance from everyone they knew before, without being able to replace them with anyone else. Even my own employment contract lasts until the end of August. Everywhere is precarity, not enough money, mute misery. In between the two gods – money and authenticity – nearly everyone decent is stranded somewhere, and few in the right place for their own happiness. Anna and Tom are not living entirely authentically, which we are told but also notice ourselves, by the way they are living always in the shadow of images – others’ and their own. But neither, typically, are we.

Modern life is tiring – witness My Year of Rest and Relaxation, whose narrator wishes to check out from the world for a year. It’s also strangely fragmented, as in the novels of Sally Rooney, where often we find ourselves constantly needing to shift between times in order to give interactions weight because by themselves individual scenes just feel light, airy. In the past I would have complained – have indeed on this very blog complained. Perfection’s numb descriptive style, without its dialogue, without its differentiation of character or action into scenes, is not enjoyable in the way that a rollicking drama is. But now, getting up each day to go to the office, struggling in the chinks of time when I’m not working to find space for authentic life, I can no longer criticise something that seems so manifestly true.

It’s not the writers who are wrong – it’s life itself. If you want good fiction today you need to change the world.

(this is referring to tales of middle and upper-middle class professional lives. I am aware that good fiction about other lives, and by other lives, continues to be produced on a regular basis)

W.G. Sebald’s leftovers – Campo Santo

As a reader, W.G. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late 2001 we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones. Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. Snarky readers who know Sebald already may ask what the difference between an essay and “prose” is for Sebald, given that his “fiction” is already strangely essayistic and impressionistic, akin to very wise travelogues. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs.

Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo. I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.

Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” is a case in point. This, the first of the prose pieces, begins with the kind of sentence that makes you do a double take, so far from Sebald’s towering reputation does it seem:

In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon.

Certainly, there’s a sense of potential mystery – what will this town hold – but the main word I’d use to describe this sentence is “banal”. I could write it or its like. Here you go:

“In the beginning of May, taking advantage of the generous German public holidays that month and feeling a certain unease at the thought of another weekend spent at my new home in the Ruhr region, I took two trains and a ferry north to the island of Norderney, of which I knew nothing other than that it was where the poet Heine had composed his cycle of prose and poems “Die Nordsee”.”

If we hoped that the “something more” would come at once from Sebald, we are disappointed by the information in the subsequent sentence that it “it was a beautiful, sunlit day”, and a description of the palms swaying. Our first sense of something possibly being off is “a snow-white cruise ship” which looks “like a great iceberg”. Here, at last, do we have something out of place – an iceberg in Corsica. It’s not startling by any stretch, but it is odd enough that we might notice the image half-consciously. “Dark, tunnel-like entrances” to houses, the houses themselves like “citadels”, give further images that, especially through their contrast with the charming day, serve that Sebaldian unease.

Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter. Within “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” we have women who seem to look like Napoleon, another one who looks dead while she sits in her chair, and a certain absence of people generally, an emptiness and darkness to contrast with the light, colour, and babble we normally associate with travel.

Unease also comes from the narrator himself, whose voice is decidedly slippery. He starts talking about an image of Napoleon, describing his situation and even his emotions, only to begin the next paragraph with a lurch – “Or so at least we might conclude from an article in Corse-Matin published on the day of my visit”. What we had trusted to be his voice was only his mediation.

We jump from normality to the strange, from voice to voice, but also from time to time. Within this piece alone we go from the present to Kafka in 1911, to Flaubert visiting the same museum as the narrator, to “Mary and Joseph”, and of course to Napoleon himself. If Sebald’s narrators do not live horizontally, in the sense that they struggle to connect to humans around them, they do however live vertically through time, endlessly connecting to past figures and ideas as intimates and friends, or at least frames of reference. This, too, is hardly typical, and encourages the reader to see the world the same way.

Once we are seeing as Sebald did, he can start encouraging us also to share a more specific view, beyond just unease and scepticism of his sources – his pessimism. “The unfathomable misfortune of life” is how he names it here, but other similar phrases are scattered throughout, not so often as to be overwhelming yet unmissably there. One way this is justified is through violence, overt in places, but more often bubbling.

