All entries for Saturday 12 January 2008

Recent Reading: Egger and Kluun

Boyoboy. Two cancer books in one holiday. Ouch. And I didn't realise either was about cancer until I had them packed with me over the holiday.

First up, Dave Eggers' A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius. This has been on my list for a long time - students have been quoting it at me for years and I've had a signed copy on a shelf since May '07, when I saw Dave reading from What is the What at Hay Festival with Valentino Achak Deng. I've stuck to reading his short short fiction mainly because it's more tolerable when you've only so much time in the world for 500pp novels about dying parents.

What I didn't realise was that the book was about both of Dave's parents dying, within five weeks of each other, of different types of cancer. And how Dave, aged 21 at the time, had to become a parent to his brother, Toph (pronounced toe-ff, short for Christopher) who was about 10. It's difficult subject matter.

I think what struck me most about the book is that it is one big magician's act - the voice, the mayhem, the energy, the fictionalising and then revealing of the fictions, the postmodern self-awareness, the insistence that book and its author are anti-ironic; and the trick of a young idiot trying to keep his brother entertained and in school and fed and housed. All in order to distract the eyes, the reader, from the gaping sorrow in his life, his brother's life.

I clicked with this mentality quickly - that it's all an act, for show, in order to bury up the pain he was going through - because the book gives you its coda very quickly. And then I immersed myself in the mayhem of it. It's wonderful. Above all, it's intelligent and unafraid of this. It has no sham to it, it is nothing but emotional honesty throughout. And it has a plot: Dave is trying to become something, run a magazine, find/keep a girlfriend, change the world. All the details of his life become inspirational by knowing what he's going through at home.

Something I find in David Lynch's films (e.g. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive) is in this book - the tricks, self-delusions or illusions that people will create in order to hide themselves from their own suffering. When you're faced with such enormity of emotional distress, there can be no end to the lengths you go to avoid confronting it. I found myself having sudden palpitations, panics and fighting back tears from the most innocuous sentences, while also laughing out loud regularly, throughout. The book turns corners, switches back and forth. It's incredibly deft and the writing is actually wonderfully in control; I found myself completely trusting everywhere it went.

On top of that, it's at the cutting edge of storytelling techniques, if you ask me. McSweeney's, The Believer magazine, all that stuff is the new voice of American literature. And AHBWOSG is a demonstration that this new self-awareness is not just tongue in cheek. Just as some people mistakenly accuse modernist writings of being all cerebral and lacking an emotional grounding, this stuff can be dismissed too quickly. In fact, it's the extremes of emotions that drive people to skirt around the issues, to camouflage themselves in personae or don the armour of technique, in order to reach the places where they are at their most vulnerable.

Which is why, in contrast, Kluun's Love Life, the second novel, succeeded in jerking a few tears out of my cynical eyes with its highly predictable ending, but left me extremely annoyed. Where AHBWOSG was intelligent, painful and bursting at the seams with subtextual anguish, this was banal, revelling in ignorance, cheap and repetitive. I bought the book as a requested present without looking at the blurb in any detail, but ended up reading it myself when I heard about the subject matter.

Kluun (that's his nickname and author name, but real name is Raymond van Kluivert), was a Marketing/PR man based in Amsterdam, happily married with a daughter of 2. At the age of 35, his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer and dies within a year. Just like the main character of Love Life (the book is called A Woman Goes to the Doctor in the original Dutch version, a hint that the book is supposed to be a heartrendingly cheerful attempt to make a joke out of sheer misery). Coincidence? If only, because then the idea might have been fictionalised into something more interesting.

You should  notice at this point that I'm going to stop distinguishing between Kluun and his main character, (whose name I've now forgotten anyway, but may as well be called Kluun). He is a serial monophobist (people who are scared of being stuck with just one partner). So having established a life of endless deceit, cheating on his wife with ex-girlfriends, random women in bars and, when these are both unavailable, visiting prostitutes, his wife is diagnosed with cancer and he is forced to face up to his own behaviour.

And his behaviour barely changes until the last two weeks of her life/the last 20pp of the book, and mostly consists of:

- Shallowly associating everything that goes well or badly to football (mainly Ajax's history, which is not an oven cleaner, but a Dutch team)

- Fucking women, shallowly

- Swanning about shallowly in bars, drinking heavily and devising ways to fuck women

- Having shallow yet poignant conversations with his mates about his behaviour

- Making shallow comments about other people with cancer and then commenting shallowly on how other people must think of him and his wife

- Trying to justify his own behaviour to himself and then avoiding the subject by drinking and fucking women

I can't put any of this shallowness down to the translation, which is loose, colloquial (towards US English, but still gets across the point of how laid back the original is). It doesn't rise above the kind of retarded vocabulary generally found in Nuts, except when Kluun finds himself struggling with long medical words and has to go look things up on Google, which he does while also emailing various women to see if they are available for fucking.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention that he uses 'wrampling' throughout - quotations from pop songs, stolen and reworked into the text - in order to make sure the level of the language never rises above the banality of your average pop song (great as songs, but fucking terrible on a page). Quotations open every chapter. They pepper the language, like his analogies to football. I found myself thinking things like, "If I have to read another fucking football analogy..." or "Please god, not another FUCKING Bruce Springsteen quotation..." 

He just about puts down his monophobia to a mental disorder at one point. That's his best defence. And when people suggest he go get some counselling, he scoffs. If anything, crashing his car has a greater impact on his behaviour than his wife's diagnosis - which could have been a painfully useful way of demonstrating the narrator's difficulty with change, but by that time I found myself wishing he'd died in the crash so I could stop reading.

The worst part about the book is that it is probably more honest than Dave Eggers' novel. In that, incapable of the techniques needed to write an actually entertaining book alongside a loosely veiled memoir, he has instead changed all the names (no doubt to protect them from his cack-handed portrayals and slovenly grasp of plot and narrative) and merely reported in a crass fashion, his wife's dying and death. It's a case in hand demonstration that having major traumatic things happen to you doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be up to the task of communicating them in the best way.

The overall impact of the text, especially from when the initial impact of Kluun's almost depraved banality had worn off (about page 20) up until his wife's imminent death (as I said above, about 20 pages from the end), was that this book was a cheap way of alleviating Kluun's guilt while also cashing in on his wife's cancer.

I feel like a horrible human being for writing that. But that's the technical part of me talking. Emotionally, the book still has all the cachet of angst that losing someone you love early can bring. And I had to go somewhere private to read the last 20pp as it was so damned sad. Writing about trauma and pain is often necessary, even if it's never shown to anyone. I don't think it's possible to displace the need for consolation into language, which is what some peope seem to try and do when they demand reactions from people on their suffering-made-text. But you can alleviate and displace the emotional turmoil, make sense of yourself, or set up barriers in yourself. Consolation comes in other ways, in reality; at least for me.

I think though, that what Dave has done with his experiences by comparison is the far better choice. He too treads the line between exploitation and need to bear witness, and he is aware of it. He also makes the reader aware of it. And he entertains, damn it, he lets his understanding of what he likes to read take over from what actually happened.

The good news is that I have What is the What to get through as well as a Best of McSweeneys anthology. The bad news is that Kluun is working on a follow up book, based on travelling across Australia with his baby daughter. nd next on my list of cancer books is Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.

George Ttoouli : 12 Jan 2008 18:30 |  Tags: A Woman Goes To The Doctor Ahbwosg Cancer Dave Eggers Kluun Love Life Review Tales |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem