Backlisted - Summer Reading 2021

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

It’s time for our annual look at what we’ve been reading over the summer break. John, Andy and Nicky discuss David Keenan’s fourth novel Monument Maker; Open Water, a promising debut novella from Caleb Azumah Nelson; Deborah Levy’s three-volume ‘living autobiography’, Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate; a reissue of Percival Everett’s satirical diatribe Erasure; Life With a Capital L, Geoff Dyer’s selection of essays by D.H. Lawrence; and Vivian Gornick’s The End of the Novel of Love and Unfinished Business, in which the author re-reads favourite classic books and comes to fresh conclusions about them.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)06:12 - Monument Maker by David Keenan. 17:47 - Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson. 25:24 - Erasure by Percival Everett. 33:38 - Things I Don’t Want to Know; The Cost of Living; Real Estate by Deberah Levy. 40:55 - Life With A Capital L: Essays by D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer. 48:33 - The End of the Novel of Love; Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Somebody said to me that we're going to be very near a great bookshop in Galway. What bookshop is this?

Charlie Burns. All right. Charlie Burns. It's got some ridiculous number of writers who've worked there and have gone on to become world famous. But it's just very great. And I haven't been to Galway. I think it might be 20 years.

Right. Can we get drunk and sing songs? That's what I'm looking forward to. I very much hope so, yeah. Okay. The last time I was in, in fact, every time I've ever been to Ireland, I got drunk and sang songs, much to the displeasure of my hosts probably. But anyway.

I did a, you know that thing, one-track mind? hosts probably but anyway i did a you know that thing one track mind i did a one track mind about my um my experience of going i guess it must have been andy when paul bagley was manager of the dublin shop oh yeah i mean really long time ago probably getting on for 25 maybe almost 30 years ago early 90s anyway and it was um it was a dinner party at column to beans house column to being at that stage i think published named only published one novel the south um by serpent's tale so he wasn't the he wasn't the great man of quite the great man of letters that he was and i think also um amazing woman called katrina crow who was from the uh i think from the national library of ireland and joseph o'connor as well it was one of those kind of and i ended up

everybody got very drunk but they started to sing at the end of the thing and there is this traditional line called the noble call where you you ask somebody to sing a song and i just remember the kind of anxiety of sitting there thinking they're going to ask me to sing a song. And I can just remember the kind of anxiety of sitting there thinking, are they going to ask me to sing a song? And I just, I'm not sure I know anywhere. And somehow, weirdly, in that sort of drunken folk, a Northumbrian folk song emerged, and I sang it. I mean, luckily, the dialect in it is quite heavy,

so I could kind of, when I didn't remember the words. Anyway, I kind of totally got away with it. But it's just, anytime anybody says get drunk and sing a song, I always think of that just extraordinary, it's not even nervous, it's just fear, deep fear. Out of somewhere, I managed to find a song. But then, you know, after that, I learned lots of songs. So I would never be, so I know know the words quite a few songs now i think that's a very mitch mitchinsonian anecdote given

what we're about to record something's gonna well up out of him now that he hasn't quite put his finger on what it's gonna be he said purposely i haven't read anything this summer apart from brain books because you've been working so hard hold on a sec i might just have one or two or 20 others to pluck out of nowhere nick do your prep for the weekend in terms of your repertoire is it okay to bring a songbook is that not allowed there's nothing worse than somebody sitting there with a with a iphone with lyrics trying to i i personally draw the line at that okay right but on the on the other hand there's nothing worse than people forgetting the words to a song so my the whole thing of my one

track mind talk which i think is on the internet somewhere was learn the words just don't yeah yeah don't muck around okay i've got i'll get a couple of songs lined up andy i'm looking forward to hearing what you've got i'd be i should be should be singing Elvis Costello's first six albums from beginning to end. I was about to say, you probably know Abbey Road, don't you? Anything from Abbey Road will be there. I do know Abbey Road, yeah, I'm quite up on that one. Right. Hello, everybody.

John, do you want to welcome people here? Yes, welcome to this special summer reading edition of Backlisted. We've been off doing various exciting things over the summer, and this is the first time we've been together in a month, and we thought it would be a nice opportunity for us to share with you some of the things we've been reading. We've done this a few times before, where summer reading doesn't mean we never do summer reading in the summer because that would be uh that would be too

easy we do it's retrospective our summer reading so it's a report on what we read that you can either hold over feet to read next summer or you can read in the autumn and winter uh the two lovely seasons approaching it should really be called summer red rather than Summer Evening. Summer Redding. Summer Red. That's lovely. So we're going to talk about a few books that we've read over the summer and that we think are easily available in another departure from backlisted tradition. You should just be able to buy these or get them from a library.

