Charles Bukowski, the Henry Chinaski novels (1971–89)
Hard-bitten, cynical, American, vulgar, funny, obscene.
What makes Bukowski of interest is that he was himself, and that’s why these autobiographical novels are so good. (The ‘semi-’ in ‘semi-autobiographical’ feels redundant.)
What comes across is the sheer compulsion to write – he’s always saying how much he likes the feel and the sound of his typewriter. I recommend listening not in the order of publication, but in chronological order for the story, starting with Ham on Rye (1982):
The first thing I remember is being under something. It was a table, I saw a table leg, I saw the legs of the people, and a portion of the tablecloth hanging down. It was dark under there, I liked being under there. It must have been in Germany. I must have been between one and two years old. It was 1922. I felt good under the table. Nobody seemed to know that I was there.
These are not audiobooks to be listened to sped up. The energy of the prose, read by Christian Baskous, already sounds sped up.
Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid (2015)
This is very much not a plotty novel, but it does have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning:
I have lice, again. […] When I was a teenager, I wanted to write literature. Even now I don’t know what happened—if I lost my way somehow or if it was just bad luck […] my life—which should have turned toward literature with the naturalness of opening a door and, once in the forbidden room, finally discovering your deepest, truest self—took a different path[.]
The long middle:
Since the autumn of 1974, from the age of seventeen, my life has had a double, a paper wrapping, and, until now, I have paid it no more than the careless attention a beggar gives the newspapers he puts over himself so he won’t be cold. I am talking about my diary, where, for thirteen years, I have recorded, without any intentions, in a pure reflection of my inner voice, happenings, literary exercises, reactions to books I have read, frustrations and sufferings, unusual states and dreams.
When I started to transcribe what I thought were the most significant fragments, I often hesitated: everything seemed worthy of copying, even if it would have made my text a thousand pages long.
Here, in the belly of the manuscript, wandering through its tangled intestines, listening to its strange rumbling, I feel my freedom; I also feel freedom’s obligatory companion: insanity.
My darkness continued, the ever-clearer division between my mind and my life.
And near the end, a perfectly Hamletian question: ‘Why can I understand everything, if I can do nothing?’
Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport (2019)
This I believe is a masterpiece. I listen and think of Orwell on Ulysses: ‘the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words’. Yes, the narrator is ‘woke’, and probably wrong about some things from a humanprogress.org perspective, but also, as read by Stephanie Ellyne, absolutely adorable. (Incidentally, her attitude to male gynaecologists and porn would align her more with ‘TERFs’ and conservatives.) The Observer quotation on the cover of one edition – ‘A […] righteously angry portrait of contemporary America’ – makes it sound like quite a boring and ignorable piece of journalism, but it is so much more than that. It is the closest thing I’ve read to chip-in-the-brain, stream-of-consciousness, hyperinternalised, automated autofiction. It takes place in the head of the unnamed narrator, who is married to Leo. Most clauses begin ‘the fact that’, but in this mental space facts are not separate from feelings. The whole book consists of thoughts and feelings that experientially are facts. Here’s a romantic bit about home:
…the fact that however long and complex their habitrail is though, hamsters never seem very happy, hurricanes hardly ever happen, but it’s hard to tell with a hamster, hampster, “Buck up,” the fact that I think they’re nocturnal, Mommy, the fact that I miss her, the fact that I never got over her illness, the fact that it broke me, the fact that you gotta live in the here and now, the fact that the sun still rises every morning, and there is twilight, when the sky glows, the fact that it happens twice a day, the fact that there are boarlets, and Leo and I get to sleep together almost every night…
And a Wordsworthian bit:
…the fact that it’s unbelievable but every single thing alive has its own center of being, and looks out on the world from that point of view, even a worm, or a jellyfish, hamsters, owls, the fact that even a leaf has feelings, the fact that you know the leaves are enjoying this warm sun going right through them, the fact that the leaves seem to be sunbathing, letting the sun lick them, the fact that there are times, maybe the most unlikely times, that you realize you’re simply thrilled to be alive, and what a great piece of luck it is just to be a part of things, to have a body, so you can feel and see and walk the earth, for just a little while…
Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle and the Morning Star novels, translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken
My Struggle (2009–11)
Read by Edoardo Ballerini, once described in the New York Times Magazine, because he has also made an audiobook of the Hebrew Bible, as ‘The Voice of God. (And Karl Ove Knausgaard, Walt Whitman, Niccolò Machiavelli…’ etc. It is a good description, but in the case of Knausgård’s six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle, Ballerini gives us the voice of a suffering God, a deus agonistes.
