I’ve been away for most of the past fortnight, firstly at FantasyCon in Scarborough, then for a week in Scotland, which is getting to be a habit with us. I haven’t felt this way about a landscape since visiting Tasmania (more than two years ago now, believe it or not) and I have the feeling we’ll be heading back there before too long.
Reading material for this time away consisted of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, which fired me up more than anything I’ve read since Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich: a rivetingly obnoxious, hilariously frustrating book that wilfully buries its story – an obsessive, a suicide, a murder house, an incestuous affair, a pernicious musical rivalry – beneath a farrago of spite. The rapier-bright, uncompromising intelligence of the narrator, who is also a complete arsehole, gave me everything I yearn towards in fiction, reminding me in weird and wonderful ways of other touchstone works: Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Mann’s Doktor Faustus.
Superbly translated (by Jack Dawson) too. I must read more Bernhard.
Meanwhile, I’m currently reading Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, which has been on my ‘to read’ list for ages. So far? I am in love with it.
Work is steadily progressing on a new novel. The madder it gets, the happier I feel.