L’Etranger can be translated variously as (most obviously and most commonly) ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Outsider’, or even ‘The Foreigner’. Questions over naming are indicative of the book itself: three distinct translations exist, differing substantially in tone. This Penguin Modern Classics edition from 2000 opts for The Outsider as a title and reprints Joseph Laredo’s 1982 translation of the text, generally seen as striking a balance between the formality of earlier translations and the perhaps overly casual approach of an American translation made at around the same time as Laredo’s. Such variations aside, the basics are well-known: the ‘black foot’ Mersault kills an Arab man in a sudden and unexpected act of violence after a long, hot day on the beach and thereafter mulls his fate in prison.

The Outsider is usually described as an Existentialist novel while Camus himself was regarded (and identified) as an Absurdist. I think that’s debatable – Mersault and the novel are more than a little Nihilistic (Camus, though, most certainly was not). Whatever label you attach to Camus’s philosophy and writing, the entire second half of this novel becomes a tract intended to show how meaningless any given action becomes once you start assuming life itself has no meaning. That’s true, actions do lose their meaning given such a realisation, it almost goes without saying, but it just isn’t how people reconcile their actions and their consequences. Life has no inherent meaning: So what? That’s just stating the obvious as far as many people, myself included, are concerned, and it’s entirely irrelevant anyway, since in every country, in every age, people have demonstrably both sought and defined meaning for themselves. Mersault’s complete and utter lack of interest in doing so may amply demonstrate the essentially absurd nature of the universe but it does little else; it offers no clue as to why we oughtn’t all sink into the Nihilism which Camus himself always rejected.

Camus was once asked to choose between football (a sport he loved and played with great success until contracting tuberculosis) and theatre and is said to have replied ‘football, without hesitation’, also commentating that ‘after many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport’. In The Rebel (L’Homme Révolté) he spoke out passionately against totalitarianism having himself been a member of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation: he knew full well the value of life even if believing it to be underpinned by no inherent or objective meaning whatsoever. It’s a shame and a failing that this appreciation and understanding does not appear here alongside the fundamentals of his absurdist philosophy in any way. H. P. Lovecraft mightn’t have had one-tenth of Camus’s philosophical nous (or his literary ability, for that matter; this is still an incredibly well-written piece, it has to be said), but Lovecraft wrote stories that far more aptly demonstrate existence in a cold, uncaring universe, because they show a human reaction to the fact. Such is missing from The Outsider and lacking it the killer Mersault doesn’t come across as some enlightened, maverick scholar of the Absurd but rather as one of those slightly drippy people you encounter from time to time who really don’t seem to have the faculties to engage with the world in anything but the most hopeless of fashions. More than that, he succumbs to the very worst of all possible human reactions to a realisation of the absurd nature of the universe – worse than the Nihilist’s suicidal tendencies, worse than the Believer’s leap of faith, far, far worse than Camus’s own rational acceptance, Mersault kills.

In an afterword by the author himself, Mersault is described as somebody who is wholly and incorruptibly truthful, a man who simply cannot lie. He cannot feign the sadness society expects of him after his mother’s death, he cannot produce the deceptions his lawyer believes might spare him from the gallows; he is destroyed by his own truthfulness. Possibly, but the idea of Mersault as some beacon of truth for all his self-destructive honesty relies upon a seeming misconception or oversimplification of the nature of both truth and honesty: to suggest that honesty equals truth is to suppose that people know everything about what and who they are, about why and how they act, which of course they simply do not. Mersault doesn’t know why he killed that man, so no matter how faultlessly honest he is an essential truth is missing. There’s perhaps something even more vital missing from The Outsider as a novel. Maybe it’s pointless looking.

In the news today because of this: Brazil Embraces Spelling Reforms

The idea of similar reform of English is occasionally mooted, often by well-meaning educationalists who seem to believe the convoluted nature of our language holds children back. To those who suggest that phonetic spelling is the answer, I have just one question: How are we going to spell the world castle?

Will it be carsul, as the Queen’s English would presumably render it, or cassul, as even my own relatively mild Yorkshire accent does? Or are we going to end up with (at least) two written forms of the language in England alone, one for the North and one for the South? There’s vast phonetic differences between the English used in different parts of the Anglophone world; trying to render the language into a single written form would leave many people, as before, forced to use spellings which in no way represent their pronunciation of the word, which rather seems to defeat the object, doesn’t it?

Tim Butcher // Vintage // 272 Pages // Non-fiction

Blood River is the story of journalist Tim Butcher’s attempt to travel the Congo river, following in the footsteps of his hero – and fellow Daily Telegraph journalist – Stanley (of ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ fame). As well a recounting Butcher’s own journey, Blood River takes the reader briskly through the Congo’s complex and bloody history.

