borkhers | Reading

Posted by Terry

https://sebald.wordpress.com/2025/11/13/recently-read-caleb-klaces-rebecca-grandsen/

http://sebald.wordpress.com/?p=21552

I’ve recently read two worthy novels that involved searching for a family member during a pandemic, both published by intriguing small indie presses (see below).

In Caleb Klaces’ Mr. Outside, which takes place during the COVID pandemic (although that barely comes into play), the unnamed narrator arrives at the home of his father, Thomas, to help him move into a care home. But Thomas, a poet and former priest who was fired for posing naked in photographs inside his own church, is nowhere to be found. His mind is failing and as the son explores his father’s house he finds only garbage, disorder, and other sights that confirm his father’s failing mental state. Along with a mysterious skirt.

Eventually, Thomas is found and father and son spend a weekend together grappling with memories, discoveries, fears, and regrets. Everything the son sees around him and nearly everything he touches seems disgusting. How could his father live like this? Apparently, he learns, Thomas just likes to wear a dress now and then. He writes “torrents” of complaining letters—to the supermarket, the local leisure center, Virgin Trains, English Heritage, the library, and so on. And he has repeatedly refused to trim the overgrown tree in the front yard. The painful discoveries feel endless and the son responds by going into panic mode. But eventually, he learns that by accepting Thomas as he really is will reduce the panic level. Over the weekend, many childhood memories come flooding back to him, and he finds he must reevaluate much of his childhood. His father must do some readjusting, as well. It’s a novel about two people negotiating a major life change between themselves, but also two people negotiating with their own pasts alone.

Klaces’ writing is appropriately disorienting, as befits a novel about senility and panic. It’s also acutely observant and tender. At one point in the book the son attempts to get his father to fill out the short biography required by the care center, and he begins by writing that Thomas was born in Wales.

“I was born inside a volcano,” he said, indicating with his finger that I was to replace my text with this new line.
“This is serious, Dad. They need to know who you are.”
“That is who I am. ‘I was born inside a volcano.’ Write that down on the piece of paper.”
I crossed out the fact that he was born in Wales. I wrote his version.
“Did you write it?”
“I was born inside a volcano.”
“Perfect. Now write, ‘As school I was captain of the rugby team. There wasn’t much competition for the position, given that I was the only boy with three arms.'”
. . .
He stared at the ceiling and conducted his silent orchestra. He delivered the next improbable chapter. I wrote down what he said. He was a dragonfly and he was a sparrow. He was a seal and he was a rat. He was middle-aged, a baby, and finally old.

Included in Mr. Outside are a dozen or so small photographs (snapshots, really). The blurb on the back of the book tells us that the book is based on the life of the author’s own father, so I think we can assume these might be his own photographs. The images don’t reproduce very well in halftone and some of them are a bit murky. But perhaps that’s the point.

Amid of a mass exodus northward fleeing the mysterious red sky, Flo is seeing fewer people every day and most of them are sick. Rebecca Grandsen’s novella Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group is subtitled A Pilgrimage: An England in Delirium, and it follows Flo as she both runs for her life and searches for her brother through a nightmarish, dystopian English landscape. She comes across very strange individuals and small groups of people who have been driven mad or who have banded together to prepare for the apparent coming mass extinction in their own mysterious way. For example, there is the Honey Ghost, the Tent Man, the man who lusts, and the Illuminated Man. Flo travels through “somnambulant woods,” down roads that have “gone wild,” through a haze of golden grasses and spores, across fields that crunch beneath her feet, through “sick towns,” and finally to some white chalk cliffs.

The narration is written entirely in words of one syllable, except when characters speak. This forces compound and multi-syllabic words to be forced apart. Grandsen makes deliberately odd and antiquated word choices, and trims away strictly unnecessary words—all to slow the reader down and give her narrative the sense that it has somehow been removed from a specific time.

On some more and the crowd thins, lone bods stand in gloom, they do not know who they are, or ere, and there is no hope for them. Tween these lost peeps, Flo spies the back of rows of the cross, shapes caught in the dark glow of the camp torch at her rear now. Cross and cross and cross, all ace a dark world. Flo can not see what is out there. The dark is too much, the light takes the sight of it down. But the light hits each wood cross. Cru ci fix. There is bulk on each cross, on the side that turns to the sea, that Flo can not see yet.