At the end of the first prose piece, a bomb goes off – it is Corsica after all. The second piece talks about burial practices, but also the banditry of Corsica. The third details the devastating effects of hunting and logging on the original ecosystems of the island, and local inhabitants’ inability to connect the consequences to their own actions. Such violence is blatant. Once we start thinking in terms of violence we are able to pick up its more subtle traces, such as in the manias affecting various figures (including at times the narrator himself). Or even, in a description like this:

Before leaving the museum I went down to the basement, where there is a collection of Napoleonic mementos and devotional items on display. It includes objects adorned with the head and initials of Napoleon—letter openers, seals, penknives, and boxes for tobacco and snuff—miniatures of the entire clan and most of their descendants, silhouettes and biscuit medallions, an ostrich egg painted with an Egyptian scene, brightly colored faïence plates, porcelain cups, plaster busts, alabaster figures, a bronze of Bonaparte mounted on a dromedary, and also, beneath a glass dome almost as tall as a man, a moth-eaten uniform tunic cut like a tailcoat, edged with red braid and bearing twelve brass buttons: l’habit d’un colonel des Chasseurs de la Garde, que porta Napoléon Ier (The uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs de la Garde, worn by Napoleon I).

Sebald’s reading, his mood, his drifting gaze, draw us into a way of looking where we cannot read this description of a typical museum’s clutter without seeing in it a certain horror. How did an ostrich egg reach Corsica? Certainly, we might innocently say trade, but in the context of Napoleon it’s much easier, and probably more correct, to say imperialism. Perhaps the “Egyptian scene” is ancient, rather than Napoleonic – it’s much harder to say the same about Napoleon riding a camel. The pointless military adventure to Egypt is not mentioned, but a knowing reader cannot but think of it. The colonel’s uniform is more explicitly related to violence, but like all the others it is something apparently innocuous which, chosen and placed alongside the others in this paragraph, becomes transparent so that we see the blood behind it.

Such a paragraph, such a working of associations, perhaps exemplifies Sebald’s project. Indeed, in one of Campo Santo’s essays there is a telling remark on “my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.” That, ultimately, is how Sebald’s prose works. Every comment, or rather cut, whether deep or shallow, obvious or subtle, works to advance his world upon us. And since that prose seems to be both factual, with the vast erudition implied by its author, while also being highly authentic, for here the narrator is in the world and experiencing and sharing it with us, the whole book seems silky and very seductive.

Yet still, once we read the other essays of Campo Santo we might find a certain tension, should we return to the prose pieces. Sebald praises this objective, reporter-like style, saying “the ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort” precisely because it prevents the “human faculty of suppressing any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life”. However, once we see the work that goes into constructing this memory-preserving prose, it’s hard to see it as anything objective anymore. If we still see the narrator as a charming guide to the world, now we see Sebald himself, furiously stabbing at his stone – what we have here is rather extremely subjective, but well masked. And what do we make of the fact that the narrator, though as obsessed with memory as the man who wrote him, remains as silent as the latter on his own past and personal life?

The excitement of Sebald is that he teaches us how to read and look anew upon the world, finding the violence and horror of history behind the slightest of objects. We come away with a greater sense of memory, its passage and the challenges of its conservation. Inevitably though, we must turn that same critical eye back towards the man who made the prose. How far can we trust a man who has such knowledge, yet is so little of the earth itself? We like mysteries, and Sebald himself provides them in his work and also in his person. The recent, in literary terms, scandals (for example here and here) over the biography of Sebald written by Carole Angier and its revelations concerning where Sebald blurred the lines between truth and fiction suggest that these mysteries are unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Jon Fosse – Scenes from a Childhood

Jon Fosse’s collection of shorter pieces, Scenes from a Childhood, contains prose so dreadful I would be embarrassed to put my own name next to it. I loved Septology and Aliss at the Fire, but the quality gap between those works and this one is titanic. I also do mean that word “quality”, because this blog has seen plenty of works that I did not enjoy grace its (web) pages, such as most recently Handke’s Goalie’s Anxiety, works in which nevertheless I was able to find literary merit and interesting ideas. Scenes from a Childhood is just shockingly bad, however. The words are bad, the style dead, the ideas thin. There’s a chance that in writing this post I might succeed in redeeming the book in my eyes, but I think the more likely outcome is that by seeing the negatives, we might instead understand how to do better.

Scenes from a Childhood is a hodgepodge of prose from throughout Fosse’s career. “How it Started” is a story of first love; Scenes from a Childhood collects various semi-autobiographical vignettes from Fosse’s own life, most no more than half a page; “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is a revenge fantasy where the narrator’s dog is killed by a neighbour, so the narrator murders the neighbour; “Dreamt in Stone” seems to be about epilepsy and God; finally, “Little Sister” recounts a few events in the life of a very small boy. The collection is not uniformly bad, with “How it Started” being a particular highlight. However, generally, the quality really is this low.

Scenes from a Childhood

We can take a look at Scenes from a Childhood as representative of the bad tendencies here. After all, it has given its name to the collection. Even with just Septology under our belts, we can recognise images and scenes from that work, done here too. (Old sheds, certain cafes and characters, teen bands, a dying grandmother). Unlike Septology, however, Fosse’s prose entirely lacks magic here.