In actual fact, Stanley’s trip features only in passing – it dominates an introduction wherein it is hailed as inspiration from the trip, but largely recedes from view otherwise, resurfacing occasionally thanks largely to the fact that Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent was the only book Butcher chose to take with him. Even the route Butcher chooses to pursue – following the course of the Congo river, making huge swathes of the journey by boat along the waterway itself – is such an obvious one as to oblige almost any would-be explorer, past or present, to follow it. Really, this is Butcher’s journey, and not at all an attempt to recreate or investigate Stanley’s.

Read an extract from Blood River (preview will open in new window).

That is both a blessing and a curse. Butcher is by no means an adventurer by nature and, ever the Englishman, frequently finds time to complain of hardships that really must have been expected from the off. Somewhat ironically the one place Butcher manages to find any reasonable degree of comfort along the way is in the company of ‘a plain-speaking Yorkshireman’ whose Congolese house, quite contrary to both Butcher’s recently-acquired Congo expectations and his stereotypical English ones, features a fridge, air-conditioning and satellite television: ‘any fool can be uncomfortable’, Butcher is informed by his plain-speaking host. In fairness, it’s just about impossible for a reader (or armchair adventurer) to really appreciate the constant terror Butcher must have felt while travelling through some of the most wild and lawless regions of one of the world’s most wild and lawless countries, so a sense of nervousness throughout the book is perhaps to be expected, even if it does cross the line from honest admission of fears into whining once in a while.

That Butcher is not some bluff, foolhardy adventurer pays off elsewhere, though, where he shows himself genuinely able to sympathise with the locals and resident foreigners – aid workers, medics, clergy and, more dubiously, businessmen – he meets. By far the most interesting parts of the book are the insights of ordinary Congolese, whose understanding of the situation is both a great deal subtler and a great deal simpler than might be expected; indeed, the lasting impression is one of woeful, or wilful, ignorance on the part of those charged at various times with improving the situation, and a sense of sad predictability about the country’s continued decline.

Many well-intentioned mantras about the need for investment, engagement, trade and other big political phrases meaningless in practice are blown apart (many, indeed, are left looking like little more than convenient excuses). Such things are the tokens governments seek out to point to what a good job they and their counterparts are doing; all the local people want is a very simple, very basic form of law and order. Many of those Butcher meets say so explicitly; implicit in that is an understanding that the real enemy the Congo faces is the widespread corruption that hampers everyday life – corruption sufficient to make progress impossible, creating grievances which can only multiply and leaving a sense of injustice in even the fairest minds. One promising new government after another has, over the years, persuaded would-be do-gooders in the West of their ability to deliver improvement when, of course, such figures are only able to court the needed international influence in the first place by sitting atop vast bureaucratic structures which themselves inherently attract such corruption. The solutions to Africa’s problems lie with the little people, not the Big Men (even amongst the mere handful of Congolese Butcher meets in Blood River, perhaps half a dozen or more immediately leap out as undeniably better candidates for our trust and better reasons for hope than any of the murderous blackguards Western politicians have time and again elected to favour, much to Congo’s misfortune). That the less than 400 pages of Butcher’s book can make this so abundantly clear begs the question of why those who matter seem so blissfully ignorant of the fact.

Colonialism is an open wound in Africa, and to what extent it can be blamed for the continent’s current problems is an equally open and equally painful question. No book about Africa’s troubled present and its colonial past (for it was Stanley’s mission, let us not forget, which essentially began European colonialism in Africa) can really succeed if it fails to make the reader question not only the nature of the problems there, but the possible, possibly indirect, connivance of those over here, too. Blood River does just that; conclusions are, as ever, for others to draw, but it’s certainly worth hearing the questions asked.

Visit www.bloodriver.co.uk for more about the book.

In a Nutshell: Grieving Blue Baker confronts his feelings through stories born of his own imagination – until they turn out to be true. Or do they? A novel (sort of) and graphic novel (sort of) from famed children’s author David Almond and Sandman artist, Dave McKean.

Review: The Savage of the title is a creation framed within not only the author’s own work, but that also of his youthful protagonist, Blue Baker. Mourning the loss of his father, Blue finds comfort in penning stories of an imagined Savage, a little boy like him, but living feral and wild in nearby woods. This, however, is no childish caveman – the wild-child of Blue’s imagining is a genuine savage, a cannibal free of moral constraints; an axe and knife-wielding brute for whom violence comes easily, and with little regret.

