The Motion of the Body Through Space

The thing about Lionel Shriver is, I guess, that she's self-deprecating.  She is obviously, also, a contrarian, and that is the quality that comes through most strongly in this book. Shriver takes a contrary view on almost every conceivable aspect and item of received wisdom emanating from the fitness industry.  And this automatically counts as self-deprecation because of Shriver's own personal investment in the values that industry promotes.  We know that this is the case from various interviews Shriver has given over the years, most notably in the New Yorker.

Let's be clear (if I wasn't above): this book is a relentless attack on both the idea and practice of 'pushing yourself to your limits'. The whole idea of limits is critically tested through a series of limit cases devoted, seemingly, to exercise, but who are revealed to be, instead, devoted to self-harm. The freaks Shriver describes are suicidally hell-bent on perfecting their bodies and attaining personal best times that they acquire, along the way a set of life-threatening injuries ranging from: blown knees, heart attacks, suppurating and infectious blisters, kidney failure, fatal head traumas, deep lacerations, internal bleeding/bruises; and much more, all in the context of the ravages of old age that both the main character Serafina Terpsichore and her husband (Remington) are undergoing.

Shriver is trying to take down a few notches the likes of, for example, Alex Hutchinson, whose book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance Remington is observed reading in bed, and it's funny because the husband is so very far from being an accomplished athlete that he comes to seem like a straw-man, set up to be so very easily knocked down, especially in comparison to the company he keeps: a set of hardcore (and all very much younger and more fit) triathletes.  Their goal: the MettleMan, a brilliantly conceived triathlon 'event' the approach of which structures so much of the tension that is built up so skillfully in the course of this novel's events.



Another straw-person is the young buff personal trainer who latches onto Remington during his first (circa 8 hour) marathon. Her name is Bambi Buffer, and she is of course a dissembling shill of a person, so seemingly representative of much of what is branded as 'good for you' by various representatives of the fitness industry today.  Bambi is the classic 'other woman' but Shriver, with extremely impressive skill, navigates the cliches and pitfalls such a character might represent, with brilliant and darkly funny aplomb (to borrow a turn of phrase Adam Roberts applied to Joe Abercrombie's book A Little Hatred.  Indeed, The Motion of the Body Through Space might quite easily, at times, feel like a good fit into the grimdark fantasy genre).

Underneath the take-down-y language and critical structure of this novel; it is more fundamentally about a marriage, and a very admirable one (a good one!) at that.  Serafina and Remington are enamoured of one another, despite their troublesome children, and various late-mid-life mishaps.  It is one of the latter (Remington's early firing from a company to which he has devoted his life and life's work), that has led to the current crises of fitness and bodily-limits thinking that underly the book's philosophical core.

Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of reactionary material being spewed by Remington and his wife, who at times too thinly seem to resemble Shriver's real-life personae.  There is a massive wedge of anti-'PC' libertarian-inflected political ideology that is quite unbelievable.  Remington's new boss, who usurps his own perceived entitlement to a management position, is a high-born Nigerian woman with a whole-profile of stereotypically progressive agendas that becomes increasingly absurd as it is conveyed through an almost play-like set of recorded dialogues Remington plays back from a workplace tribunal he underwent immediately prior to his firing.  This woman, his new boss, allegedly re-named a street in Albany, New York, 'Robert Mugabe' drive.  Which is kind of funny, but also a bit insulting if we are expected to believe this or that this kind of cardboard character actually exists.

Does this book have a happy ending?  The main character, at the end of the final chapter, has a heart attack and does not finish his race.  His wife, with a fresh knee operation that is trashed through the tribulations of her finding her lost husband, has to undergo the operations again, and is permanently crippled in the process.  But the afterward is a glorious tribute to the wonders and pleasure of old age in the company of a spouse truly and deeply loved and enjoyed, hour by hour, day by day.  It came off a bit hokey, if I'm being honest, but that was probably also part of the satire.

I took the critique of the fitness aspect very seriously, and I am certain it will have a positive impact on my own practices, if not quite anywhere near the extent that Hutchinson's book Endure will, then perhaps in a more subtle way.  The Motion of the Body Through Space is well worth reading.

Self & I

Will Self has exerted a certain fascination over my life. This is a result of having read only a couple of books by him.  In "Psychogeography" he attempts to 'walk' from London to New York, which means, essentially, walking to and from the airports of those two cities. I read most or all (I can't remember which) of "Great Apes" because I was reading a lot of philosophy at that time, and a lot of philosophical arguments in favour of various forms of animal rights, from duty-based, to rights-based, to utilitarian arguments.  Self's fiction was the first fiction-based argument I'd come across, and it added a whole new and unforgettable dimension to thinking about animals and their positionalities.

Recently I read the first section of Self's autobiography "Will", and fully plan on finishing that book later this summer.  I like the way he writes, it reminds me of surrealism, of Ballard, and of postmodernism, all with connotations, for me, of freedom of self-expression unconstrained by institutional norms.  Abaitua's memoir of his time as Self's personal assistant has helped me to pin down precisely why I've warmed to Self in my lifetime, even as I might, at times, have spurned him for being unserious, wild, or unsober as a thinker and role-model.  But these objections are neither here nor there, with Self, because they are irrelevant.  All that is relevant is the work itself.

