Ways of dying with Jacques Derrida

Full title: Learning to Live Finally. The Last Interview

Author: Jacques Derrida, translated by Pascal-Anne Brault

Genre: Fiction, Novel
Attributes: 100 pages, paperback
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (2007)

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

This last interview took place when Derrida was sick, already accustomed to the idea of dying, already an expert in mourning and the delivery of funeral orations, but also prepared, as it seemed, for his own final withdrawal. Ominously published one year before his death in 2004, the short conversation opens the gates to a deluge of answers to the essential question, What is it to be dying?

Derrida, who didn’t shy away from mixing poetry with philosophy, has many things to say about death, and in many ways. The immediate effect of this thanatological eloquence is that the subject matter is no longer frightening; it no longer appears as a terror of the living subject.

Death, at the same time amorphous (almost like glass) and metamorphic (like a text or like a rock), flays the skin of a philosopher's mind-body to reveal the joints where life appears more clearly as a foreshadowing of the inevitable, possibly repetitive, coming into non-existence. In writing, we are told, there are traces of a death-to-come. With words and sentences published in a book, a part of the writer's life goes by, a part of him disappears. And with this, a host of thoughts, a multitude of anxieties: what’s going to happen after this death? How is this death of the writer going to be taken by the world? What will this death engender? What will it kill? These questions allow Derrida to revisit one of his most famous theories: the theory of the trace – of the thing that remains once everything has disappeared. In other words, the theory of the consequences of death.

"At the moment I leave 'my' book (to be published) – after all, no one forces me to do it – I become, appearing-disappearing, like that uneducable spectre who will have never learned how to live. The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. This is not a striving for immortality; it's something structural. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, 'proceeds' from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing. It's the ultimate test: one expropriates oneself without knowing exactly who is being entrusted with what is left behind. Who is going to inherit, and how? Will there even be any heirs?"

But there’s another form of dying that Derrida needs to address, and which is more subtle and more effective than all the other forms of dying-while-alive: the death by progression. As living means going on through life, moving towards the moment when the biological ultimatum of the body becomes reality, every step ahead means further separation from everything that has already been lived. Put into fewer words: by living we are constantly dying. Or, in Derrida’s own words:

"[L]earning to live is always narcissistic [...]: one wants to live as much as possible, to save oneself, to persevere, and to cultivate all these things which, though infinitely greater and more powerful than oneself, nonetheless form a part of this little 'me' that they exceed on all sides. To ask me to renounce what formed me, what I've loved so much, what has been my law, is to ask me to die."

As above, Derrida is quotable every step of the way. Clipping off small bits of his responses feels very much like helping the creation of his aphorisms. A form of death, no doubt: a form of flaying the skin of his work. But that, of course, will not seem odd to the passionate reader of the father of Deconstruction. This reader will recognize the style of 'putting the problem,' so as to generate a moment of discontent wherein questions can be asked in the most impertinent ways.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in the year of his death. Source: O Globo

Vestiges of this impertinent questioning are to be found, for instance, in his dealing with language: a very specific version of language (let’s call it French) which Derrida challenged and deformed, paradoxically, out of pure love.

“You don't just go and do anything with language; it preexists us and it survives us. When you introduce something into language, you have to do it in a refined manner, by respecting through disrespect its secret law. That's what might be called unfaithful fidelity: when I do violence to the French language, I do so with the refined respect of what I believe to be an injunction of this language, in its life and in its evolution.”

With language, as with life, one needs to sacrifice something in order to prolong existence. In other words, one needs to kill a specimen in order for the species to endure. Life lives through renunciations, insofar as what is renounced turns into an offering to that which is being sacrificed. It’s the very way Derrida himself has sur-vived (i.e. lived above and beyond his death).

To a certain extent, his last interview is his first manifestation of survival through another happy paradox: having survived while still alive.