This is a poet’s novel, a story of dystopian beauty and unspeakable brutality. Flo deals with sexual assault and, from a distance, witnesses human sacrifice, crucifixions, and cannibalism. “Rust cars sit, some burnt out, bon fi res up front, she sees stakes, and shakes her head. They did it. They did. They fell back on myth and made the worst of things bo il.” But perhaps because the possibility of mass extinction seems so real in the book, much of the writing focuses on the strange beauty of nature.

Bluff twines in need round a sun haze morn, birds nest their down with kind beaks, ruff soft breast on fair green boughs, lace wings step on flut green leaf, grass hops tend a verge at peace. Flo skates the back road through miles at rest in light, on her skin is the touch of no god, just the sol rise, just the room to float the world. Straw limbs form, sun lap field on for good, chaff rags, dolls in twist and knot born. Weed chain worn as a lop may queen crown, straw and gold and rust buds tug snug in fine hairs. A slow beast laps at a road side pot hole, cool drink on its tongue, puff tawn fur on its haut. Beasts nudge through field brush with ease and scamp with kicks.

Both novels are emotionally tough to read at times. And they should be.

Caleb Klaces. Mr. Outside. London: Prototype, 2025. Prototype is the London-based publisher of Kate Zambreno, Derek Jarman, Chloe Aridjis, Danielle Dutton, Bhanu Kapil, Stephen Watts, Iain Sinclair, and many other writers worth reading.

Rebecca Grandsen. Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group. London: Tangerine Press, 2025. “Tangerine Press has been publishing misfits, mavericks and misanthropes since 2006,” including William S. Burroughs, Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and R. Crumb, just to pick a few.

https://sebald.wordpress.com/2025/11/13/recently-read-caleb-klaces-rebecca-grandsen/

http://sebald.wordpress.com/?p=21552

benegenetriivir

Watch on YouTube

benegenetriivir

Мобильная звонилочка нуждалась в подзарядке.
Никто не замечал её, где ласковый прибой.
Но мимо без оглядки прошли босые пятки,
Босые, загорелые протопали гурьбой.

Ребята шли гурьбою по солнечному пляжу,
Абраша шёл последним и больше всех скулил.
Случайно иль нарочно, он сам не знает точно,
( Звонилочку Абраша ногою подцепил... )

sebald_feed

Posted by Terry

https://sebald.wordpress.com/2025/11/03/the-photograph-worth-297-words/

http://sebald.wordpress.com/?p=21611

In the last book he wrote before his death, Tomás Nevinson, Javier Marías reproduced a single photograph, an image credited on the copyright page to the Spanish photojournalist Pere Tordera. Marías used 297 words to describe what he saw in the photograph. He has used ekphrasis in a similar manner in several earlier books, describing in words what we can see in a photograph on the same page or a nearby page with our own eyes. What’s he doing in this description?

In this book, Nevinson is a Spaniard who thought he had retired from a career spying for England and who had returned to his position at an embassy office in Madrid. But then he is asked by his old handler to do one last job: ferret out which of three women now living in a provincial Spanish town was the fundraising mastermind behind several bloody terrorist attacks that occurred more than a decade before. For a long time, Nevinson wants to say ‘No.” He’s been away from his wife too long, he feels estranged from his children, and he is worried that he is rusty. His handler tries to convince him that this terrorist must be identified and must pay for the deaths and injuries she helped to cause in two horrific bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza, Spain in 1987. The mention of these two events causes Nevinson to recall a photograph he saw in the press at that time. “It was just one of those images you never forget.” Marías then proceeds to have Nevinson describe and think about the photograph for a full page and a half.

At the heart of Nevinson’s recollection of the photograph is his 297-word description of what it depicts. This description occurs on the page prior to the reproduction, so we read his verbal version first.