Take a random example:

ASLE WANTS A DOG OF HIS OWN

On Sundays when he was little Asle and his parents used to go for walks. They used to walk past a little house and the man who lived there had a little white dog with black spots. Whenever they walked past the house the dog leaped over to Asle, who patted it and talked to it. Asle wants a dog for himself so badly but his mother says he can’t have one. Asle wants a dog of his own.

I want to make clear from the start that this is not the shortest, nor the simplest of the stories. Many others are worse. This one is representative of them, however, in style. We have here simple sentences, reflecting perhaps the relatively simple consciousness of Asle’s experience (sometimes we have an “I” instead). There is none of that flowing consciousness expressed through run-on sentences which we are used to from Septology or Aliss, just declarative sentences without any energy behind them at all. Those aspects of Fosse’s work that work brilliantly when enveloped in the mystical power of those breath-like sentences in those stories, instead are unexciting here – for example, his repetition of the word “dog”. In normal prose, repetition can quickly become monotony.

And what of the ideas? Asle sees a dog and wants one but can’t have one. Each of the scenes in Scenes from a Childhood is similar to this. Asle rides a bike and likes it. Asle reads a book and likes it. Asle is nervous about playing at a concert with friends. The problem with these stories is that they are flat. There is only ever one idea at a time, one single moment from the narrator’s past which can only be interpreted emotionally: this happened, and this was how he felt. Such an approach means we cannot actually think about these stories, because there is nothing at all to think about.

Rather than, as my blurb claims, these stories showing short prose “occasions some of [Fosse’s] greatest works”, we see that by paring down the stories and depriving them of any length, the result is utterly discardable. There is no accumulation of images to give even the mundane its strength. There’s no rhythm to the prose to let it wash over us. And there is no depth to the content, which after all can be gained in a pinch by letting us look at the same puddle from different angles. Without length, the puddle has to be deep, for we only have one angle to look at it from.

What, we might desperately ask, of the topic? Is this not so relatable? This is the weakest defence a book can have. Indeed, as a child (and now) I have felt anxious, or excited, or wanted things I cannot have. Even, growing up in rural Scotland, a few of the scenarios in Scenes from a Childhood were familiar to me in their specifics. But relatability is never an end, only a means. Relatability brings us in; good literature takes that closeness and does something with that, like revealing some tension or strain under the surface of our lives. Fosse here does not do this. He just writes something we know and stops. The problem is that relatability is easy. It’s how popular music, art, and literature works. Nothing against them, but Fosse needs to do more, both with his prose and with his ideas, than happens here.

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me”

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is quite a different work. The novella is much longer than everything else in the collection, and since it involves murder, it is less likely to be something we as readers relate to from our personal histories. However, those of us with pets might not struggle to imagine murdering anyone who hurt or killed them.

In any case, the novella is strange, and if nothing else a feat of imagination, at least it appears so. The man’s dog is shot, and one neighbour says it was another neighbour. When the man goes home, he sees his dog, dead, on the porch. At night the man gets on his boat, rows to the other neighbour’s house and stabs him with a pitchfork dipped in manure, before returning home. He digs a grave for the dog, speaks with a few neighbours, and then the story finishes with him admitting to the initial neighbour who told him of the murder that he did it.

If this sounds exciting or tense, it is not. As with the stories in Scenes from a Childhood itself, the dominant note is monotony. The dog dies, and the narrator is filled with a murderous rage. For the next twenty or thirty pages this is the single emotional note of the novella. We see quickly how little variety there is in such an emotion. “That fucker’s gonna die tonight” is repeated, over and over, until the neighbour does indeed die. No images of rage, no torrents or torments, just hate directed towards the neighbour until (and after) he is dead. It is actually not very exciting, and again – we sit there wondering if there is anything at all to interpret. There’s no motivation for the dog’s murder, just as there’s no complexity to the revenge. As a reader, you’re faced with the uncomfortable thought that there’s nothing to think about as you turn the pages.

Once the murder is complete the narrator behaves irrationally, failing to bury his dog and answering questions from his other neighbours in a way that would immediately throw suspicion upon him. There are moments of tenderness towards the dead dog, and moments of madness where the narrator seems confused about where the dog went after he has buried him. The tenderness is touching, and almost hints at a kind of metaphysical aspect to the story which the rest of the text does not really cater to:

“…I’m standing with the dog in my arms and rocking him back and forth like a baby and I say you have to go away now, far away, but it’s somewhere where it isn’t cold, it isn’t freezing, you need to go away now and I have to go now, I can’t stay standing like this, I have to just go, now, you’ll wait for me, I’ll be coming soon, you’ll be excited and wag your tail when I get there, because I’m coming too, soon now, it won’t be long…”

In general, however, the story just does not withstand any inspection. There are no motives to analyse, no nuances to the narrator’s emotions and only limited rationality to his actions. As far as literary murders go, it just does not do anything interesting. The prose has its moments, but that is the best I can say for it.