Amélie Nothomb and the size of things

Full title: Hygiene and the Assassin

Author: Amélie Nothomb, translated by Alison Anderson

Genre: Fiction, Novel
Attributes: 167 pages, paperback
Publisher: Europa (2010)

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

Amélie Nothomb’s propensity for oversized characters was made apparent from her very first novel. Hygiene and the Assassin, published in French in 1992, is a novel where larger-than-life is the predominant size. It features an obese writer stuck in his bedroom with only months to live and a secret story to tell to the person who proves to be equipped with the best pair of ears to hear his message and the best pair of eyes to read through his work.

Something else is apparent in Nothomb’s very first exercise in fictional virtuosity: her talent in conducting dialogue. The novel, written almost entirely in the form of dialogues between the writer, Prétextat Tach, and four journalists who interview him, shows a unique ability to move from speech line to speech line without falling into trivialities or syncopated silence gaps. This too, one would say, is a feature of the novel’s larger-than-life-ness, whereby the spoken word is brought to bear on the issue of oral eloquence as well as on that of writing genius.

“Writing begins where speech leaves off, and a great mystery lies behind the passage from the unspeakable to the speakable. The writer word takes over where the spoken word leaves off, and they don’t overlap.”

Prétextat, who has given the world a wealth of novels for which the world has loved him back with passion, has been issued this unwriterly task of confessing a crime he committed when he was in that tricky period between childhood and puberty. He is made to perform his confession not in writing but through speech. The interviews representing the bulk of the novel (Prétextat’s exercises in oral persuasion) reveal him as a complex creature, one capable of causing both disgust and pity.

In France, the novel has been successfully adapted for the stage. Source: TV5Monde

Moreover, he’s authored a novel that describes, in an exquisitely veiled manner, the very crime mentioned earlier. This book is also Prétextat’s only unfinished work. Bearing the title of Nothomb’s actual novel, Hygiene and the Assassin, this incomplete text has been circulating through the world of devoted readers without any of them having seen beyond its façade.

“When I told you that people read me without reading me! I can allow myself to stray dangerously close to the truth, and all anyone will ever see is metaphors. There’s nothing surprising about that: the pseudo-reader, clad in his diving suit, can swim perfectly impermeably through my bloodiest sentences. From time to time he will exclaim with delight, ‘What a lovely symbol!’ That is what you can call clean reading. A marvelous invention, very pleasant to practice in bed before falling asleep; it calms the mind and doesn’t even dirty the sheets.”

His readers’ myopia justifies Prétextat’s cynicism and, at the same time, offers him the perfect place to put his crime at rest: hiding it in plain sight.

Prétextat is a writer, and as a consequence of his profession he looks for order in the chaos of life. Where this order cannot be found he creates it out of nothing, “playing the demiurge.” This discovery offers Nina, the last and only successful interviewer, the opportunity to give the constantly-irritated and irritating novelist a slap across the face when she figures out his fundamental feature, that of making up realities in the name of a fiction that’s entirely his:

“I have caught you flagrante delicto under the influence of your profession, monsieur. Like any self-reflecting obsessive writer, you cannot stand the thought that there is no mysterious correlation between your characters. Genuine novelists are basically genealogists at heart.”

This play with creation is, perhaps, the central theme of the novel. Prétextat, who has been hiding the crime his entire life, built up a whole textual wall around himself. His very name, I’m sure, is significant. Notwithstanding the existence, in the sixth century, of a real Saint Praetextatus, bishop of Rouen, the name evokes this event that started it all: the writer’s first and fundamental fiction, the text that preceded his entire career. At the age of near-adolescence, Prétextat, a wonderkid by all accounts, had devised an entire philosophy of purity (“Don’t you understand that girls die the day they begin puberty?”), which will be the end of her beloved cousin, Léopoldine. This (the pretext of his entire career as a writer), the pre-text that stood before all his subsequent fictions, is what Nina, the strangely disinterested journalist, finds out. The only person to have read Hygiene and the Assassin properly, Nina is also the one who puts an end to Prétextat’s insolent and often boorish, misanthropic and misogynistic attitude towards all who pass their mere opinions on his work. His readers’ lack of understanding is all the more significant since Prétextat’s writing is plain, unadorned. Indeed, he is an outspoken enemy of metaphors (a feature which could be equally said about Amélie Nothomb herself):

“If you could just see things as a whole, the way I see them at the moment, you would understand. Metaphors were invented to enable human beings to establish a coherence between the fragments in their vision. When this fragmentation disappears, metaphors no longer have any purpose.”