Knausgård is the king – or, since he is Norwegian, konge – of hyper-internalised autofiction. It is whispered abroad that he resides at Deptford Strand. His achievement is to render what it is to be an experiencing self in whatever we want to call our postmodern time. These books were part of my life for about eight months. His partners are somewhat merged in my mind, as are his brother and best friend. Only the voice of the narrator is ever present. These excerpts are all from the first volume, A Death in the Family:
I am sitting alone watching, it is some time in spring, I suppose, for my father is working in the garden. […] I was eight years old that evening, my father thirty-two.
I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it […] my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.
The world was the world, which I touched and leaned on, breathed and spat in, ate and drank, bled, and vomited. It was only many years later that I began to view this differently.
I leaned forward to look out the window, down onto the dusty tarmac, which I had once done twenty years ago with the bizarre but clear intention of remembering what I saw, forever.
Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past. Trees and streetlamps, houses and outhouses, but also people and animals. If someone was waiting for a bus they would be sliced through the middle, their top half falling like a felled tree, leaving feet and waist standing and the wound bleeding.
And from the final volume, The End:
My basic feeling is that of the world disappearing, that our lives are being filled with images of the world, and that these images are inserting themselves between us and the world, which for that reason is becoming lighter and lighter and less and less binding.
On life-as-struggle, Knausgård seems to subscribe to Yeats’s principle that ‘Words alone are certain good.’
The Morning Star series (2020–)
When I first started listening to The Morning Star it reminded me, in the way it made me feel, of 1Q84: happy in the company of the voices, and cosy in the storyworld, despite it being an uncanny one.
I can’t do justice to these novels. The Guardian reviewer said of the first, ‘Its failure is total and totalising’, and I disagree with this, totally, unless it was Knausgård’s intention to write a cleverly plotted Ian McEwan novel.
In The Wolves of Eternity (2021), the second novel, a character called Alevtina says,
I so remembered the singular joy of looking up from a book and knowing that no one else had any idea what world I was in as they went about doing whatever it was they happened to be doing at the time.
It was always understood by some that the novel form itself is a kind of internalisation, but now we have more perilous devices to look up from, knowing that no one else has any idea what world we were just in.
My favourite in the series so far is the fourth, The School of Night (2023), a Faustian story set in south-east London in the 1980s. The narrator is called Kristian:
What I wanted was a sense of being at the bottom of the sea, where the world and all its industrial hue and cry existed only at a great distance, if not in another dimension, then at least in another element than the one I inhabited.
This is what it feels like to walk along the Basingstoke Canal.
Coda: Inadvertent (2018)
Translated by Ingvild Burkey, and read, again, by Ballerini.
This short book is Knausgård’s contribution to Why I Write, a series from Yale (presumably named after Orwell’s essay of that name).
I quoted above the narrator of Cărtărescu’s Solenoid saying that his life ‘should have turned toward literature with the naturalness of opening a door’, but didn’t. In a thrilling section of Inadvertent, Knausgård describes how he solved this problem – how he broke through to the open space beyond that door. He went to a library, overheard a conversation, wrote it down, and then let his protagonist overhear it.
And the distance this created between him and me, or between the text and me, had the effect that my thoughts took on a slightly different hue when I wrote them down, and this slight foreignness imperceptibly altered what followed, which suddenly seemed unfamiliar to me, and beyond my control, at the same time that it was mine and came from me. It was just like reading. The feeling was exactly the same. I lost sight of myself and entered something at once unknown and familiar. This was what I had been longing for. This was writing. To lose sight of yourself and yet to use yourself, or that part of yourself that was beyond the control of your ego, and then to see something foreign appear on the page in front of you. Thoughts you had never had before, images you had never seen. It was the form that created them. For if what I put into the writing was my own, and familiar to me, the form changed it, and that change demanded that I put something else into it, which in turn was transformed, so that even without moving, I was moving away from myself. And that is exactly how it is to read, isn’t it? Certainly, we open ourselves to another voice, which we turn into ourselves, for when we read what we feel are our own feelings, our own fear and enthusiasm, sorrow and joy. […] It was like an avalanche. I wrote and wrote.
And we listen and listen.
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (2009–10)
The dual narratives of Aomame and Tengo, beautifully read by Allison Hiroto and Marc Vietor.
1Q84 is a world unto itself, and where Knausgård gives us a world with a new star, Murakami gives us one with a new, second moon. But don’t be put off by the ‘magical realism’ label.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (c. 1913–35)
Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. The idea of travelling nauseates me.
Pessoa says at one point that he is one of those condemned to think, while most people live. The Thamesward quest of the riverwalk-with-audiobook enjoyer is to find a way to think and live.
Edward St Aubyn, the Patrick Melrose novels (1992–2012)
At Last (2012): ‘a life is just the history of what we give our attention to’.
Too true.