Sydney Padua and the computer that almost existed

Full title: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer

Author: Sydney Padua

Genre: Graphic novel
Attributes: 320 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Pantheon (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The book’s a jaunt through Victorian pretty-much-everything. To be more specific (…ish…): 1. Fashion (a lot of it, to keep the reader well immersed in the ‘spirit of the era’; btw, you’ve got to see the drawings to understand); 2. Technology (the book’s concerned primarily with this, since it’s set out to contemplate a possible alternative reality centered on a technological near-miss: the invention of the computer); 3. Historical facts (tons of them, every page explaining details about the era through copious references to primary sources, citations, encyclopedic blowing up of minute biographical details, etc. etc. etc.); 4. Mores and thereabouts (from literary salons to scientific soirées, a lot is being covered and presented with gusto).

Of course, as they say in Germany, Victorian times call for Victorian measures. Meaning: being so steeped in these times of ours when we take delight in all manner of reenactments, we might as well take pleasure in contemplating some Steampunk vogue (itself a conglomerate of fashion, mores, and all things Victorian). Which makes the Babbage case (see below for clarifications), with the addition of characters such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his crazy plans for the employment of the steam engine, pretty spot-on, since they’re prime material for the exploration of all of the above.

So Charles Babbage. A man who went down in history as the first who had an inkling of what a computer (called by him a “difference engine,” for a better-made philosophical case) might have looked like. Also, on the less fortunate side of his destiny, as one who proposed measures for the replacement of human workers by automated operations and/or machines. It’s said in the book:

“As I outlined in Machinery and Manufactures (6s. bound in cloth), true savings in labor costs arise from de-skilling complex tasks, so they may be done by any easily replaceable ignorant menial!”

In which by the menial is meant (symbolically first, actually later) an apparatus devoid of soul; in other words, a machine.

Good material for the Luddites to exercise their counter-arguments in their revolts. There are pages in the book that capture the protests of the masses, and they must be taken into consideration as well. At least for historical color.

Ada Lovelace, the other name in the title, has a story of her own too. Daughter of Byron (yes, the Byron), she was trained in sciences rather than the poetic reverberations of her father, who seems to have advised her strongly against his own profession. Or that’s what some letter fragments say. So she became a quite astute mathematician, met Babbage, worked with him for a while (some saying she was behind his calculations, as a do-all high priestess of the Difference Engine), but then their relationship broke, Lovelace died at the age of 36 (the same as her father’s! damn destiny!), while Babbage lived on to die a poor, bitter man, with none of his dreams fulfilled.

Sydney Padua. Source: Forbidden Planet

These are the facts. But Sydney Padua builds a parallel story. Of course, her art permits such escapades. And so we see Lovelace and Babbage succeeding in building that proto-computer that never got built in reality. And once they see it working they put it to use. More precisely, they sort out a financial crisis, get to work on manuscript corrections, go nuts about mathematical possibilities, and more, and more. As it’s easy to see, a lot of fictional stuff. Yet isn’t fiction, as they say in Magna Germania, the meat and bone of progress?

But to get back to Lovelace. Padua suggests she was powerless against the Byronic legacy (and she may not be the only one to suggest so); powerless in the sense of unable to avoid the fictional aspect of mathematics, the storytelling inherent in numbers, the narrative lure of formulae and theorems. Ada soliloquizes at some point:

“Nonsense! The most advanced mathematicians accept unquantified symbols in their realm! In any event, I am a historical figure, and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Humanities!”

We appreciate the joke, but that’s exactly the point, madam la comtesse. Being made into a comic character, you’ve been moved away from the fact factory of overly-exact historicism and dropped into the melting pot of fiction.

Sydney Padua, it has to be said, does a very good job at balancing the two.

The book as a whole is a series of complexities. On the one hand, it reads like a straight-up comic book: panels following panels, the narrative organized in a mostly linear way (in the serialized fashion to boot), the drawings telling the story when the words aren’t that capable.
But wait, there’s more. Almost every page has footnotes, containing mostly true facts. In addition, these footnotes have their own notes, at the end of each chapter/installment, which bring about more information, more story, more insight. And just to complete the picture, the book ends with a thick section (almost sixty pages) containing two appendices: one made up of cutouts from primary documents (mostly mid-19^th century newspaper articles and “trivial yet amusing snippets”) and the other one offering a comic’s explanation (with illustrations, of course) of the Difference Engine, its operations, its logics, its many-many cogs and wheels. The first representation, it seems, in a long, long, long, long, long time.

But wait, there’s even more.

A page from the book, outlining the early-childhood destiny of Ada Lovelace.
Source: www.sydneypadua.com

There are special appearances by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and other Victorian celebrities I’m likely to have forgotten, depicted in their attire and typical gestures; and also some more cameos by Karl Marx and a bunch of Russian-looking revolutionaries (not sure if I spotted Lenin there or if it was just an illusion), who witness the crushing of ideology under the weight of progress. Chronological mismatches don’t matter, of course, because this is a multiverse, where time and space often coincide in the best ways possible, so as to generate an outcome equal to the input of fair judgment plus conceptual match-making.