“How it Started”

The story I liked best in the collection is “How it Started”, which has much in common with Scenes from a Childhood. What separates them is the prose, which is vastly more musical, and which also gestures towards far more than does that other work. “How it Started” is about the first flush of teenage love or infatuation. Other stories covered the same, but merely described the scene. Here, prose and theme merge:

…when we ran up to the big attic, lay down on the floor, and when the others came running in, when the girls came in, when that girl in particular came in.

When she came in.

When she came in from break…

Here the repetition is conscious, rather than the result of (apparent) laziness. It reflects the shock and the butterflies in the chest, the break in the world’s continuity when someone we so earnestly want to notice us has come in and we can no longer sit idly but must take ourselves and be our best.

The prose also now flows:

When she came in from break, from all the breaks when you’d seen her, when she came in with her long hair, those small breasts just barely visible under her shirt, when she came running up the stairs and you knew that you’d never dare talk to her, as you wrestled and shouted there on the floor, playing with Geir or another one of your friends, when she came in you calmed down, you stopped kicking your legs, you stopped fooling around, joking, shouting, you calmed down, you were a bit embarrassed, you got up from the floor and suddenly you didn’t know where to go or what to do with yourself, your heart grew troubled because now she was there, she was near you, with her hair, her body, she was just a few yards away from you, so close, and you couldn’t talk to her even though she’d sent word to you two days before, even though one of her girlfriends had come up to you, giggling, and said she was supposed to say hi to you from her, from her, from her, the girl with the long hair. When she stood there, calmly, talking to one of the other girls, up in the half-dark attic at the pastor’s farm, with the other kids who went to youth group, and we all did, almost all the kids in the area went, when she stood there with her new breasts, her long hair, and she smiled at her girlfriend, and you stood there, stood there alone while the others wrestled, and felt a sadness grow large inside you, that was probably when it actually started.

That was when the music came to you.

There and then it came, and it’s never left.

I’ve quoted generously because this is finally good prose. It reflects a consciousness – anxious, excited. And it also shows more than just a scene by giving a sense of consequences – “that was probably when it actually started”. I presume this is the ability to write (as music standing in for creativity in general), but it might just as much be simply love. Either way, we have a sense of something higher, some significance stretching beyond the scene.

This nervous enraptured consciousness envelopes the prose. It brings us closer to the narrator and his struggle. For the first time, we have tension, which can grow over the story’s length because rather than a single paragraph we have five whole pages. We also, finally, have a sense of perspective, by which I mean that we can look onwards to higher meanings and consequences for a whole life. “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” might have had this, but instead the narrator’s mind is so focused on revenge that there’s no opportunity for any kind of thought or reflection. Here is how “How it Started” ends:

That was how it started, in the dark, the rain, on a road along a shore, there were waves always beating, and skin that grew bigger and bigger. Her kiss was a mark on my skin, it was like it entered into my body and stayed there. She’s married now, her kids are grown, she’s a housewife and she usually goes to village parties with her husband. They were there the summer we played at the village party. She was there, but her body is more shapeless now. Her hair is short. Her breasts have grown much bigger.

This is magic prose because, like the kiss, it sticks with us. There’s more than what I’ve quoted, of course, but I hope here is enough to give a sense of the power of that moment when they kiss in the dark, and how that moment becomes indelible even as time passes.

Conclusion

All of this raises awkward questions, however. If the only thing separating “How it Started” from Scenes from a Childhood is long flowing sentences and a few ambiguous phrases that point towards something of higher significance, then doesn’t that almost devalue Fosse’s whole work? Or, at least, doesn’t it say that we can just do the same by taking anything mediocre we write about our own lives and removing the full stops to whip it into something Fossean with no difficulty?

In that case, of course, it would be obvious who we are imitating. Originality counts for something, so that most modern autobiographical prose seems just waiting to have “Sebaldean” slapped on it, and any kind of ranting prose at all will forever be indebted to Bernhard for blazing the trail. The precise way that Fosse builds up his rhythms and repetitions is not just casual or the work of a hack, and combining long sentences and repetitions with hints of the higher requires talent well deserving of the Nobel Committee’s praise.

From the perspective of someone looking for what to read, however, this collection is clearly not where Fosse’s talents are best displayed. Most of the stories here really do seem too easily written and too lacking in depth.