And these are mostly new books, aren't they? They're mostly new books. What quantifies a new book? How new is new i think all my choices are published this year nearly all of them yeah so this isn't a regular episode of backlisted still this is still a kind of well it's very irregular yeah irregular happens once a year and then we'll be back to back to business as usual in a fortnight we're recording an episode in galway and if you are one of the listeners who likes to know what the books are ahead of time that book will be the novel elizabeth costello by jm kutzea kutze this is a traditional backlifter thing as well,

where we haven't worked out how you actually pronounce the name of this object. We'll have to have it confirmed. We will find that out. If you live in Galway, you may still be able to get tickets to come and see us. I believe so. It's part of the Galway International Festival. And that is taking place this Friday, as we're recording this. September 10th. Which book should we start with everybody? Well why don't you kick off Andy? All right let's start

with the biggest and most daunting book that we're going to talk about. That's a good plan. David Keenan who has written several books I'm going to talk about in a minute had a new novel out a few weeks ago called Monument Maker Friend of the show He's been on a couple of times He was here to talk about Peter Gerard and Elvis Presley books and he was on earlier in the year

to talk about Clarice Lispector with Wendy Erskine which was a really fun episode. Anyway, David is, I don't know, a force of nature. That's not right, is it? Force of intellect, force of reading, force of willpower. He's remarkable, isn't he?

He's the real thing, yeah. It took me about three weeks to read this novel, and I'm going to do something that we don't normally do on Batlisted, It's a real thing, yeah. It took me about three weeks to read this novel, and I'm going to do something that we don't normally do on Backlisted, but I was commissioned to review it for a magazine, and I'm going to read the review out as I wrote it, because actually I found the novel really inspiring, and it inspired me to write the following, and I think it's worth respecting David's words and mine by just telling you what I think.

So let me just share with you what I thought of Monument Maker by David Keenan, which is published by White Rabbit Books and is in bookshops now. Anne is in bookshops now. Near to the heart of this wild and labyrinthine novel, page 516 of 808 pages, I turned the corner down so I could find my way back to it, a character in a letter addressed to his future self within the reminiscence of a disfigured and imprisoned World War II sailor who will subsequently be transformed via sorcery, surgery and sex

into a medium and prophet, eventually finding his way back to Scotland where he will subsequently be transformed via sorcery, surgery and sex into a medium and prophet, eventually finding his way back to Scotland where he will marry his own wife again, though possibly not in that order, states the following, quote, my studies in magic and experimental psychology and of course alchemy suggested that the goal of magical practice, which had become the goal of art practice, was a reuniting of fractured selves across time. This feeling of union, of union with the past, the present and the future, in a place that was outside of time, well it was palpable to say the least, and true to our beliefs, our gamble with art changed everything.

A gamble with art is a fitting description of Monument Maker, the novel itself as a place outside of time where the author can combine a huge variety of characters with a multiplicity of ideas, memories and esoteric reading. And the book can be considered an artistic gamble too with its author's reputation as the high stake. This is the fourth novel David Keenan has published in as many years. This is Memorial Device, 2017, set in the post-punk scene of early 1980s Scotland, was a cult hit. For the Good Times, 2019, won the

Gordon Byrne Prize. In 2020, Ex-Estabeth attracted attention from figures as diverse as Edna O'Brien, Selina Godden and Kim Gordon. Monument Maker features references to characters and locations from these predecessors in what is becoming increasingly apparent is either a cycle of novels or one vast fictional gallimaufry. Several more instalments are in the works, and that Monumacre is the largest, longest and weirdest to date should detract neither from its ambition nor the risk it represents in its own right. David Keenan has said that the novel took him 10 years to write, though construct may be a better term for a book inspired by the architecture of the cathedral. It's dedicated to the glory of God and encompasses four books identified as nave, transept, apse and choir,

plus several ecclesiastical appendices. Most of the sections are stories within stories, memoir, biography, translation, supernatural tale, diary, letter, and so on. This allows Keenan to keep moving stylistically, geographically, and temporally. A summer in the south of France in a house once occupied by the composer Frederick Delius, the siege of Khartoum, Sudan, 1884, Crete during World War II, the surface of the moon in the not too distant future. And when they come, these shifts are disorientating, not to say baffling, but they are also crucial to the process of reading the book, one achievement of which is to unite the personal, the archetypal and the fantastic in a way that offers the reader the satisfaction of narrative, or narratives,

without being reliant on what happens next. The book moves backwards and forwards in time like a connected series of dreams or visions. Quote, I thought of the trenches and I flitted back there in my mind via the secret tributaries that tunnel beneath the page and I imagined a literary underground, a book as a tomb for language and of a literary valley of the kings, a vast subterranean network connected across time and space, and all that would entail the empty bunkers, the daring passageways, the perpetual lack of sunlight. Monument Maker, then, is an experimental novel informed by religion, art, the occult, sex, tarot, alcohol, signs, symbols, and other experimental novels. It evokes

the work of Malcolm Lowry, Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Arthur Macon, Philip K. Dick, and even John Fowles. Like them, Keenan is a literary disruptor and sees himself as such. He's also a writer for whom the lived experience and the imaginative one, drawn from books, films and music, are both vital and interchangeable. This isn't an easy or straightforward read, but it crackles with the energy of someone challenging themselves to make something new, meaningful, and personal with the tools at their disposal. By turns, it's obscure, romantic, terrifying, funny, and, an underrated and unfashionable literary virtue, sincere. And if occasionally I was baffled by Monument Maker, well, I enjoyed being baffled,

while also feeling I was this close to decoding it. I would love to read it again. From deep within the appendices, another clue to this book's true nature. Works of rogue imagination are impossible to police. The end of my essay on David Keenan's Monument Maker. What a damn fine review. I commend that. The bigger point for me is I didn't really understand all of the book, but I was utterly enraptured by the energy, ambition, intellect, effort.