There’s a meeting between Ada Lovelace and George Eliot I am tempted to draw attention to (and I will), when something I’d like to call “poetics of data” is brought up. The way Lovelace explains to a desperate Eliot that the words she’d thought destroyed by the machine are safe and well confers upon the topic an elegant lure, if tinged here and there with well-intended pretentiousnesses (yes, my plural is well intended too, if slightly odd):

“Despair not! Your words are not destroyed! On the contrary, they are shedding their earthly form! They have become transcendent! They have become… Data! Liberated from the static shell of the material, transliterated to the purely symbological, sublimated into a state entirely new! It can be filed, indexed, converted, replicated, searched, shared, shuffled, linked, remixed, recombined, archived, analyticated… resurrected!”

And to complete the picture in the same avant-la-lettre fashion, here’s what might sound even more familiar to a contemporary (i.e. of 21^st-century descent) reader:

“Imagine… with the eventual integration of Wheatstone’s telegraph, the difference engine will convey, transcribe, analyze, and store forever the deepest thoughts, the most profound conversations of our greatest philosophers!”

Sounds familiar? That’s because Lovelace is endowed by Padua (her favorite of the two characters, you can tell) with this special foresight that enables her to see the computer materialized when it was nothing but a technological dream, and even that a failing one.

So here’s to a multimodal book, where the weighing of historical accuracy takes place not in terms of a contradiction between True and False, but as an exchange of energies between truth and fiction. May the game (not a contest!) be won by both sides!

An apocalypse of penises: another Chuck Palahniuk idea

Full title: Beautiful You

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 224 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Doubleday(2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

As Chuck Palahniuk has already proven so many times, his narrations are nothing if not verging on the outrageous. Most of the time they hang onto some crazy idea which he works on until a world unlike anything we know comes out. And then everything seems normal, because it’s made to work like a world that we know. Case in point, Beautiful You. The subject matter: orgasm. Exactly what I was talking about.
The mad scientist type, one by the name of Cornelius Linus Maxwell (abbreviated, for mass media purposes, to Climax-Well), launches this whole line of personal care products designed to satisfy the world’s female population with the intention of changing forever the fabric of society. As the quote on the dust wrapper makes apparent, “A billion husbands are about to be replaced” by these wonderful inventions. And indeed, Beautiful You, the name of the new line of products, makes female orgasm possible without the input of men. The idea is met with more than enthusiasm (and not only by women). But not before we're given some solid information to chew on for thorough edification.

Crazy items bearing crazy names and performing crazy feats of electronic self-manipulation are tested on the protagonist, Penny Harrigan, a young (somewhere in the twenties) Midwesterner with dreams of making it big as a lawyer in New York. She meets Climax-Well, thinks she’s become her girlfriend but finds out quickly that she is in fact his test subject. There’s a mocking reference, of course, to Fifty Shades of Grey: same social gap between protagonists, same focus on aberrant sexuality, same media involvement, etc. etc. Once the reference is figured out, Palahniuk moves on to something more complex. He plays with biblical dimensions. He emulates the apocalyptic narratives that inundate literature and film nowadays. By having pleasured Penny to an extent never experienced by other women (with the exception of the President of the United State – yes, there’s a first US woman president on stage, which places the novel in a future setting – and the Queen of England – not the current one, of course, but a puppet manipulated by the billionaire, so another fictitious character – plus a film celebrity whose career stops in full bloom), by having pleasured Penny, then, Palahniuk makes sure we understand what Beautiful You is capable of. And once we got the point, he makes the crazy billionaire launch his products to hysterically enthusiastic crowds. Here's where the Zombie-like atmosphere comes to the front stage, to tick the box of futuristic, apocalyptic, mob-crazy explosion. The women of the world, grown so quickly fond of the self-fondling equipment given them by Climax-Well's company, reach a stage of universalized hysteria that takes them out of social and economic schemes of things and plunge them into self-obliterating, intense, continuous sexual arousal. Which makes the world a hell devoid of women. What takes place in New York (the setting of first choice) is akin to Zombie-ridden cityscapes. For example:
"Those thousands of desperate women surged forward and crashed against the pink-mirrored façade of the building, hammering at the glass with the clunky helps of their ugly shoes. They wielded their worn erotic tools as truncheons. They beat with their fists until ominous cracks raced in every direction and the windows and doors bowed inward, ready to collapse."
And so the Big Apple is taken by a storm of overly-excited yet insufficiently-pleased women, asking for more sex toys the way their Zombie counterparts would ask for more brain.

There’s social and cultural commentary to be had here, with a de-rigueur sarcasm that suits so well Palahniukean texts.