Against a backdrop of desolation and destruction, the ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke, a policeman, his tie visible beneath his uniform, and his face all bloodied, is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain. In the background – it was one of those black-and-white photographs you can’t take your eyes off of – you could see a couple, the husband with his arms around his wife, and the wife with one hand on a buggy in which her baby is still sitting, the child is, at most, a year old, and given his or her age, would forget everything it was now hearing and seeing. Elsewhere, you can see a father (I assume he’s the father) putting his arms out to another child of four or five, and beside him a taller girl, who appears to be staunchly coping on her own. What I remember most clearly, though, is the expression of the face of the young policeman, or was he perhaps a fireman, carrying the little girl. Although much of his face was covered in blood, so that you really couldn’t make out his features (the blood could have been his own or someone else’s, like the blood on the girl’s arm), his expression was a mixture of determination and profound pity, perhaps there was also an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity at what he was witnessing. Determination to save the injured child he wasn’t even looking at, instead staring straight ahead, his gaze perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible. And profound pity for many possible reasons.

The very fact that this photograph is reproduced in Tomás Nevinson requires some slippage between the book’s narrator and its author. Tomás Nevinson is only remembering an image he saw ten years ago. (It’s a remarkably accurate memory, but then Nevinson has spent more than two decades risking his life on his ability to see and remember details.) It was Javier Marías who decided to have this photograph reproduced in the book so that readers could see it for themselves. I think this should prompt us to be more than a little curious about his text concerning the photograph. One of the things that Nevinson is doing in his description of the photograph quoted above is focusing our eyes on where he wants us to look. But I think Marías is intervening here, as well. Presumably, Marías saw the photograph in a somewhat better version and the image would have been clearer for him. As a result, he would have been aware that he needed to prepare the reader to pay attention to something that is nearly lost among the half-tone dots of the mediocre reproduction that his book would produce. I definitely think that is why he wanted to make sure the reader noticed that the young girl in the man’s arms has lost not only one of her sneakers but part of her left foot as well.

It might seem odd that Nevinson spends only sixteen words on the site of the bombing or on any other evidence of the terrorists’ bomb, such as the blown out car windows. If this photograph wasn’t reproduced in the book, the only thing we would know about it other than the commentary on the people in the forefront is this: “The ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke.” Nevinson says absolutely nothing about a street that is lined with automobiles and buildings. Then again, we have to keep in mind the reason that Nevinson has recalled this image of a newspaper or magazine photograph from so long ago. He’s in the middle of making a very human equation. What would it take for him to go out and try to bring a terrorist to justice one more time? Apparently, property damage doesn’t enter into the equation for Nevinson, he’s only sensitive to the human cost of terrorism. Does visualizing the pained face and damaged foot of a young girl tip the scales for him? This is why Nevinson is only focusing on the human cost of the terrorist bombing that is visible in the photograph.

Nevinson’s 297-word description is embedded within a longer discussion of the photograph that takes place in his head because the photograph has led him to recall both the public horror and the political arguments that took place when ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist Party, began bombing locations that involved children victims. As he sits and debates his own future with his handler, this factor weighs on Nevinson, but he still doesn’t make the decision to accept the job for another forty pages.

Marías/Nevinson uses nearly half of the 297-word description of the photograph to tell us about the expressions on the faces of the man and the girl in the foreground. The girl’s face, the reader is told, is “a picture of pain, pure pain.” Several phrases are used to explain what should be seen on the face of her rescuer: “a mixture of determination and profound pity” . . . “an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity” . . . “Determination” . . . and, once again, “profound pity for many possible reasons.” Furthermore, the reader is told that that “his gaze [is] perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible.”

The idea that we can accurately read the emotions on other people’s faces is as old as time, but it first achieved a real scientific stamp of approval in 1872 when Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, illustrated with numerous photographs intended to show what certain emotions looked like on a variety of faces. Most of the photographs used in the book were made by the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who, along with his colleague, Jean-Martin Charcot, conducted experiments on patients at Paris’ Salpêtrière, a university hospital. At least two decades before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin had begun wondering whether the psychological aspects of life were hereditary. After considerable research and consultation with psychiatrists on the subject, he became convinced that there were some core expressions that were universal among all peoples and certain animals.

Photographs illustrating emotions of grief from Darwin’s “The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” 1872. Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne performing facial electrostimulus experiment.

As a fiction writer, Marías can make up whatever story he wishes about the events that take place within a photograph. But when he lets the reader compare the photograph to his words, he is giving us the ability to compare his ekphrastic version with what we see. I happen to be of the school that believes that it’s not always possible to accurately judge what the expressions seen on the faces in photographs are “telling” us. I’ll let you be the judge if the face of the man in the photograph represents determination, pity, rage, and incredulity.