Musings/Träumereien/Devaneios

(Original Review, 1981-05-05)


The best fictional writing about the First World War is a series of novels written by Henry Williamson. In a long fictional cycle with the overall title of "A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight" there are 5 novels that deal with the period 1914 - 1918.

These are: “How Dear is Life”, “A Fox under My Cloak”, “The Golden Virgin”, “Love and the Loveless”, “A Test to Destruction.”

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(Original Review, 2007-05-05)



I've long waited for someone explain to me what the criteria are to select the best fiction out there. I know when I like a book or when others like a book, yet critics and intellectually sophisticated people often talk about books as if one can assess their value objectively, going beyond mere preference. Yet, mysteriously, the criteria by which literacy value is to be assessed are never stated with sufficient precision so that they can actually be applied. This article is a case in point. Even though saying exactly what literary value is would be of extraordinary importance to make the point the author wants to. In the absence of any solid and justifiable philosophy underpinning assessments of literary value, I fear we have to take pronouncements on what's good and what's bad as a form of virtue signalling in certain circles.

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(Original review, 1981-04-30)



“The Great Gatsby” is essentially a love story. Daisy turns out to be as unattainable to Jay as Beatrice was to Dante but this being the US, the hero doesn't elevate his idol to muse status; instead he embarks on a ruthless pursuit that ends up destroying him.

It's difficult in the present era of throwaway relationships to comprehend the extent of Gatsby's romantic obsession. The questions are: 1) would he have taken to crime had Daisy returned his love and told her wealthy family to go to hell and 2) did he love Daisy precisely because she was a romantic chimera, a glamorous woman who represented a rarefied world he wished to conquer?

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Imagine the scene: It's 2025 and a school student is visiting their careers adviser.

Student: Hey there, so do you have any advice for me in choosing a career?
Adviser: Well, we've monitored your performance over the last 13 years of schooling, your interests and abilities and used our software to predict which roles you would be best suited to.
Student: Ok, so whats the result?
Adviser: We are terribly sorry, but it seems you are what is commonly called a 'spare'
Student: Umm..a spare?

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I have said elsewhere that crime fiction seems to flourish in times of stress, such as our era now. I fully expect more great detective fiction in the near future as it is one of the few genres that can show society from top to bottom: the detective, investigator or whatever, in many of the best novels, talks to both the monied and the moneyless at the same time against a puzzling foreground as broad and as complex as the society, or the human beings, that carry out and solve seemingly deeply baffling crimes at the outset of any great novel.

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“Living is not an art, but to write of life is. Life is a series of accidents and anticlimaxes, misremembered and misunderstood, with lessons only dimly learned. Life is disorganized, lacks shape, lacks story.”

In “The Affirmation” by Christopher Priest




A Priest book isn't just a (SF) book. It is the distilled essence of a philosophy, a memoir; a piece of someone's soul. Losing the book is losing that element. On a more mundane level, it is also a memory - I read a book when I was about 7 (a proto-choose-your-own-adventure thing) that I've fitfully searched for ever since and never found, and doing so would put me right back on my nan's sofa on a Saturday afternoon with the wrestling on.

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(Original Review, 1981-04-24)





“They performed in silence. He trembled a little out of vanity, as when he had first scaled the mast. The woman’s lower body, like a hibernating animal half asleep, moved lethargically under the quilts; he sensed the stars of night tilting dangerously at the top of the mast. The stars slanted into the south, swung to the north, wheeled, whirled into the east, and seemed finally to be impaled on the tip of the mast. By the time he realized this was a woman, it was done...”

In “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” by Yukio Mishima.



I've read many scary books with frightening stories before and since, but they don't disturbed me the way this book did. The book was disturbing in a completely different way - it felt as if it was talking about me, saying something that's scary yet true about me.

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(Original Review, 1981-04-20)


“I was growing inward incessantly; like an animal that hibernates during the wintertime, I could hear other peoples' voices with my ears; my own voice, however, I could hear only in my throat. The loneliness and the solitude that lurked behind me were like a condensed, thick, eternal night, like one of those nights with a dense, persistent, sticky darkness which waits to pounce on unpopulated cities filled with lustful and vengeful dreams.”

In “The Blind Owl” by Sadegh Hedayat



“My one fear is that tomorrow I may die without having come to know myself.”


In “The Blind Owl” by Sadegh Hedayat

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(Original Review, 1981-04-17)



“The Mysterious Stranger” by Mark Twain which presented a very bleak and troubling vision of humanity. It had some Huck Finn style youthful frolicking too but this was swamped by that sense that human history and the consequences of moral decision making are a horrible dream that the narrator may be able to escape from but we cannot. I was expecting some jolly progressive waffle about the stupidity of religion but the book went far deeper than that especially when Satan started compassionately bumping people off because he could foretell how awful their lives would be if he didn't.

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(Original Review, 1990-04-17)


“He produced a big 9mm Quickhammer automatic with the tired ease of a conjurer showing off to a few girls and shlacked one into the chamber. He told Roatta: ‘Now I want you nice and still while all this is going on, Felix, because you’re going to make a terrible lot of mess.’
Roatta immediately screamed: ‘Wait! Wait!’ but his eyes were brighter than he was, and knew better. They had stopped moving before he did, because they could see there was nothing more profitable for them to look at, so instead they turned into a pair of dark, oily stones fixed on the last thing they would ever see – eternity in the barrel of a pistol. His ears were also straining with the intensity of a concert pianist for the first minute action inside the weapon as the killer’s finger tightened, because they knew that was the last sound they would ever heard. So in his last seconds of life, each of them arranged for him by his senses, Roatta sat waiting for the gun to explode with the rapt attention of an opera goer during a performance by his favourite star, leaning further and further forward in his chair until his existence was filled by, narrowed down to, and finally became the gun.”

In "I Was Dora Suarez" by Derek Raymond

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(Original Review, 1981-04-15)


"One" by David Karp, 1953.

It is like a nightmarish but plausible convergence of an über HR Services Dept. and the State, attempting to flush out and supplant individual heresy with conformity, even when dealing with the life of a most innocuous individual. A bit like some of the places we now have to work in really. Sh*t, I've really dropped myself in it now. I’m so skeptical and paranoid of any workplace that attempts to implement cultural change ever since. (I automatically switch in to heresy mode, can't help it.) They won’t come for me yet but it'd be only a matter of time, why are they waiting? Posting this now before it's too late because I don’t even what I’m going to major in, maybe Theoretical Physics or Computer Science, let alone what work I’ll do in the future [2018 EDIT: It’s so funny reading this in 2018…ROTFL!]

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(Original review, 1981-04-10)



Dino Buzzati's “The Tartar Steppe” disturbed me in the most elemental way. I found it extremely hard to finish yet I couldn't put it down. McCarthy's “Blood Meridian” is also unsettling, but in a glorious way. In some respects I found it very similar to “Moby Dick.” Finally, I'd nominate Andrei Platonov's novel Chevengur as one of the most parodic ans horrific horror stories that disturbs because of its truth.

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(Original Review, 1981-04-04)



Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du Vice (Story of Juliette or The Prosperities of Vice) by de Sade.

Profoundly disturbing - not only in its depiction of cold-hearted indulgence, by way of a text nearly as long as War and Peace, in murder, rape, robbery and more horrors besides, but also in its capability to beguile and confuse readers of a feminist persuasion.

Angela Carter fell for it: "[Sade's] great women [characters in Juliette], ... once they have tasted power, once they know how to use their sexuality as an instrument of aggression, they use it to extract vengeance for the humiliations they were forced to endure as the passive objects of the sexual energy of others ...”

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.