“Artificial overstimulation seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available. Whether the victims were men or women, arousal addiction seemed to have become the new normal.”

The novel also takes pleasure in imitating forensic and medical drama. The parallels are to be found in the narrative voice, which provides descriptions of anatomical parts with a care for details that would make the producers of House, Bones, or Body of Proof blush with embarrassment at their shallow knowledge of biology.

Chuck Palahniuk

Those who don’t want to accept such exercises in emulation will perhaps miss the play with similarities that Palahniuk appears to be offering his readership. There’s a scene, for instance, where book burning is referenced as well. Yet in the scene the flames don’t consume volumes; they devour artificial penises. All caught on camera (the 21^st-century version of Inquisition’s all-seeing eye):

“The camera drew closer, and Penny witnessed what looked like any male’s vision of hell. Innumerable multitudes of severed penises were writhing in the conflagration. Phalluses squirmed in the intense heat, blistering and twisting as if in prolonged torment. Aflame, some suffering man-parts crept, inchworm-like, from the fire as if attempting to escape to safety. They flopped. Flipped. Jumped and twitched. As if in agony. These were caught by the surrounding men and summarily flung back to their doom. Still other dongs erupted in the heat, spouting pink molten lava.”

Palahniuk is quite vivid. We’ve got to give him that. It has to be said, though, that there are moments when it isn’t quite clear that what he's doing is pure mockery of popular genres or just a lack of will to finish this work well. To climax it well – if you get my pun (lol). There is the matter of motivation, for instance, that needs to be clarified. No spoilers are going to be provided, but the denouement isn’t as fabulous as one would expect – a rather common way of finishing a story, something not unlike certain Hollywood productions that handle endings in terms of unexpected discoveries and dues-ex-machina resolutions (old tricks in use since Greek comedies). There’s also the question: why the hell is a female mystic living in the Himalayas needed at all? Because one such appears, out of the blue, and even features in the end, where she dies dramatically, but not before having the chance to tell the story of everything from a perspective we haven't been aware of. I know it sounds familiar. Because it is. Mockery again? Point taken. But still: why? And why, also, the continuous postponing of the ending? The story misses (metaphorically speaking, if we take this to be intentional) three or four chances to finish, but every time more seems to be the case. This is not the classic multi-ending narrative but rather a story which refuses to end. Hold on. There’s something that just struck me, as I was writing the line above. Is this continuous ending meant to be something akin to a never-ending orgasm? Which is what happens to the women in the novel? Since Palahniuk likes to play with possibilities, it’s likely we’ll never get an answer to these questions. But what a thought! The never-ending orgasm and all that...
So let's leave it here.

Computers and cigarettes

Full title: My Documents

Author: Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 244 pages, paperback
Publisher: McSweeney's (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Alejandro Zambra has always acted as a writer who writes about a writer's life (Hemingway updated, Roberto Bolaño’s re-embodied?). His latest volume, the collection My Documents, goes about peering again into things that make up the profession’s paraphernalia. For Zambra, the most important of these things are books and computers. Books have their special place, close to the Platonic ideal, so nothing’s changed in the library area; admiration, respect, veneration: all untouched, all good and (strange to say) ordinary. What is out of the everyday (narratively speaking) is the presence of computers. Still young in spite of their half-century of supremacy, PCs and their offspring seem to be slow in taking a place in literature. There’s a sense that they don’t have much to add to a story, that their presence is more likely to cause harm than charm.

But computers do have a role to play. For one thing, they provide memory, which is what writing has always been about, and which is what writing is always going to be about. In "Memories of a Personal Computer," the protagonist and his girlfriend experience the machine as a novelty with potential. They write up their poems on it, they love and hate each other under the PC’s gaze. When the computer works, their relationship works too. When the computer breaks, they too go each their separate way. What’s left of their adventure is a computer memory from which all data has been erased. The story ends with the PC in this state of purity: a blank hard drive deposited in an old carcass. The protagonist's son, an adolescent already over-versed in computer work, takes the object given to him as a gift to an underground location, symbolic setting for a work of disremembering.

"[He] went to the basement to find a place to store the computer, where it has been ever since, waiting, as they say, for better times to come."

With an ending like this, fairytale-style, the story reads like a fable about memory. It’s a story in which the computer too is a protagonist: we find it newly-born in the beginning, and we see it decrepit in the end, its narrative cycle gone full circle.

Alejandro Zambra. Source: Acabo de leer... Y me gusta

If computers are aids to memory, cigarettes are aids to other things that writers do. "I Smoked Very Well" reads like a praise to the vice in the title. The protagonist has just managed, via chemical intakes, to hinder his urge to smoke his lungs off. But what he finds at the end of the tunnel is not joy; it’s the opposite. If there was ever a connection between computers and cigarettes, it becomes clear when the protagonist (a writer with a smoker’s problem or a smoker with a writer’s problem) realizes that the chemicals in his medical treatment have made it impossible to enjoy at all his former love for smoking:

"I feel perplexed, and bruised. It's as though someone were gradually erasing all the information related to cigarettes from my memory. And that strikes me as sad.
I'm a very old computer. I'm an old but not entirely broken computer. Someone touches my face and keyboard with a kitchen rag. And it hurts."