The size of Prétextat’s art is, therefore, equal to this totalizing gaze that makes figures of speech useless. He, the fat writer, has gotten to the point of totality where fragments disappear behind the curtain of perfection. And that, to him and to many like him, means being successful in the art of fiction. It means, if you like, acquiring genius. End of story.

The Underworld in the 1960s

Full title: Poem Strip. Including an Explanation of the Afterlife

Author: Dino Buzzati, translated by Marina Harss

Genre: Fiction, Graphic novel
Attributes: 224 pages, paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books Classics (2009)

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

At the height of his career, Dino Buzzati was the kind of writer you'd go for to find the quirky, the unexpected and the twisted. His stories were nothing if not delightful experiments in how to surprise the reader. Read the stories in Restless Nights or his opus magnus, the novel The Tartar Steppe, and you'll see that on full display.

But Dino Buzzati was also a very talented (and for some reason "talented" sounds so ill-equipped to describe him) artist. Take Poem Strip for evidence. A comic-strip venture where Buzzati features in a glorious one-man-show of booming proportions, as writer and illustrator. Not only are the drawings suggestive as hell (pun intended), they also come to support the story in dealing with its big questions.

As usual, Buzzati was not afraid of tackling topics seemingly overworked through centuries of literary practice. Poem Strip is a reworking of an idea dear to literate cultures of the Indo-European descent: the trip to the underworld. Take Ghilgamesh, take the Odyssey, take the Divine Comedy, take, if you wish, Paradise Lost. The topic has been the favourite of the founders of literature. Buzzati came to the feast of the genre in the late 1960s. You can guess the time from the atmosphere that defines it: a time of sexual liberation, where resplendent bodies show up on printed pages without the bashful pretence of puritan arts.

What’s more important, and also in line with the literary developments of the 1960s and ‘70s, is the poem’s alignment to the demands of generic literature. To put it briefly, Poem Strip reads like a good Noir: there's the whiskey bar feature, a general atmosphere of inebriated intelligence falling into the cauldrons of metaphysics. A mysterious lady is in the loop as well. She shows up like Dante's Beatrice to sort out an existential problem caused by loss. Add the artistic spin (a protagonist who's a musician by profession but a poet in the depths of his soul), make that protagonist work his way into the story like a detective, and give the narrative a sad, unavoidable ending. That's how you get the feel of that Noir I mentioned above: Noir as in the etymology: the darkness of a place where shadows reign supreme; Noir as in the way the story delves into human condition – not into its living part but into that part where you need a special vision to see the world of the Below.

Dino Buzzati (). Source: Andrea Pagani

But there’s more to this: the protagonist’s name is Orfi. Sounds familiar? Yes, Orpheus travelling to the Underworld in search for his beloved Eurydice. And in case you wondered what the girl’s name was in Buzzati’s version, well, she’s called… Eura. The reference requires no explication. Now we know why the protagonist is a musician and why the beloved never makes it back into the world of the living.

As in the original myth, Buzzati's vision is one where the Up and the Down are confused. Finding a way through the gates of the Otherworld, the protagonist also finds himself facing a reality he had imagined different. The dead are exactly like the living. No physical difference whatsoever.

“Everything is in working order. Bones veins nerves everything works. They move eat drink etcetera. They live, almost. Yes, they’re practically transparent, it’s true, plus they no longer have hope that most miraculous of torments they suffer no pain no hospitals, funerals, cemetaries, or graves. They’re lucky, wouldn’t you say?”