It's one of those books that I thought i don't need to understand it understand why do you need to totally comprehend everything is wonderful johnny in fact what did you think i think david would be disappointed if anybody felt that because i don't think he comprehends all of it either that's that's kind of why i think it's such a and i i don't say this lightly i think it is a i think it is a great book. I think it's as near as we're going to get to one of those strange, unclassifiable, baggy masterpieces. I don't think, having read it, that you will forget it.

And I also think it's a book that you could very happily go back to in the future and reread and get more out of it. I think he's operating at, it's a high, it's a tightrope walk. It could easily fail. I loved what you said about sincerity. He means this book.

And I love that about David. He, you know, I saw him read from it at the, an amazing event organized by white rabbit books, his publisher at the social in London. And it was OTT mad, wonderful event. Wendy Erskine interviewed him and he read several sections, including incredible kind of litany of names of choristers from the book. John Higgs, who'd previously been

on the podcast talking about Steve Aylitt on Backlisted, read an amazing passage from Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I felt incredibly energized by the whole thing because it was people not only talking about, but also reading from, manifesting that sense of imaginative energy. And you talk about the time travel in your review, Andy, that the amazing thing that David manages to do in this book is he gets away with passages set in the future on the moon. He gets away with jumping from cartoon to, I mean, I don't quite know how he does it, but there's a kind of an energy and an openness and a deep, deep curiosity and a reluctance to judge in his writing. Often with a difficult book or a challenging book you would say to people i'm

not sure it's you know if you don't like that kind of thing you're not going to like this i think there's something in this novel for almost anyone i think it i think you could pick it up and start reading it and find and find you know something in it that would that that would that would chime with the experiences you had he's he's opened the kind of passage is imaginative passages in a way that very few writers do now it's it's it's great is it is it a novel if you were to ask me your your trademark question what is it about i don't know that's what my review was trying to say that's's like 800 words of going, I don't know. I tell you, Nicky, I think the thing that holds it together,

the immaculate design, and relates to what John was just saying, when I think David follows his passions and intellectual interests with a really appealing, commendable lack of snobbery. So his willingness to fold in elements of different cultural disciplines and within those different types of music or imagery or fiction, when I, you know, I made that litany of writers to whom I could have added many more. But, you know, I love the sense that he's pulling in high, medium, low culture, pulp stuff, things you would have bought in compendium in the 1970s high table literature and yeah psychology together through through a vision and in a sense you ask is it a novel

if david says it's a novel it's a novel you know is art art if the artist says it is to some extent then it is and then it's our job to to decode it and it's in bookshops now and it's 25 pounds so right one down who wants to go next on our summer reading carousel andy shall i talk about the book that uh i enjoyed very much in fact that you told me about at the beginning of the summer uh yeah why not great open water by caleb azuma nelson and i think you said right at the beginning might be not even on a program you said i would maybe go away and read this and see what you think and you were very cagey about what you said as well you didn't sort of say it's brilliant it's wonderful it's odd it's strange you just said i'm interested to see what you think and and uh yes because indeed i still i'm still

i'm really i i don't you don't you haven't told me what you're going to say and i'm still stewing this book which is very short unlike monument maker it's it's a really short little novel, novella. It's called, yes, you said, Open Water by Caleb Azuma Nelson. We've got a clip of the prologue. This is the very beginning of the book, and this is Caleb reading his own work himself. The barber shop was strangely quiet. Only the dull buzz of clippers shearing soft scalps. That was before

the barber caught you watching her reflection in the mirror as he cut her hair and saw something in her eyes too. He paused and turned towards you, his dreads like thick beautiful roots dancing with excitement as he spoke. You two are in something. I don't know what it is, but you guys are in something. Some people call it a relationship. Some call it friendship. Some call it love. But you two, you two are in something.

You gazed at each other then, with the same open-eyed wonder that keeps starting you at various intervals since you met. The two of you, like headphone wires tangling, caught up in this something. A happy accident. A messy miracle. You lost her gaze for a moment, and your breath quickened, as when a dropped call across a distance gains unexpected gravity. You would soon learn that love made you worry, but it also made you beautiful. Love made you black, as in, you were most coloured in her presence. It was not a cause for concern one must rejoice you could be yourselves right so on the surface this is a romance it's a book a very and you set it up in your hand you

said oh is it a bit like a sally rooney novel you could say on the surface um and you know perhaps they should have put that on the front because that would have made it sell tons of copies but it turns out to be a lot more than that. It's a romance at the beginning which is not a kind of will they, won't they. It's this couple who have a friendship and it takes quite a long time to turn into a romance and actually those are very beautiful moments within the book because it's very tender and it's very much about friendship

and should you change friendship into romance and and lots of really i think really restrained kind of writing around that um and and and it's it's really very beautiful and thoughtful and as i said very tender but then it kind of evolves into something much more than a romance and i don't know how much more to say but essentially essentially it's about kind of being young black man in London and the sort of pressures that systemic racism adds to your daily life. And actually the whole book is about being young and black in London and some of it being the sort of pressures,