Smoking-is-important-to-writers is the message conveyed throughout the story. The cigarette doesn't only serve as a prop; it isn't only something a writer holds in one hand while with the other hand he's writing. The cigarette marks a fundamental difference between a writer and the rest of the world (a question of status as much as a question of profession):

"What for a smoker is nonfiction, for a non-smoker is fiction. That majestic story by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, for example, about the smoker who desperately jumps out the window to rescue a pack of cigarettes, and who, years later, very ill, his wife keeping a vigilant watch over him, escapes to the beach every day to unearth, with the skill of an anxious puppy, the pack of cigarettes he had hidden in the sand. Non-smokers don't understand these stories. They think that they're exaggerated; they read them cavalierly. A smoker, on the other hand, treasures them."

The fear of losing memory, addressed at point blank in "Memories of a Personal Computer," reaches here the same traumatic height, but its weight is different, because it is made much more personal. Smoking, a vice that threatens the body, puts the soul in a greater impasse when it ceases to be near. Zambra writes up a credo to mitigate this loss, but one that feels sad rather than hopeful:

"I remember that brilliant and unequivocal phrase of Italo Svevo's: 'Reading a novel without smoking is impossible.'
But it's possible, it is. I don't remember anything I read, though. I read badly. I don't know if I've just read a good novel badly or a bad novel well. But I read, it's possible."

The protagonist, who has lost appetite for reading and writing, who has been thrust into this despair of growing sad when the body is cured, makes the cigarette part of the syntax of creation. He's grown wise enough by now (this is close to the end of the story) to see with clarity the link between smoking and composition:

"Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life. Now I live without punctuation, without rhythm. My life is a stupid avant-garde poem.
I live without cigarettes to mark a question. Without cigarettes that end as we get happily or dangerously close to an answer. Or the absence of an answer. Exclamation cigarettes. Ellipsis cigarettes. I would like to smoke with the elegance of a semicolon."

And so poetry arises from despair, metaphors from lack of punctuation, a writer’s angst from running out of smokes. What’s left, then? As always, memory. Of how writing must be done, of what cigarettes taste like, of what computers are good at. Almost every story in Alejandro Zambra’s collection has a reason to reflect on the above, because at the end of the day being a writer makes one dependent on these props. No writer is free. They all must be set up/upset by some rituals.

Vargas Llosa’s two trilogies at one stroke

Full title: The Discreet Hero

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 326 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The novels of Mario Vargas Llosa should come with instruction manuals. Not because he indulges in obscure matters, but because his constant play with references is so intricate and so personalized that a new text, like The Discreet Hero, risks passing as a mere exercise in simplistic storytelling flavors with an exhibitive soap-opera character. Knowing the author’s penchant for narrative experimentations, a lot of this is likely to have been done on purpose. But confusion does look like a real possibility when it comes to readers.

The review in The Guardian, for instance, all but ignores the cross-referential nature of the novel, which brings together allusions to earlier novels by Vargas Llosa. Francisco Goldman’s account, in The New York Times, is much better informed and better situated critically in its balanced view of the Peruvian author’s literary and political views (paying attention to matters of plot significance, as well as following his ascending career, from the socialist devotee of the early works and convictions to the aristocratic conservative known, since 2011, under the hereditary title of 1^st Marquis of Vargas Llosa).

The Discreet Hero is an interesting case of double closure, a really curious and highly original hybrid. It stands as the third volume in two different trilogies: the one taking place in Lima and featuring Don Rigoberto and his immediate family (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto and In Praise of the Stepmother) and the other one set in Piura and featuring Sergeant Lituma (The Green House and Death in the Andes).

This hybrid is not at all surprising if one considers Vargas Llosa's distinctive attention to narrative interweaving and plotting, based precisely on shooting references across pages and across texts.

His favourite technique shows, at a local level, throughout The Discreet Hero: alternative chaptering. As in so many of his previous books, Vargas Llosa refuses, almost programmatically, to stick to a one-plot narrative. And for that reason his cast of characters is, as always, impressive. Every chapter has its own plot, with their respective subplots and parallel developments, each following the performance of specific characters. The most important of them are, of course, Don Rigoberto and Sergeant Lituma. They don’t know each other, and when they do meet (very late in the novel) there is no outstanding exchange between them. Only the reader is satisfied to see the convergence of the two lines of plot and to admire, perhaps, the author’s art of bringing them together. Otherwise, Rigoberto is the same aristocrat disgusted by the mundane flavor of life, who featured, with his strange rituals of ablution and sexual oddities, in The Notebooks and in The Stepmother. Lituma too remains true to his narrative destiny drawn in the previous novels: poor but honest, victim of coincidences and misunderstandings, the only policeman in town who has never taken a bribe and who, for precisely that reason, is, in his own words, “the only one that's still a poor beggar and will be a cop forever.” Both Lituma and Rigoberto, must be noted, are secondary characters in this novel. The chapters in which they feature are dedicated to Felícito Yanaqué and Don Ismael Carrera, respectively, business owners of different calibers but of similar providence, who find themselves the victims of their relatives’ rapacity.