In this perfection, where further death is not a choice, the departed live a life of eternal repetition. The spleen that made the Europe of the late 1960s explode is apparent in these fragments, where the masses (of the living or of the dead – it matters not) take up the foregrounds and wander about, a proto-Zombie generation, to have their silent say about the most serious issues concerning life and death.

It’s plain from these passages that Buzzati didn’t just put forth a story about the experience of death. He aimed at offering another description of the Otherworld: a place where everything is identical yet entirely different. Time, the most prominent of figures, stands still to comply with this story of paradoxes:

“Here time stands still the clocks go on ticking but time stands still the rivers flow but time stands still it’s always the same day.”

The dead want to hear stories, because it’s stories of the Upperworld that they miss the most. But they’re very specific in their requests: they want to hear stories of dread and terror, stories of things that threaten and scare. In the world of eternity inhabited by them, the dead perceive everything as unchanging. Terribly, awfully, boringly unchanging.

“Oh the dread is gone, the nightmares, the anguish, the injustice here everyone is healthy, equal, content. Oh, sweet unhappiness!”

And so there, where immortality is achieved as a matter of fact, and where nothing spells out anything awful, souls long for depravity, for frights, for inhumanity. They long, in other words, for everything that was forbidden in life. This longing is formulated as a series of implacable no-more’s:

“No more throbbing languors wicked flesh no more exquisite cruel vice mouths that tomorrow… tender nothings as fleeting as flowers. Instead an inconquerable dullness sameness, predictability, boredom.”

And so, when it’s Orfi’s turn to bring his own news about the Earth, what he says doesn’t sound like news at all. What he tells the dead is a series of age-old stories of crimes, of infelicities – interrupted stories, stories without conclusions, stories of the night, of nightmares, of the sublunary watching the moon in dismay. With these stories, Dino Buzzati’s vision of the Underworld grows into a story of a special longing for the Evil, where “the dawn leaks through the blinds” with the same poetical force of a Paradise lost before inception, in the midst of an eternity where the poet’s voice “will climb over Himalayas of souls.”

The fictional epistles of Amélie Nothomb

Full title: Life Form

Author: Amélie Nothomb, translated by Alison Anderson

Genre: Fiction, Novel
Attributes: 144 pages, paperback
Publisher: Europa Editions (2013)

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

Amélie Nothomb writes the kind of novels descriptive reviewers are ill at ease to write about. That’s not because of some insurmountable complexity but because the story line often takes abrupt and highly significant turns. Since these turns are essential to the understanding of her novels, one can’t just go on saying what’s happening there without committing the most terrible crime among book reviewers, the murder by spoiling. The fact is apparent in Life Form as well. I can’t say what happens in this book without giving away its most important events. So I better refrain and stick to the rich theoretical underlayer that forms the novel’s conceptual skeleton.
Life Form is a novel about reading and writing as much as it is a novel about fat people (one of Nothomb’s favourite character types) or a novel about war, deceit, and, why not, human condition at large. Structurally, it is a semi-epistolary text featuring a lot of anachronistic (let’s not forget we’re in the age of emails and social-media stunts!) hand-written letters. Amélie Nothomb is not only the author but also the narrator and the protagonist. That, in itself, would be enough to complicate things to a considerable extent. But wait, there’s more. In between letters and narrative episodes, Nothomb manages to plant reflective signposts that stop the text and the reader for a healthy bite of well-cooked theories of the business of writing. But because her prose is so self-referential and the universe she has constructed around herself as a writer and a literary persona so dynamic and intricate, it is often difficult to draw the line between what’s the author’s and what’s the character’s. At one point in the narrative, Amélie Nothomb, the protagonist, talks about her literary inceptions in the form of letter-writing.

“Already at the age of six I was forced by my parents to write one letter a week to my maternal grandfather, a stranger who lived in Belgium. My brother and my older sisters were subjected to the same regime. Each of us had to fill an entire letter-sized page addressed to this gentleman. He answered with one page per child. ‘Tell him what happened at school,’ my mother would suggest. ‘He won’t be interested,’ I retorted. ‘That depends on how you tell it,’ she explained.”

As the character makes clear a few lines further down, this was “the only period in my life when I have experienced the anxiety of the empty page.”

Amélie Nothomb. Source: Grazia

Knowing that Nothomb has been publishing one novel every year since the publication of her first, Hygiene and the Assassin (1992), this problem of the empty page (and the subsequent absence thereof) becomes, indeed, an autobiographical detail. But this is also a point where writing is regarded as an audience-orientated matter. The unknown reader who needs to be told the story well, the fixation on the task as painful but unavoidable – all this is, in a nutshell, what writing looks like from within, as well as from without. This is also a prelude to the love-story between Amélie Nothomb (the author and the protagonist) and the writing of letters. “Even when I like someone to the point of living with him,” she says a few pages later,

“I have to have him write to me, too: no connection seems complete unless it includes an element of correspondence.”

This trafficking of letters (of the alphabet) by means of letters (as epistles) is the central factor in Life Form. Without it, the plot would make no sense. Two characters writing to each other across continents, across worlds, and across mentalities, provide the perfect background for everything Amélie Nothomb has to say about scripts, inscriptions, and missives.

Making use of the topos of letter-writing, the novel also provokes some thoughts on the virtuality of writing in general. Amélie Nothomb and Melvin Mapple, the principal (and for the greatest part the only) characters are people hidden behind words. The protection offered by these words, however, is a feeble one. When they are peeled off and the characters show through as human beings, the virtual nature of their correspondence proves to have been a deceit, a fiction like all fictions. This is why Life Form reads so well as a mystery novel, where the reader finds surprises awaiting behind every corner: a text that deceives in the sense in which many works of fiction trick the reader into loving their promises.

A Kureishi catastrophe?

Full title: The Last Word

Author: Hanif Kureishi

Genre: Fiction, Novel
Attributes: 304 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Faber & Faber (2014)

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

If you leave aside all the polite circumventions and the condescending tone of the reviews that came before and after the publication of Hanif Kureishi's 2014 novel (his first in six years), the diagnosis imposes itself unanimously: The Last Word is a catastrophe. First of all it is (although the author doesn’t quite accept the idea) a roman à clef. The fact is painted all over the façades of these reviews: with this last one of his novels, Kureishi added his name to the detractors of V S Naipaul. The characters in The Last Word resemble almost bone for bone the author of A House for Mr Biswas and The Middle Passage. So the gossip goes. But roman à clef or no roman à clef, the novel must have some other attributes to look at. Well, of course it does, but that's exactly where things go sour. Kureishi, who, ever since his The Buddha of Suburbia, has set up a pretty high standard for his own talent, has been keeping reviewers on the lookout. And looking out they've been doing alright, but not, unfortunately, to the author's benefit.

Frankly speaking, though, this time they might be onto something, these cohorts of critics. To say it only by way of an introduction, The Last Word has a very heavy tone about itself, one that makes you feel like dragging through the text at points.

There's also this thing about characters, and especially about the secondary ones. I know Kureishi has a penchant for the people in the background, but in this novel he leaves some of them mightily unattended, or just incompletely crayoned (see especially the numerous lovers – destined to fade out almost unnoticed). But this aspect should not surprise, since even around the protagonist, Mamoon, the Indian-born writer who used to have the whole of Britain under his post-colonial spell, there are sometimes thick patches of darkness, which leave the reader with some unresolved questions as to his former (and highly significant) life as a famous man of letters.

Could these be purposeful gaps (one might ask), considering the novel's plot line? An old master of explosive temperament, Mamoon, hires a seemingly (at least in the beginning, because things change almost without a proper explanation) timid biographer, Harry. In the process of writing up the monograph of Mamoon's life (or “extreme biography,” as Rob, the editor, calls the thing he has been employed to do), Harry discovers uncomfortable truths, which he diligently slips into the final version of the biography. So, with a biography in the viewfinder, there should be no reason to panic if not everything is up to date and detailed insofar as the life of Mamoon is concerned.

But still, people talk. Readers moan. Critics pull their noses. The story would have been more appealing without these gaps; they would have tasted better with more of the ketchup-and-mustard of what incendiary biographers usually spice up their work with.

Hanif Kureishi. Source: The Telegraph

To make amends, it seems, Kureishi did create room for some spiced-up spectacle, although it looks like there's more in the intention than in the execution. I'm talking about sex, of course. There is a lot of it in the novel. And when you use the modifier "a lot" in relation to sex you somehow expect lust to come your way with obsessional intensity. In The Last Word, it’s precisely how this most universal of themes appears. There are so many references to sex, you don't need to be a puritan to say enough is enough. Not that sex in literature doesn't matter, or that it should be kept out of the reach of readers, but some of the mentions are beyond good taste, or even beyond necessity. You wonder sometimes, indeed, if the book wouldn't have been better without them.

“The intellect and the libido have to be linked, otherwise there’s no life in the work.  Any artist has to work with their prick or cunt. Any person has to work with their desire, to defeat boredom, to keep everything alive. Anything good has to be a little pornographic, if not perverse.”

This is, obviously, not the worst of them. But neither was I trying to point out the monster. There’s a lot more where this has come from; a lot more, and a lot less interesting.

Yet the novel is not awful. There are moments when one is left thinking, and, given a good topic, the outcomes are precious (in the good, Gollum-like, sense of the word). It happens when the narration isn’t exactly ambitious, when it doesn’t want to discover dazzling features for the sake of dazzling features. It happens, for instance, when the narrative voice takes a turn towards the central point of the book itself: the play with other’s lives (in essence, the definition of biography):

“Harry was in [Mamoon’s] house; he was walking and discussing seriously with him; he would write his life. Their names would be linked for ever; he would have a small share in the old man’s power.  But biography had learned a lot from the scandal sheets; if had been sucked towards the dirty stuff, a process of disillusionment. Unmasking was the thing, leaving just bleached bones. You think you like this writer? See how badly he treated his wife, children and mistresses. He even loved men! Hate him, hate his work – whichever way you looked at it, the game was up. The question had become: what can we forgive in others?  How far do they have to go before we lose faith in them?”

It is around this idea of invasion, of editorial curiosity, of intrusion for the sake of a headline, that the novel becomes most truthful. After passages like this one feels like all is not lost. At the end of the day, let us not forget, Hanif Kureishi is not a writer devoid of talent.

Memories of things that matter

Full title: I Remember Nothing, and Other Stories

Author: Nora Ephron

Genre: Nonfiction, Essays
Attributes: 138 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (2010)

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

I remember nothing, the title of a book that promises household satisfaction. A book to be liked. Quite a lot. The easy tone of it, sometimes veering into colloquial witticisms, the mix of confidentiality and honest, unrestrained testimony. The essays read lime lunch-break wisdom: a smile in the corner of the mouth, a wink of recognition, a flicker of consent, a raised eyebrow when the text hits an uncommon but clever-as-hell point and the eyes stop blinking for a second or two.

I think I know where the appeal comes from. The texts start off from seemingly domestic viewpoints, easy to recognize and identify with. And then there's a lot of battling against misconceptions, done in the voice of confident authority; which is exactly the tone of voice in which you've been told a lot of the (excuse my French) BS you've been hearing from day one of your life. Like, for instance, the BS about egg-white omelette being healthier than the full version. Ephron's at it under the pretext of giving some friends a good piece of advice. But it doesn't take very long till she turns the whole matter from gastronomy to straight-up politics (under the same pretext, it seems, only much harder to avoid):

"So this is my moment to say what's been in my heart for years: it's time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I don't want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Afghanistan, which it's also time to put a halt to, but I don't seem to be able to do anything about the war, whereas I have a shot at cutting down consumption of egg-white omelettes."

At another point, in a different essay, she finds something to say about the Internet. Unavoidable topic. So many things to say about it, so many complaints to file.

Nora Ephron (1941-2012). Source: Salon

But most importantly, one finds this claim about the value of truth in the age of virtual reality:

"It's not easy to be wrong about the Internet - the Internet consists of pretty much everything in the universe. So pretty much anything you say about it is going to turn out to be partly true in some way or other."

The same topic offers, at a different point, the chance of another revelation. It happened, if we take the word of the essay for granted, at a conference (one of the very many) about the Internet's ability to make people rich beyond belief. Out of it comes the following thought, which may be classed as depression, as Ephron herself suggests in the end:

"It had suddenly become clear that there was a lot of advertising money out there, and all you had to do was provide content so that the ads had something to run alongside of. It crossed my mind that the actual definition of 'content' for an Internet company was 'something you can run an ad alongside of.' I found this a depressing insight."

At times, you find statements made with an air of unrelenting particularity, as if the words just said could be said only in this and this very case alone, in this very situation. But not after long, you realise that the same statement is capable of remarkable permutations. It can, in other words, be applied to a multitude of other instances, given the right circumstances. For clarification, take a look at the thought about restaurants, in "My Life as a Meat Loaf":

"[I]t's my theory that owning a restaurant is the kind of universal fantasy everyone ought to grow out of, sooner rather than later, or else you will be stuck  with the restaurant. There are many problems that come with owning a restaurant, not the least of which is that you have to eat there all the time. Giving up the fantasy that you want to own a restaurant is probably the last Piaget stage."

There isn't much to say about this statement, apart from, perhaps, something to the effect of 'ah, those restaurants.' But then it turns out to be so easy to change the topic, by merely mentioning (magically, as one might find the right trick) the word that defines it. It must be in this interchangeability that Nora Ephron's texts find their charm. You gotta like a writer who is making it so easy for you to participate in a game you thought was yours. Of course it cannot be just that. The success must also be due to her easing our access to the seemingly inaccessible: the famous, the rich, the contentious.

A storm like a party

Full title: Storm

Author: Tim Minchin

Genre: Graphic novel
Attributes: 112 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Orion (2014)

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

Storm, a mix of radically-worded histrionics (gotta call them that, since they’re such a show) and cleverly manipulated drawings (suggestive as hell, capable of carrying the story along at full speed), is a high-quality comics book, and one to bear the name with pride, especially as the offspring of a slightly older, similarly popular animation short film. At the centre of it stands Tim Minchin at his usual, happy to go against things called, by a wrong name, ‘spiritual.’

To make a short story shorter, here’s the essence of the gist of the nub: London top-floor flat. Group of friends. Drinking party. Enter beautiful yet seemingly simple (in the mind) extra guest. Name’s Storm. You’ve guessed it – she’s the umbilicus of the book, so keep an eye on her. The narrator (Tim Minchin-looking, crazy-haired, blond, suspicious, sceptical, impossible-to-restrain) takes aim at the girl-from-nowhere (a narrative type – you’ve guessed it again), who’s been regurgitating clichés all night. So slowly, slowly, the girl is pushed into a corner and beaten the crap out of – in a metaphorical way, of course, because there’s no physical violence in the book, only the violent blow of the wind of discontent. As a consequence, she’s no longer the umbilicus, because the Tim Minchin-looking narrator has become it. End of story.

On a different level, though, there’s the anti-crap philosophy the narrator (like we didn’t know who he was!) mixes with the event like you mix butter with toast.

“Look, Storm, sorry, I don’t mean to bore ya’
but there’s no such thing as an aura
reading auras is like reading minds
or tea leaves or star signs or meridian lines.
These people aren’t plying a skill,
they’re either lying or mentally ill.
Same goes for people who claim they can hear God’s demands
or spiritual healers who think they’ve got magical hands.”

Just to make a note here, quickly, of the fact that it’s sort of interesting for a nonbeliever to spell the word God with a capital G. But that’s a minor thing. I won’t dwell on it. There’s bigger fish to fry. Bigger because, right as it is in most of its arguments, the book leaves some things unattended to.

Read Storm to the end (which isn’t very far away from its beginning), and you’ll discover that it’s nothing but a rant. Played and organized according to the best rules of rants: take the piss out of someone, demolish them, rock the boat of their words, fuck the Pope, fuck Deepak Chopra, fuck everything that’s conventionally destined to be fucked in this second decade of the third millennium, and at the end of it all you’ve got what you knew you were going to get all the way. You’ve got a list of thoroughly discarded myths, you’ve ploughed the field of disbelieving, you’ve trenched the hell out of everything that sounded sooo last century, sooo last decade, sooo yesterday.

Minchin is a clever guy. He’s got the talent, he’s got his special way with words:

“I’m like a rabbit suddenly trapped
in the blinding headlights of a vacuous crap.”

He is also a showman. He is also a celebrity. Which means, he runs on fan power; he is idolized by many. He is worshiped, adulated, adored by individuals trapped in his own headlights. So there.

It’s not that his revolutionary demeanour might be the cause of some problem here. At the end of the day anyone would be perfectly entitled, like Minchin, to go nuts when it comes to bigots, to the conventionally-clever, to the cliché-vomiting individuals who take everything down with a good glass of wine and a bite from a pink-salmoned canapé. But there’s one more thought to have a go at before zipping it all up. There’s one reality Minchin appears to ignore with flare: that of radicalism being itself a matter of fashion. Multi-award-winning radicalism, which stands crassly misrepresented, if I'm permitted the word. Misrepresented as in try to take away the multi-award-winning part (don’t see it, don’t touch it, don’t make a fuss about it) and see what happens. See how many hits your rant is getting now. We, the Unfollowed, the poorly befriended, the seldomly Liked, understand this well. We know it's not exactly the message that travels along but the face. We also know that radicalism is not the right word when you're not exactly the only one ranting about the topic. To be radical you need to be somewhat - how should I put it - unique. Id est, not a celebrity. The truly radical are always hated. Even when they think they're loved.

Plus let me say this. It’s so easy to cook up a revolt, to let the water boil over, to sprawl about the wings of scepticism, when you live in a time and space, but mostly under a regime that doesn't behead you for it.

Not sure if Minchin knows, but there’s a point where brandishing the flag of freedom is injurious to those who can’t afford it. Anything from the Inquisition, to the religious states, to racial fundamentalism, to North Korea, to terrorism, is predicated on this kind of intolerance in which many of the so-called revolutionaries of the Western world would think twice, at least, before even opening their mouth.

A rant at a drinking party is good. For a party. But drenching your spirit in spirits? There are many who would find this simple task impossible. I'm talking about those who live in the warehouses of ideology, in their concentration camps, where even the idea of having a party is radical enough to warrant their fear of being arrested, interrogated, etc.

The issues raised by Tim Minchin sound okay to a Westerner's ears. Not to all of them, but to many. Every era has its demons and its angels, some to be cut open and revealed in their full deceitfulness, others to be hailed and sung as hymns in the churches of the new-believers.

But one must have something else in the back of one's mind when it comes to drinking-party revelations. From Plato onwards (oh, wait a minute – is that what Minchin was trying to emulate?), we've certainly figured that drinking, thinking and speaking seem wonderful together. Yes, but. While they increase desire, they also diminish performance. In other words, they blow up big fireworks but do it as a form of entertainment. Whereas, let's face it, there's nothing funny in being a radical, sometimes not even when you're a stand-up comedian. Let us not forget the slogan of the French: Every revolution devours its children. That, at least, should ring some serious bells. Especially in the minds of the famous.