but also some about the beauty and the wonder and the amazing art and culture. And it sort of references tons and tons of other artists you know zadie smith is kind of quoted throughout and and you know curtis mayfield kendrick lamar and things like that so you're always sort of hearing of lots of these great kind of cultural icons throughout but it's it becomes kind of more and more intense actually around the sort of oppressive nature of living this life in London as a young person. And one of the things that I really liked about it was this,

you know, I'm in my 40s and I live in London and I'm a white woman. And it was this window into a world of, of course, you live with your family. You're in your 20s and you're a Londoner. How else would you live in London without living with multiple you know generations and having to manage a relationship a new relationship around the fact that everyone lives with their family of course they do because how else would they survive so I thought some of that stuff really interesting and and then in terms of the writing itself it's kind of super rhythmical and i think you heard that it's all in the second person and you know you you have the phone tucked between

your ear and your shoulder or but and loads and loads of repetition throughout isn't there it's sort of repeating things all the time i don't know sometimes i found that beautiful but sometimes i found that slightly odd it's scratchy at times. Bit scratchy yeah that's right scratchy. I learned stuff you know. Yeah. The fact that it was more than the romance because the romance is a good hook it really made me think oh gosh okay this is affecting you in such a way yeah you aren't able to make these good decisions about your life. Well, you think you're reading normal people when you start it or a version of normal people. But actually, as the drift of the book goes on without saying too much,

it becomes much more about an investigation of single identity and why the option of writing normal people from a different cultural perspective is not open to the individual writing the book. It's not a critique of normal people. That's not what I mean. But it is very interesting about showing up the cultural circumstances that produce one kind of book as opposed to another kind of book.

And that's the thing I think I took away from it. another kind of book. And that's the thing I think I took away from it. I agree with you about some of the methods in the prose. And I felt this was, in the best way, very promising rather than the finished article. Did you feel that? It made me think, well, this is great. I wonder what this guy's going to do next.

I felt that too, actually. I felt that too too at times i was a bit sort of as you said scratchy is a good way of of describing it it wasn't perfect but it's still absolutely 100% kind of worth it you know yeah i i absolutely enjoyed it and i i i felt there was something interesting because also he's a the main character is a photographer, right, who writes a bit. And the author is a photographer who's clearly written a fair bit, you know, in order to get this done. So there's lots of you're not quite sure how much of this is personal and how much of it is, you know, is created, is fiction. And, you know, that makes me think, okay, well, what next for someone who's, he's managed to get a book out, right?

What's he going to do next? It might be a different art that he works in now, a different discipline. He's somebody worth watching. Also, I commend him for writing a short book. That's just a personal reflection on my time. John, have you got something for us? Well, it's interesting.

Can I just say you've both made me really, really want to. I did not do my homework, Andy, because I completely forgot about it. You both really made me want to read that book. You'll do it in an afternoon, John. You should definitely read it. You should definitely read it. It's a very good book. I want to talk about a book that's given me just the most intense amount of pleasure that I think I've had from a book for a long time.

And bear in mind, I have been reading lots of books about the brain over the summer. But it's Erasure, a 2001 novel by the American writer Percival everett and republished this year by faber so it's 20 years old but it is you know let's be honest i we like we like a book about books on this show and the the narrator of this of this book is a writer, an academic, and a novelist called Thelonious Ellison, or everybody knows him as Monk. He's clearly, there is a kind of a, there's quite a lot of Percival Everett in this character. It's playful in tone, but it's also, I think, the undertow is actually quite a serious and complex. I think The Undertow is actually quite a serious and complex and possibly the most interesting attempt to deal with the problem

of how do you be a black writer when everybody's telling you what you should be doing as a black writer? So he's subtly undercutting that. So Thelonious is a writer, but he specializes in incredibly difficult postmodern novels that nobody reads. There's a brilliant parody. He delivers a little piece to students at the Nouveau Romain Society about his take on Essaid, the famously complicated Roland Barthes book, which is based on a structuralist rereading of the story Sarazine by Balzac. I mean, apart from the fact that it's a brilliant bit of parody, you can feel that what's building up around this is one, his mother's getting dementia, two, his brother has announced that he's gay and he's in dialogue with his father who's dead. But his agent rings him in the middle of all this and says look you know you're

just not black enough you know this stuff your stuff is not you need to do and he becomes obsessed by this young female black writer who's got a massive advance and a massive film deal for for a book he's just furious about this so what he does is he writes he writes a book called my pathology by stag double g r lee and he and it's basically stag all yeah so it's like it's written in kind of in in black slang it's full of it's full of hoes and bros and people being stabbed and sex. And that's a good 60 pages of the novel. Of course, he sends it to his agent. And he gets offered like $600,000. And then, I'm not going to tell the whole plot,

but then, of course gets he ends up being asked the character monk ellison ends up being invited to be a judge on a big national book award so he becomes a judge on a on a book award so in in the kind of meta way that of course a book like this works my pathology he decides he decides he doesn't like the title. So he gets the publishers to change the title to Fuck by Stagg R. Lee. And in the end, they just have to buy it. There's a brilliant scene where he starts to impersonate Stagg R. Lee. I'm going to read you a little bit about the books that he gets submitted.