But we know that Lituma and Rigoberto are the men to look for, because they are the ones who help finishing the trilogies.

Mario Vargas Llosa. Source: The New York Times

The chapters woven into each other play the obvious role of keeping the reader’s attention in check. With the spirit borrowed, doubtlessly, from the popular telenovelas of South America and also, perhaps, from the Greek and Roman Menippean satire, this technique relies on the good old effect of well managed cliffhangers: tension builds up, a climax becomes possible, then very likely, then unavoidable, and suddenly the curtain falls and we move to the next chapter. Where the action starts anew and builds up towards the same resolution. And so on and so forth.

One wonders if this technique, now anything but new in Vargas Llosa's work, is a narrative strength of his or just a sign of weakness. I believe both options have equal chances to be the winner. I would not completely dismiss the view that this spectacular intermingling of narratives turns almost all of his novels into collections of short stories. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Nobody said novels must be monological. On the contrary. And in fact the novels of Maria Vargas Llosa always find subtle, surprising ways of connecting those stories and sub-plots in ways that give them a true novel feel. But still, that demon of doubt...

In The Discreet Hero, it's not only stories that are sewn together but also genres. From drama to tragicomedy and from 19^th-century melodrama to 20^th and 21^st-century telenovelas, a broad spectrum of possibilities is activated every step of the way. At times the novel feels like the work of a debutant who is trying his hand at as much narrative material as possible.

A tad too much soap opera? Maybe. Albeit the message is clear: here’s life imitating art and art imitating life.

“My God, what stories ordinary life devised; not masterpieces to be sure, they were doubtless closer to Venezuelan, Brazilian, Colombian, and Mexical soap operas that to Cervantes and Tolstoy. But again not too far from Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, or Benito Pérez Galdós.”

Until the moment of the reunion of the two narrative threads, though, almost everything has that cheap allure of unexpected encounters, events whose levels of likelihood would, under normal circumstances, be very low, situations and accidents that seem, well – too accidental to be taken seriously. Kind of like eighteenth-century novels. Something à la Tom Jones, if you like, or the pseudo-romances of Samuel Richardson, where characters run into trouble in the most artificial of ways, all in the name of a transparent spectacle.

But it’s clear that Vargas Llosa has planned, with this his latest novel, a take on genres as much as a take on his eternal concern with Peruvian life. And since we’re in the eternity department, let’s finish with another quote concerning telenovelas:

“The soap opera isn’t over, it goes on and on and gets harder to understand every day.”

That’s Don Rigoberto for you, the aristocrat who ends the novel in a plane, flying his family to Europe, where he has planned to disappear amidst bourgeois intellectual pursuits like a man who has been planning his withdrawal from a book.

The ingenious prose of Nic Low

Full title: Arms Race

Author: Nic Low

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 250 pages, paperback
Publisher: Text Publishing (2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Being a character in Nic Low’s first collection of short stories would be nothing short of a great vacation. You’d be taken places you never imagined or never thought of visiting during your lifetime. India. Laos. Mongolia. The Australian desert. A New Zealand coast town. San Francisco. London. Melbourne. New Zealand again. And some more. Wouldn’t your character life look like a traveler’s map if you took the journeys advertised by the volume?
Pick and choose – Master Low will take you there in a few pages and give you the ride of your life.

Not only do the stories in Arms Race grow beautifully in such geographic amplitudes, you’d also be given the chance to travel multidimensionally. Like, for instance, getting to a London of a future where all you can consume to stay alive is megabytes. This is the case of “Data Furnace,” a story where Low shows the traces of a true master storyteller.

What is a master storyteller? Someone who leaves the reader wondering how the hell he’d come up with that or with that or with that.
Going into details would ruin the pleasure of reading, I know, I know. But unfortunately you can only talk about Nic Low’s stories if you commit, repeatedly, the crime of giving the show away. That’s how good you feel after having read, one after the other, the twelve stories in the volume, asking, at the last page, if there were any more of them on the way.
So beware: the following may contain spoilers.

To take “Data Furnace” as a model and give it a brief summary, what have we got? We’ve got the city of London caught up in an apocalyptic winter. First stop, take a look at how he describes the city:

“I leave the train line and cross the ice downriver of Tower Bridge. The wind-blasted shell of City Hall, the gutted apartments along the reach of the Thames, the abandoned spires of the City: they’re all so deformed by frost they look like they were designed by children. An evacuation plane struggles overhead. I choose not to watch. It feels like every last breath of heat has been sucked from the world.”