Blue illustrates his stories with his own sketches, and here the well-worn formula of a story within a story is brought properly to fruition. Blue’s own thoughts looking back are presented as prose, while his original stories are presented in scratchy, childlike handwriting, featured graphic novel-like alongside Dave McKean’s illustrations. The blend is seamless and what it produces is truly astonishing, and rather more complex and subtle than either the conventional novel or graphic novel formats.

The story itself also embraces subtlety and complexity without fear. Among the more striking themes touched upon are grief, random violence and, quite possibly, mental illness. These aren’t merely allegorical mentions, though, extrapolated by an adult reviewer and left to go unnoticed by youthful readers – these are clear portrayals, central to the story and its characters. Through the eyes of the Savage, Blue plots serious– hateful, terrible – violence, and yet such thoughts aren’t merely denounced in tut-tutting parental fashion, but rather left for the thinking, rational Blue – the thinking, rational child – to resolve for himself.

Very often, children’s fiction shows the author to possess a fear for his readers akin to a parent’s fear for a child. Like that fear, this tendency is mistaken when allowed to become overprotective. Not so here. This is a book for children specifically because it understands they won’t be that way forever. For adults, such a concept may be terrifying – and make no mistake, many ‘concerned parents’ of the most unrealistic kind will find much to be uneasy over in The Savage – but so what? They should just grow up.

This review was originally published in Death Ray magazine.

Earlier this year, a Belgian woman revealed she had invented her tale of survival as a Jewish girl searching for her parents with a pack of wolves in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Monique De Wael, who adopted the pseudonym Misha Defonseca, admitted she was not Jewish and had lived in Belgium.

And a memoir by a white woman that claimed she was raised in poverty by a black foster mother and sold drugs for a Los Angeles gang was also exposed as a lie after her sister contacted the publisher.

Margaret B Jones, the author of Love and Consequences, actually grew up in a well-off area of California’s San Fernando Valley.

Meanwhile James Frey, another author championed by Oprah Winfrey, admitted he “embellished” his bestselling memoir about his battle with drug addiction, published in 2003.

You can read the full story here: Holocaust ‘Love Story’ Was Fake

Matt

Perfume was published in German in 1985, published in English a year later, and soon after hailed as a classic. It remains well known, though how many people have actually read it and how many mention having heard of it, recently in large part thanks to Tom Tykwer’s 2006 film, is an open question.

Perfume is not, as its title might suggest, the story of a murder or murders (well, it is, but they’re essentially irrelevant). It is a story and a book almost entirely concerned with the murderer himself – Grenouille, a boy born without any natural odour of his own and yet with a sense of smell far beyond that possessed by any other creature. He is also reviled by all other living things and seemingly possessed by the devil (though the book’s closing lines seem to suggest a rather more mundane cause for his evil). He is orphaned almost at birth, when his neglectful – and perhaps herself murderous – mother is executed for his cruel abandonment. (He is also, by the way, the ‘Scentless Apprentice’ of Nirvana’s In Utero.)

Grenouille’s astonishing sense of smell alters his very perception of the world, a skewed vision which the reader shares through Süskind’s redolently descriptive prose. That’s not to say the description here is purely olfactory; it certainly isn’t, but everything here whether felt by the hand or witnessed by the eye is described in terms themselves instantly reminiscent of odour and fragrance. It’s a world laden with smoke, leather and pine needles, none of them scents but objects so intimately bound with their own familiar smells that they’re recognisable in almost no other terms.

What Perfume at once makes manifestly clear is the importance of scent and the paucity of our understanding and appreciation of it; we have endless metaphors for sight, sound and touch – endless innuendo, some might say, for taste – but our olfactory senses and the smells they continually process for us seldom feature in the same way. Yet Perfume’s fantastical conceit – a boy born with an abundant sense of the quality, but possessing none of his own – simply wouldn’t work with any other of our senses, giving scent a special place as both overlooked and essential, and perhaps more integral than most.

This isn’t merely some exposition on the importance of scent for the sake of the reader, though; this same integral importance is the source of Grenouille’s murderousness. Lacking scent, his instinct when he encounters it is to possess it, to own it, to store it deep within himself like a memory in a stoppered bottle. To get nearly enough of it, of course, means killing those blessed enough to bear it, and so a murderer is born, in search of his own special perfume. Seen as a simple premise, though, this doesn’t capture half the book’s subtlety or cleverness. There’s no tedious waffling about Grenouille stalking his prey, no clichéd French detective on his trail, no murder mystery, no pointless, page-turning, thriller exploits – Grenouille’s murders are things of plain and practical, if greedy and lust-filled, purpose, described in the offhand fashion they occur; their gruesome commission not the book’s focus at all. Rather, that is the murderer’s own story.