Having just done a book prize, this is one of the best. Yeah, all right. Spoke to you, right? I mean, the writing throughout, it's so funny. It's so clever. But in the end, what it's actually about is serious and real. It's about family relationships. There's a lovely introduction from from brandon taylor

and he says i just think this really sums up the book perfectly everett is illuminating something all right but what erasure sends up is the silliness of going about your business as a black person only for the world to rush in and to try to remind you that you are black and that it means something but that you aren't allowed to dictate what that something is. The world demands that you introduce yourself twice, first as you are, and the second as you're told to be. So it is a serious thing. I mean, it seems to me that it connects to some of the things you were saying about Caleb Azuma Nelson's book, you know, what you can't do as a black writer in some ways that you can do if you're, I mean, this is,

he saw Bellow good in terms of his pro it's comic pros. He's at it. It's, it's, and the book is also think very, very kind of in dialogue, as you would imagine with, with,

um, with Ralph Ellison. I mean, the characters, so with invisible man in particular, but I just thought this, this will amuse, uh,

listeners. Cause it's, it's so spot on. He's getting all these books. The books are coming in their caseload through the door. It was the season of the absent or lazy editor. So many of the novels were needlessly fat. Six were more than 900 pages.

Twelve were better than 700. And any one of them would and could have been, with a modicum of editorial attention, a good 400-page novel. There was an incredibly dense novel from a well-known reclusive writer of dense novels. There was a nicely crafted and notably lean novel from a writer whose reputation was astonishingly well-made. There was a volume of collected stories from a dead writer, a shelf of first novels about fatherly abuse and motherly alcoholism, and the reverse, a min-list author's new but dreadfully old take on the academic novel, 28 middle America domestic where will the children live novels, 40 coming of age novels, 35 new life after the wrecked marriage novels, 30 crime novels,

40 so-called adventure novels, and six yeah we're Christians with chips on our shoulders novels. For the most part, the titles received more consideration than the stories of the writing. Still, I found 30 I wish I'd written, 10 because I could not have written them better. The other 10 were simply good, well-crafted, serious, thoughtful. At the first conference, one of the judges, I'm not to say which one, said, I'd like to see Rita Totten's Over My Body on the shortlist. When asked why, she said, for two reasons, because Rita's a good friend of mine and because she got such a scathing review in the New York Times. I pointed out that one could argue that either of those reasons might be enough to keep her off the list. this is Tomad speaking as it was a telephone conference it was kind of him to identify himself and I believe that Totten's novel is just so much fluff filthy fluff but fluff nonetheless

another judge I'd like to see Richard Wordman's book on the lists don't you work with him someone asked why yes although I don't think it's his best book I'd like for him to know that I take his work seriously why don't we wait until all the books come in i asked sounds reasonable wilson harnett said this is my suggested course of action we each compile a list of 25 books then we see if there's any overlap we'll discuss the list and any book with

at least two mentioners goes to the next round from there we'll wing it tomas says sounds good i've already got a couple i'm willing to go to the mat for there's some gritty stuff out there sigmussen yeah sure the nature writing is skinny by my standards but there are still a couple of good ones toby lack fugen's book is remarkable hoover i didn't get all of that yes of course i was surprised to see so many books by such big names shouldn't we just go ahead and put them on the list first? Ellison. Okay. Oh, brilliant.

Really good. Really good. I don't mean again, cliche, but it will keep you laughing until the very last page. I just think he's, he's one of those writers I've discovered. And I think I don't,

I haven't read comic. I mean, Andrew Sean Greer, you know, our lovely Francis plug. I mean, there are very few comic books that really, really, that really do it. And here's one.

What's it called again, John? It's called Erasure. Erasure by Percival Everett. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. I'm going to just say a bit about, and I reckon quite a few listeners will have read one or all of these books already. Deborah Levy, the novelist Deborah Levy, has over the last several years published three volumes of what she and or her publisher, Hamish Hamilton, refer to as a living autobiography. First volume was published about seven years ago. It's called Things I Don't Want to Know. The second volume, 2018, I think, The Cost of Living,

and then the third and final part, Real Estate, came out in May this year. And these are memoirs, short in each case, These are memoirs, short in each case, of Deborah Levy's life as a writer, as a feminist, as a parent, as a recently divorced former spouse. And in that sense, what the books are really about, I think, are identity in midlife and beyond, looking forward what are we if we are or aren't and can or cannot refer to us as those things and um here's a bit from the audio book of the cost of living which illustrates the theme and the tone of these books perfectly read read by Juliet Stevenson quite brilliantly.

And this is the second book, is it, in the three? Yeah, this is the second one, The Cost of Living. That November, I moved with my daughters to a flat on the sixth floor of a large, shabby apartment block on the top of a hill in North London. Apparently, a restoration programme was due to start in this apartment block, but it never seemed to start. The floors of the communal corridors were covered in grey industrial plastic for three years after we moved in.

The impossibility of repairing and rehabilitating a vast old building seemed gloomily appropriate at this time of disintegration and rupture. The process of restoration, the bringing back and repairing of something that existed before, in this case an Art Deco building that was falling apart, was the wrong metaphor for this time in my life. I did not wish to restore the past. What I needed was an entirely new composition. It was a bitter winter. The communal heating system had broken down. The heating was off, the hot water was off, and sometimes the cold water was off too. I had three halogen heaters on the go and twelve large bottles of mineral water stored under the sink.

When the water was switched off, the toilet would not flush. Someone had anonymously written a note and stuck it on the lift door. Help! Please help! The flats are unbearably cold. Could someone do something? My oldest daughter, who had begun her first year at university, joked that student life was a luxury in comparison. For a few weeks after she departed to begin her degree, I woke up in the small hours with a queasy feeling that something was wrong.

Where was my oldest child? And then I remembered, and I knew that we were all of us moving forwards into another kind of life. That resonate with you, Andy? It does resonate with me. But then, I mean, I don't think these books were written for me but i found them incredibly uh useful and funny and rather moving and the energy for me as i think you could hear there in that brief excerpt is the just the sheer pleasure of the careful, pinpoint accurate prose. That is writing. What's writing? That's writing.

You know, choosing, selecting the details to present to you and paring them down and paring them back. None of these books are very long. You could probably read most of them in an, you could read one in an afternoon. I would say for me, the first and third volumes are both very good. But the middle one, The Cost of Living,

which I know has been much praised and appeared in lists of books of the century. I must say, I think the middle one, The Cost of Living, which I know has been much praised and appeared in lists of books of the century. I must say, I think the middle one, The Cost of Living, from which that excerpt comes, is exceptional. I think you could just read that one straight off the bat. Although they do talk to one another, there are themes and images that pick up from book to book i ended up thinking they were incredibly um brave they are incredible feats of nerve because actually what are they about they're not really i mean they're they're musings on subjects they're they're they're autobiography but they're not autobiography because they're so partial.

Also, I was very interested with some of the books that I've been reading. I've been reading a lot of books by women over the last couple of months, and Deborah Levy really engages with what it means to be a writer and a woman, and a woman writer in this historical moment in this point in her life how useful to her is is ideological feminism at this point um does she wish to hang on to that identity does she want to discard pieces of it is it possible can those do those two thoughts go together or not i found him really thoughtful and this dovetails in with the books by Vivian Gornick that I'm going to talk about at the end of the show

but anyway so yeah I've strongly I love them, what can I tell you I love them so they're all published by Penguin or Hamish Hamilton the first two are in paperback and Real Estate is out in hardback I think you would both i mean we keep saying this to one another about all these

books don't we but i mean i think you would i find it hard to think that that you're not you know both of you but also anyone who really listens to this podcast regularly would just enjoy you know would just enjoy, you know, undoing the laces of their tight shoes and just reading these with pleasure, you know. John, have you got something else for us? I have, actually. I've just, over the summer, I had friends staying and uh who they were doing something that when they were doing a i always think it must be quite thankless to be running a bookshop at wilderness festival apparently it was lots of fun but sure i mean i'm but i just think it was the weather was

appalling oh was it oh god a mud fest joyously, what happened was that one of the writers who was speaking was Jeff Dyer, who'd flown over from LA. So Jeff came and stayed for an evening, and we had a very, very jolly time talking about all kinds of things. Inevitably, talk got on to D.H. Lawrence. Inevitably. And the reason i'm telling you this is because he said you must read my selected essays i said well you know funnily enough i've

just i've just done a thing about francis wilson's book and she kind of more or less agrees with you that the point of lawrence is the small pieces the travel pieces that the reviews that the the letters you know it's all one it's all one book so anyway he he sent me he sent rachel and i a copy of the book uh life lived with an l and it's the most jeff dyer thing in the world because he's um he's there are a couple of mistakes in the introduction he's hand corrected oh has he oh that's good i just thought what i might do because i know it always cheers andy up when i decide to i thought i might just read you a tiny little bit of of one of one of the best essays in the book um uh which i had heard quoted from but i never actually read and it's called

the bad side of books okay the bad side of books there doesn't seem much excuse for me sitting under a little cedar tree at the foot of the rockies looking at the pale desert disappearing westward with hummocks of shadow rising in the stillness of incipient autumn this morning the near pines perfectly still the sunflowers and the purple michaelmas daisies moving for the first time this morning in an invisible breath of breeze, to be writing an introduction to a bibliography. Books, to me, are in corporate things, voices in the air that do not disturb the haze of awesome and visions that don't blot the sunflowers. What do I care for first or last editions? I've never read one of my own

published works. To me, no book has a date. No book has a binding. What do I care if E is somewhere upside down or G comes from the wrong font? I really don't. And when I force myself to remember what pleasure there is in that, the very first copy of The White Peacock that was ever sent out, I put into my mother's hands when she was dying she looked at the outside and then at the title page and then at me with darkening eyes and though she loved me so much i think she doubted whether it could be much of a book since no one more important than i had written it somewhere in the helpless privacies of her being she had wistful respect for me but for me in the face of the world not much this david would never get a stone across at goliath why try let goliath alone anyway she was beyond reading my first immortal work it was put aside and i never wanted

to see it again she She never saw it again. After the funeral, my father struggled through half a page and it might as well have been hot and tot. What did they get you for that, lad? £50, father. £50? He was dumbfounded and looked at me with shrewd eyes as if I were a swindler. £50?

And I've never done a day's work in my life. I think to this day, he looks upon me as a sort of cleverish swindler who gets money for nothing, a sort of Ernest Hooley. And my sister says, to my utter amazement, you always were lucky. Somehow, it is the actual corpus and substance, the actual paper and rag volume of any of my works that calls up these personal feelings and memories. It is the miserable tome itself which somehow delivers to me the vulgar mercies of the world. The voice inside me is mine forever, but the beastly marketable chunk of published

volume is a bone which every dog presumes to pick with me? Well, obviously rubbish, John. It's absolute rubbish. No, obviously that's great, isn't it? Well, I've got two things to say. The first thing is, you know, who isn't looking forward to yet another adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover coming on Netflix? Amazing news.

But also, I'm going to be talking about, on the next episode of Backlisted, I'm going to be talking about Rachel Cusk's new novel, which is inspired by an engagement with a memoir of D.H. Lawrence. And Cusk's novel is a kind of exploration of what the Lawrence-like creative figure means in the culture 100 years later. And that's very interesting in terms of the book we're going to be talking about, Elizabeth Costello by Kurtz.

So that's why I'm holding that back for the next episode of Backlisted. So we will return yet again to D.H. Lawrence. Can't get rid of him. Shall we finish up? I've got one more thing to talk about. Andy, you've been on a new reading binge. It's amazing, all these new books. Well, it's because we had the break

and suddenly I didn't have to cram a backlisted book. I had all this free time to read much many more new things or writers who are new to me. And how have you found, just a quick kind of interlude, how have you found this whole modern reading malarkey? It made me realise how our reading for Batlisted is we're very lucky because to some extent the quality control is artificially heightened because we ask people who are experts to select books that therefore tend to be excellent books or written by people whose work is also excellent and interesting so a lot of our time we spend reading um books that are a cut above yeah and what i found by being given a my own um will back for a few weeks is it was possible to read quite

a lot that were a cut below um because because and I read a couple of things that I absolutely hated. And that actually hasn't happened to me for a while. But a couple of, I'm not going to, don't even bother, don't message me, don't email me, don't tweet me. I'm not going to say what they are. But I read a couple of things that I just, I was laughing because I hated them so much. I actually enjoyed reading them, Nicky.

Well, you got a one star. You love a one star review. This reminds me of what real reading is, you know. It wasn't boring. I didn't get nothing from it because what I got from it was the sheer exhilaration of reading something I hated. I really hated. So anyway, but that's not what I'm going to talk about now. Finally, for this episode, I want to talk about Vivian Gornick, who is a New York Jewish woman writer in her mid-80s. There are probably a dozen of her books that I could have talked about or we could choose to talk about on Batlisted.

Her memoir, Fierce Attachments. Her book, The Romance of American Communism, which I've started reading, which is absolutely terrific. But I read a couple of things by her, which are her books of essays, literary essays. And I think they are exceptionally great. The first one is called The End of the Novel of Love. And it was published in the mid-1990s, when she was slightly older than Deborah Levy is now.

And there's a reason i mentioned that and the other is called unfinished business notes of a chronic rereader and this was published last year now she is in her early 80s and the two books really do speak to one another uh by the same writer from different points in her life about how she felt about books when she was in her um early 60s and how she feels about them now she's in her mid 80s and she folds that into what she's writing i'm not imposing that that's not my interpretation that's partly what the books are about. And the end of the novel of love, which was written in the, collects her journalism, features essays on amongst others,

Grace Paley, Willa Kather, Jean Rees, George Meredith, Jane Smiley, and Richard Ford, John. And she's coming at those from the position of she's a famous feminist writer

and she's coming at them from the position of saying novels about love rather like the end of history presumably with the book to which this 90s book refers. Novels about love are over. What love means, fulfilment in our society now, is no longer the same thing. What's much more interesting are novels about self-realisation. And she revisits books that she may have read as a younger person, written by those authors, not from the position of romantic fulfilment that the characters may or may not have experienced, but from the position of individual fulfilment. that you may think you know all about from a completely different perspective simply by changing the focus. Is it a book about Dorothea and Will getting together or is it a book about Dorothea becoming herself?

Discuss. And she takes the latter discussion. Now that was written and that was written in the mid-1990s. And her argument is in the mid-1990s, novels about love are over. Fast forward to 2020. Fast forward to her in her 80s. This is a book about what rereading means at different times in life. And she at no point renounces what she said earlier.

But she is prepared to go back and her brilliance as a writer and a critic and go back and judge herself and say, was I right? It doesn't matter if I was right or if I was wrong. What does this way of looking at a book or the world or my life allow me to do? And what does it stop me doing? And that seems to me incredibly interesting and relevant and engaging as a way of thinking about books, but a way of thinking about how we think about books. So this paragraph from an essay about Pat Barker's regeneration and, yes, backlisted listeners, J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country is spectacular because she talks about what she thought A Month in the Country was about the first time she read it when it was published and what she thinks about it now she's re-read it and she says I cannot believe that I interpret it one way and not the other while I can simultaneously see that both

interpretations are valid and then she produces this paragraph and this is my favorite thing of all the books I read in the summer in this summer reading episode episode, this single paragraph, this is what it comes down to. From this essay about a month in the country, which is the subject of the very first episode of Batlisted, Vivian Gornick writes, In service to class struggle, or women's rights for that matter, I have experienced many times those deliciously hard-edged feelings Billy had whenever he was ripping off authority, and I know while in their grip one imagines oneself bold, free, liberated.

But un-nuanced freedom is no freedom at all. It's the nuance that makes us act like civilised human beings, even when we do not feel like civilised human beings. Do away with nuance, and it's all animal life. In other words, war. now i think that as a dropped in paragraph of a few sentences in an essay which is superficially lit crit is just it knocked me off my feet um because of what the historical period we're living through at the moment and things that happen in the culture at the moment and her willingness to say, to try and create a way of seeing the world that can incorporate ideology without being enslaved to ideology. Yeah. That seems both the kind of artistic drive, the true artistic drive, but also a place that as a culture we would do well to try

and bear in mind when we're tearing chunks out of one another about relatively unimportant matters so that's where i am on that those books are amazing the vivian gornick the end of the novel of love and then that bit that i just read is from Unfinished Business, Notes of a Chronic Rereader. And when was Unfinished Business written? Last year, published last year. Last year, okay. And like I say, she revisits books, and if this doesn't persuade listeners,

and especially John Mitchinson to read this book, I don't know what will, she revisits books by J.L. Carr, Pat Barker, Natalia Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bowen, Colette, and D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.

And John, the essay about Sons and Lovers is totally wonderful in terms of saying I thought this book was about this. This book is about this. is totally wonderful in terms of saying, I thought this book was about this. This book is about this. But I couldn't have known that when I was younger.

And being younger, that wasn't the wrong reading. But every reading reveals something new depending on who you are and what the book means. And does she talk about her own life in relation to these books then? Is that kind of very much about her as a human woman? Yeah, she manages, well, yes. She does an interesting writerly thing of assuming you, the reader, do know something about her life and her career. And I find that, I think that's very good, a bit like Deborah Levy actually.

But she's almost writing from, you know, Deborah Levy's books are about looking down the track, what will be useful to her as she heads into being an older person and down the track 25 years ahead is vivian gornick saying well rightly or wrongly this is what i feel i have discovered in the post-ideological uh way i now look at the world or try to look at the world so So it was a good summer, Nicky. Right, I'm so pleased. The way that all these books talk to one another inside your head and we get to talk about them on here, it's very rewarding.

I'm so pleased you finished it with a woman in her 80s because I think, you know, we've talked about people writing in their senior years on lot listed, haven't we, before, but there is this sort of perception that once you reach a certain age you know you don't have that intellect anymore which is such a kind of ridiculous you know people really talk down to older people don't they there's a real sense of are you there are you okay you know yeah but actually somebody you know really just reflecting on how only through having their lived experience are they able to reassess and see great works

that they've previously seen as one thing and they can now see as another. Really, that life is important and has led to that re-understanding. And also the expression, you can hear the QED of that is the manner in which that is expressed in the paragraph I just read. That isn't a wishy-washy, rather pretty, literary, seeming poetic piece of writing like this terrible book that I read, which I won't say what it is. That is the real thing. Each sentence says something different and builds on the previous sentence and doesn't muck about with wafting rose petals around the room.

It's just true. The writing is so full of um wit and life so there you go vivian gornick i will be reading more yeah just to say her the interview her paris review interview is one of the very best i've read it it's just just so funny and so and yeah she's amazing i think um well i don't often say this as it were on air but i've ordered that and you know Just so funny. She's amazing, I think. Well, I don't often say this as it were on air, but I've ordered that, Andy, now. Have you?

He literally sold it to me as we were speaking. On the spot. On the spot. On the spot. So, John, where can people purchase these books if they want to? If they're not going to borrow them from a library what what service exists if you go on to bookshop.org and um and put in i think forward slash backlisted you should come up with um you should come up with the backlisted shop let me just give you i'm gonna do this properly because

it's uk.bookshop.org forward slash shop forward slash backlisted and you'll see that all of our 144 episodes um are on there and we will definitely be putting um putting these books this this episode which i guess is going to be our 145th will be on there as well yeah and if you can't remember the url there you can just search backlisted can't you in bookshop.org yeah well i thoroughly enjoyed that that was great it's great another that's our 145th episode so we're back in a couple of weeks we'll be talking about elizabeth costello by jm kurt sayer please back us on the patreon uh patreon.com forward slash backlisted because that helps us keep going as does anything you buy from the bookshop. And we're about to go straight on and record another episode, but that one is for Locklisted and that is for Patreons,

and that has got more book chat like this. So if you enjoyed that, join us on the Patreon. Thanks very much. See you next time. See you, everybody. Thank you. See you next time. Bye. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.