Good, isn’t it? Atmospheric to the point where you feel your bones penetrated by cold.

And this is just to give a taste of what all the texts in the volume read like: with aplomb, with wit, with clarity, with a baroque tendency of exaggerating the contours, but only lightly, with a candid touch not to make the landscapes too foreign. There is, indeed, a sense that, no matter where you are in these stories, no matter what the location or the situation or the purpose, you’re never in need of a compass: you can do it on your own; you can journey through these places like a pro.
If there’s one element that stands out in Nic Low’s stories, it’s got to be his associations. In descriptions, you’re always driven away from the ‘natural’ course. The “gutted apartments” – who would have thought of using that adjective to describe an empty habitation? It’s the adjectives that do the job, of course. Adjectives, those no-no’s of creative writing classes, are Low’s best allies. He knows how to deploy them and deploys them to get the best effect. Like in an arms race for the conquest of readership.

Source: Te Karaka

But to return to the story. Temperatures have gone so low and for such a long time that people have been leaving the streets, the houses, the whole urban space. All but a few; to be more precise: the narrator, his beautiful colleague Umi, and the opportunistic homeless figure known under the name of Old Man Canary. The first two work as IT specialists in a company that has just shut down its last server room. They refuse to leave the city when everyone else is running for the airports like crazy. They stay and they come up with a brilliant idea. Since there’s nothing else to burn to keep themselves warm (every single tree in London has been cut to pieces and consumed in domestic fires), they will use data. They will get the servers to heat up.

This is one of those situations where the reader goes, Oh, I see. Because we all know that computers do give off heat (that’s why they’re equipped with coolers!). But in order to generate enough heat in the servers, the two of them need traffic. They need to get the servers working like never before. Solution: shoot a YouTube video and wait for it to go viral. Easy to say, not so easy to do, since online audiences are best known for their volatility and unpredictability. But a new brilliant idea pops out of Umi’s head. She connects a terrarium to the servers. In the terrarium there’s a tropical frog. The frog needs warmth just like the humans. But there’s a trick to it. As we are told a little earlier (by way of a story that sounds like an urban myth), if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out; but if you put it in cold water and heat that water gradually, it will stay there, allowing itself to be cooked to death. This is where the ingenious idea resides. With a few videos and some hacking that brings traffic to a decent level, the terrarium starts getting warmer and warmer. The heat from the server is transferred to it. It grows hotter and hotter as the viewers turn the event into a share frenzy of epic proportions. Everything’s broadcast live and soon bets are placed on whether the frog will jump out or not. It’s this betting that gets the traffic flowing. The world is taken with the madness of this new form of entertainment. And behind all this – the logic of data flooding:

“We spam out the link, and people have got to be curious. They visit the page, they push up the server load, the temperature goes up too. Incrementalism, I call it: billions of tiny, innocent actions that add up to catastrophe. Just like the real world.”

I have to stop here, though. “Data Furnace” still has an ending that needs to be read, not overheard. But after all this effort to summarize, I think there's one thing that can be said about Nic Low with some degree of certainty: his stories are imaginative like you haven’t seen for a long time. The pleasure with which he tells these stories, the succulent texts full of images and metaphors that make your mouth froth as you read along, the pace of the narration – all these things make the collection impossible to ignore. As also impossible to ignore must be Nic Low’s current project, set to be launched in 2016.

The last novel of Philip Roth

Full title: Nemesis

Author: Philip Roth

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 304 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2010)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

When Philip Roth declared, in 2012, that he had given up writing, Nemesis had been the last novel published under his name (2010). So far, he has kept his promise, and by the looks of it he’s just as determined to shut his creativity shop as he was, in the past, determined to write like there was no tomorrow. So now, knowing that this is his last novel, Nemesis has the aura of a closure. But truth being said, there is nothing in it that suggests some end-of-the-road proclamation. So I believe we need to get back to where it all started, i.e. back to the novel itself, and read it as it should be: as a novel with only itself to stand by.

Nemesis is a book of hostilities. Set in 1944, when Europe and the Pacific were being blown to small pieces by WW2, it follows closely the brief career of Bucky Cantor, a teacher and playground director in a Newark Jewish community. What’s singular about Bucky Cantor is that he has the ill luck of being contemporary with an epidemic of polio. Roth follows at a painstakingly slow pace the evolution of the illness, which makes the account all the more appalling. Kids disfigured, reduced to having to breathe through machines, with their limbs twisted and paralyzed, the children under Bucky Cantor’s care enter the stage and leave it as if they had never existed, casualties in a war without weapons. We get a quick glimpse of them and then they’re no more.

Several characters in the novel make the obvious connection between the Jewish origins of this community and the historical destiny of the Jews at large, especially at the time of the then-unfolding WW2, when the concentration camps in Europe were still running. As Dr. Steinberg, one of the prominent figures in the community, declares, the destiny of those children killed by polio was equal to the greater destiny of the Jews in the world, and that in its turn was equal to the destiny of humanity in general:

”I’m against the frightening of Jewish kids. I’m against the frightening of Jews, period. That was Europe, that’s why Jews fled. This is America. The less fear the better. Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us.”

Bucky is conscious of the weight of this destiny and the power of this fear. He sees, around him, parents growing paranoid, impatient, and unfair. Some get as far as screaming out, with the power of a slogan: “Disinfect everything!” Others, confronted with this implacable destiny that seems to be unwilling to take any prisoners, find consolation in the pathetic illusion that salvation can come from signs:

“Where is the quarantine sign? People have been coming and going from upstairs, in and out, in and out, and why isn’t there a quarantine sign? I have small children. Why isn’t there a quarantine sign protecting my children?”

The panic grows continuously, and Bucky Cantor is a hopeless witness of the growing devastation. Caught in the centre of the epidemic, he finds it his duty to stay and fight the right fight to the end. But there’s a fiancé as well; she is in a holiday camp away from the polio catastrophe, and she insists that he join her. Bucky gives in and he leaves the city at a time when the epidemic had already reached biblical proportions. But once in the safe haven of the Pocono Mountains, where everything is bucolic and out of harm’s way, he starts having second thoughts. He is in a constant strife with himself: a man overcome by his own morality, a teacher with the constitution of a hero but the fortune of an apostate. He comes out of all this scarred for life, a victim with a story to tell.

Philip Roth. Source: The Reader's Room

Bucky’s tragedy is that everything for him works the other way round. He is not like the others. He is an orphan whose mother died giving birth to him. His father, a thief, disappeared from his life when he was too young to even notice him. He is athletic by nature, fully prepared to face the world, but because of his poor eyesight he is not accepted in the army, and so, fails to enlist in America’s wars against Germany and Japan. While others his age are fighting in a real war, he is caught up in this fake, humiliating, war against polio, which is far crueller, more unfair, and less glorious than any other war he can imagine. And while those who have fought the honourable fights come home, he finds himself on a hospital bed, ridden with polio, more wounded in his soul and more maimed in his body than those who had seen Normandy or Pearl Harbor.

Bucky’s tragedy is the tragedy of someone who’s never been given the chance to become a hero.

He is engaged in very many battles, but each of them seem to be the wrong one. He battles polio when everyone else is battling the Germans or the Japanese. He battles god when everyone else is battling destiny. He battles his own demons when everyone else has an external cause to fight for. Bucky is always misplaced, always at the mercy of an incoherent fate:

“Sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.”

Because God, indeed, is an uncomfortable notion for Bucky: the entity he blames for the entire disaster, for the polio as well as for for everything else. God, a fixation that hurts, an obsession that insists on meaning nothing reasonable:

“His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one Godhead, as in Christianity, but of two – a sick fuck and an evil genius.”

This gives the novel an air of revenge. If anything, Philip Roth's last novel is a book about the unfairness of the world, about heroism that just doesn't happen, and also about the failure of an ideology based on patriotism and duty. America at its most vulnerable: this is the working topic of Nemesis.

"The ping and the pong of America"

Full title: The Making of Zombie Wars. A Novel

Author: Aleksandar Hemon

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 320 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

When you see the title you know straight away that there’s fun to be had from reading this novel. And the fun begins alright, yet slowly, gradually – because nothing can proceed unless we have some good introductory chapters first. So here it goes: Joshua Levin, a young would-be writer based in Chicago, is facing the mother of all creative impasses. He’s tried his hand at various genres, but after a while decided that film scripts are the go-to enterprise. So he proceeds to writing them. No success. Projects die one after another. He’s joined a group of other would-be’s, with whom he shares this destiny of being in an eternal bottleneck. They get together to discuss writing that never takes place and end up, almost invariably, with their minds assaulted by sexual ideation or drowned in cheap oxidized wine.

Case in point, the following dialogue:

“’American movies always have happy ending,’ Bega said. ‘Life is tragedy: you’re born, you live, you die.’
‘This could be like a European art-house movie. Which would be good because you could show tits,’ Graham said, pausing to picture the tits.”

Of course, what Hemon wants to point out here is the cultural break that divides these two cultures he’s concerned with: the Easter-European one (a culture of immigrants who have too many stories to tell and no chance to do it properly) and the American one (where things make sense only if they’re showy, over-the-top, kitsch). In fact, Bega, the Bosnian, doesn’t lose a single opportunity to highlight, in his accent-ridden voice, this division. He does so with the typical air of contempt that behooves respectable immigrants:

“’I was thinking, Josh,’ Bega said. ‘Why America now must have superheroes? Why can’t you just have normal heroes? John Wayne was not good enough, now you must have Batman?’”

And a couple of pages further down, again, because nothing is sweeter than the taste of cultural revenge:

“’Tell me why is that,’ Bega said, ‘last eight presidents have simple names: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, two with Bush. You used to have Washington, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, and then something happened. You can’t elect your president with complicated name anymore. Idiot voters have to be able to spell fucking name.’”

Mocked, Joshua flexes his artistic muscle even harder, trying to achieve the impossible. He keeps a record of all the ideas that cross his mind at various points in time. There are many of them. He has them numbered, neatly catalogued in the memory of his personal computer. He brings them out every now and then as personal reminders that work needs to be done if artistic immortality is desired. But there’s no joy in the exercise, because he never gets to the point of materialization. His writing sucks, to put it bluntly; and he knows it. Nothing has come out yet from under his unconvincing finger tips. Nothing, that is, except this script idea for a film called Zombie Wars.

Aleksandar Hemon. Source: KCET

Steeped in American dullness, Joshua has a life best described as minor. His food is bland, his family is concerned with inconsequential Jewish problems, his whole life’s a sub-product better imagined as part of a low-budget B-series movie. He can’t even enjoy the prospect of dreams.

“Joshua hated sleeping, but waking up was worse. Nightmares were not the problem: he never really had any. Nobody ever bothered to chase him in his dreams; he never plunged from a tall building to wake up just before exploding like a pomegranate, nor did he ever experience even the vaguest presence of death. There was little violence, only occasional vanilla sex, his dreams damp rather than wet, his subconscious a Wilmette where he was forever sleepily immortal.”

Trapped in this dreamless Americanness, it’s a miracle Joshua doesn’t turn into a Norman Bates or some solo-act of Bonnie and Clyde.

Truth is he doesn’t have a chance to become wild, simply because he doesn’t have the guts. He flees conflict, avoids his mad landlord, avoids his family, avoids the happiness that seems likely to catch roots in the company of his near-perfect Japanese girlfriend, avoids – ultimately – writing the script of his own life. Hence the general feeling of his being completely and utterly (excuse the word) fucked: a looser in the most specific sense of the word, eligible to feature in the world’s best galleries of all-time losers.

After a while, though, things get moving and everything that was dull in the beginning turns into a fast-paced Hollywood-like production. There’s drama (Joshua’s father discovering that he has prostate cancer), romance (a lot of it, but of the problematic kind, with the Japanese girlfriend gone from perfect match to utter hater, aided by a Bosnian contender impossible to resist), adventure (featuring the colourful landlord by the name of Stagger, who brandishes a samurai sword and gets his butt kicked big time, and not just once), and even bits of thriller (with a bunch of other Bosnians in close-up, just to make sure we don’t forget who Aleksandar Hemon is).

With action cropping up at superhighway speeds, The Making of Zombie Wars turns hilarious and sad at the same time. A sympathetic reader will surely feel for the protagonist’s sorry ass, but will LOL at the encounter with Stagger, the novel’s best, if not only, truly comic character (“If ever a man was entitled to a cape and light saber, it was Stagger.”)

Then one must admire Hemon’s talent for destroying every cliché that ever comes his way. There are moments when one is reminded of those comedies in which a seemingly melodramatic plot ends with a turntable scratch that makes the audience aware that this ain’t nothing but a joke. Take this, for instance, for a ruined bucolic:

“All across the wide world, spring was landing on its fairy feet. Everywhere, trees were budding and coming into leaves, ground thawing and earthworms stirring, dog shit defrosting and releasing the pungent stink that brought back memories of springs past.”

As per example, Hemon knows irony well, and proves to be a good adept of the new American wave of novelists, who take the Mickey out of everything but do so with intelligence, elegance, and sophistication. (See Chuck Palahniuk, George Saunders, Gary Shteyngart, Junot Diaz etc. etc.) Some of Hemon’s metaphors, let’s admit it, rock. Take “clouds floated like meringue zeppelins” for an example. But metaphors aren’t everything that stands out. Hemon also engages perfectly with the critical vein of the American club, seeing where America is weak and hitting precisely there, for maximum effect:

“Hope sold, of course, and well; it was the corn syrup of existence, fast burning and addictive. On the other hand, it was cheap and everywhere. Hope and war: the ping and the pong of America.”

There would be numberless other occasions to quote Aleksadar Hemon, now at his sixth book, already a victor of American letters. Part of his talent is that he knows how to scatter quotable bits throughout the text. The novel expertly apes the prose of religious sermons, it mimics Spinoza, it offers brilliant philosophical gems, it mixes script excerpts into the novelistic fabric. It does all sorts of novel-writing prestidigitation, and a lot of it comes out well. A multi-voice enterprise, The Making of Zombie Wars is a novel worth keeping in one’s personal library for some time.