And Abaitua is correct, I think, in identifying Self as a canonical writer.  I had not known this until I read Self & I.  But the best parts of this book are the stories of the good & bad times Self & Abaitua shared.  It is also a book about how to be a writer, and it is both sympathetic and patient with anyone reading the book who might have such aspirations.  Part of the reason for this is that it seems, reading the book, that it has taken Abaitua himself a really long time to settle down within himself, and produce the works he needs to produce in order to create the kind of art that feels true to himself, his vision, and his discipline.  That discipline is hard-won, mostly because he's enjoyed his life enough, and this is very apparent here in the book, that for time, it seems, he might never have settled down enough to have actually written anything worth reading.

But he has. This book is proof.  I haven't read Abaitua's science fiction novels, but I will.  I will also be picking up those books in my library that I've been putting off so long, for some reason: "How the Dead Live" and "Umbrella" for starters.  If you are interested in writing, in fiction, or in Will Self, this is one of the best books I've read on any of those subjects, and I recommend it very highly.

The Memory Police

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa, reads so effortlessly in translation that I'm reminded of beautiful moments years ago when I used to lose myself in Murakami.  This is beautiful writing of a Kafkaesque kind, and it flows like clear water. 

The plot is simple: objects are being forgotten, one by one. The forgetting is, however, categorical, imperative, and backed up by a brutal police force that constantly patrols the island upon which the novel's events are set, searching for backsliders: the ones who wilfully remember.  First calendars disappear, then novels.  When calendars are 'forgotten' time itself takes on new characteristics: it is constantly winter for the second half of the book.

When novels are 'forgotten' the main protagonist, a female novelist and her friend (the unnamed 'old man') cart a wheelbarrow of books to a conflagration in the middle of town where the whole community pitches into chucking books on the fire, which reaches skyscraper-like proportions.  Nearby the town's library burns down. 

The whole book is a comment on the nature of naming, language, and memory; politically, it comments on coercion and the collective power of forgetting. As in the Kafka novel, the hero is the individual who can stand up to what a damaging collection of individuals (a community, a state, a class) can decide to do to that individual. One comes to feel targeted, to take it personally, and one begins to resist, first in small ways and, later, on a larger scale that might begin to enlist others.

The 'other' here is the novelist's editor, who cannot forget. For some unnamed reason the editor, also metaphorically, does not allow himself to ever forget a single category of object that the police have placed on their list of the forgotten.  For this reason, the editor is given a special room in the novelist's house, hiding out like a Jewish person during a Nazi occupation.  The secret room is the site of much of the novel's most poignant, central, and emotional happening, from birthday parties, to readings, to physical bonding. 

Another main character in the trio of those to whom we come to care about in this very touching narrative, is the 'old man' who lives on a 'forgotten' boat.  The old man helps the novelist and editor to set up the secret room to be self-sufficient with toilet, teapot, ventilation, and communications ducts.  So many books have resonance right now because they remind us of 'lockdown' during the coronavirus, and this is yet another example. 

Read The Memory Police for how it sheds light on problems both old (around state violence and totalitarianism) and new (subtle but pervasive changes in societal norms that become entrenched). 

They Will Drown In Their Mothers' Tears

Johannes Anyuru's nominally science fictional work applies a critically reflexive lens to questions of race, violence, and nationalism. A poetry of terrorism is tempered only through the metaphorical use of the idea of 'time travel' that makes an alternate world, one in which a terroristic act was avoided, possible.  This possibility 'saves' the narrative from the implied barbarism of the writing of poetry after such an act (as from Adorno we know such barbarism to exist 'after Auschwitz').

This is not just a case of a literary novelist appropriating a science fictional trope in order to triangulate the SF back into the literary. The narrative not only would not work, literally and metaphorically, without time travel, but it would also be morally vacuous without the alternate and parallel timeline, in which a young 'Swede' comes to the crucial moment ready to disarm the man who recruited her into killing the author of comic books satirising Islam.

But I didn't read this book because it is science fiction. I did so in spite of its earning a place within that category. The cognitive estrangement of the novel proceeds from its subject matter, and from the poetry of its presentation. The dystopia it sketches gradually fills in through details of the city in which it is situated (Gothenburg), its architectures, seasons, and the family members of the perpetrators and victims of its violences.

My brother recommended this book to me. Its translation appears to be an equal partner in its success as a literary work, having been rendered into English by Saskia Vogel, and prose certainly does not in any way detract from the story's momentum, its impetus.  This, despite rapid shifts of point of view, in two main structures proceeding first from the young female protagonist's and her doppleganger from another timeline; the other 'I' being that of a young male journalist writing up the story of the attack on the comic book store. Images of this attack bookend beginning and ending sections of the structured story, and alternations of point of view are unmarked, but very easily worked out from context.

This is very skillful, controlled writing, but equally skillful is the masterful poetic imagery of the 'rabbit yard' and 'building T', incremental architectures of doom in a spectrum of structures designed in a dystopian future Sweden to separate and subjugate its Muslim populations.  The racial dynamics and clashes are very resonant for these times we are living through.