Perfume is a fantasy in the trust sense – the most underused and underutilised sense – of a tale predicated upon a fantastical concept or conceit and yet told as believably as any true story; the kind of novel where you find yourself wondering whether the story’s strangeness is part of that fantasy or whether that’s just how the world really is anyway. Those peddling endless shite about goblins and magic axes would do well to take note – it isn’t the magic or the myth that maketh the fantastical, but the otherwise normality upon which the fantasy is predicated.

Perfume is fantastical and ridiculous in the best possible way, and all the truer for it. It’s a genuine classic.

When this book was published in the US, it was subtitled How Religion Poisons Everything (a phrase which appears repeatedly throughout the text of this version, too). That, if anything, is the more accurate title – a few occasional side-swipes at the Creator’s paradoxical inconsistency aside, this is the case against religion more than it is the case against god (though Hitchens clearly relies upon that argument having already been made by many of his contemporaries, most notably Richard Dawkins).

Hitchens’ approach is essentially a threefold one: First he recounts many of the most well-known religiously-inspired (or religiously-sanctioned) atrocities, such as the Srebrenica massacre, the Rwandan genocide, suicide bombings across the Middle East and beyond, and religion’s staunch opposition to contraception. Secondly he points to many lesser known harms attributable to religion (as with the outbreak of herpes amongst young Jewish boys in New York, responsible for at least one death, stemming from the traditional practice of orally removing the circumcised prepuce; or Chapter Seventeen’s suggestion of regimes from Stalin’s Soviet Union to the Kims of North Korea as stemming from religious thinking). Thirdly he attacks religious beliefs themselves as irrational and therefore inherently erring towards harm, based partly upon the origin of most modern religions as little more than the parochial desert squabbles of long-ago tribes, and partly upon their demonstrable scientific and philosophical unsoundness.

Hitchens approach is a largely anecdotal one, and resultantly a sometimes disordered, bewildering one (Chapter Eight’s mention of the ‘Australian fascist and ham actor’, Mel Gibson, being one of the more memorable flails thrown from the Hitchens whirlwind). Evidence is drawn from an incredible array of only briefly recalled sources, references thrown with mudslinging vigour, often lacking more considered investigation, with the result that it sometimes feels this is an argument Hitchens is intent on winning by simple battery and weight of evidence more than any deep philosophical examination. Still, almost everything he says is undeniably true: there is no sensible reason for believing in god, there is no justification for religion and the irrational pursuit of both of these have combined at various times and in various ways to unleash unimaginable terror upon believers and unbelievers alike.

And here’s the crux of the problem. So what?

Almost everything Hitchens says is correct, but what’s the point? Religion is something people cling to for reasons they themselves will often admit to poorly understanding; it’s a need more than a choice for many people and like any other addiction proving the harm it can do won’t diminish the need one bit. Hitchens might have been well-advised to spend a little more time singing the praises of reason rather than simply cataloguing the crimes (sins) of religion. Only in the final chapter are we introduced to Hitchens’ preferred alternative and proposed solution – the need for a new Enlightenment – but this is a suggestion just not given the space it merits; indeed, the proposition surely deserves a treatment as accomplished and irresistible as this one, yet here it forms mere afterword. A better book, perhaps, waits to be written with this as its central premise, front and centre from the very start. As it is, God is Not Great is a book whose irresistible arguments achieve only a hollow victory. More, much more than this is needed to extract religion’s poison from the world and place reason squarely in the hearts of men.

If the formatting of the website looks a little odd and a little plain, it’s because it’s designed to be read on mobile devices - a rather interesting idea, I think. You may wish to do likewise to see if it works.

The story itself is one I wrote while sat on a plane at Charles De Gaulle Airport, waiting to take off. There were very high crosswinds on the runway, leading to an indefinite wait (of about 20 mins in the end) before the pilot was able to take off.

I wrote a version of the story in my spiral notepad immediately that the idea came to me. It came to about two and a half pages in my notepad which I later cut back to the shorter version you can see in Burst. You can see the original handwritten version by clicking on the images below.

The crossings out are all from the time of the original writing, on the plane; I never revised it on paper again after that immediate first draft. Much has been removed since, but I’m sure you can see the relation to the finished piece.

Anyway, why do I mention this and why do I duplicate the pages here? You’ll often hear people say that if you want to write carry a notepad and pen with you wherever you go - it’s true. Do so. Wherever you go. I had my laptop with me, which for many people (including myself) may substitute for a notepad on most occasions, but you can’t use them on takeoff on a plane journey, so don’t get out of the habit of carrying a notepad. You never know what you’ll miss.

When Herman Melville published his sixth novel, in London, in 1851, it bore the title The Whale, this later being relegated to mere subtitle upon the book’s publication in New York a month later. Thus Leviathan shares its sub-title (and, at least partly, its eccentric punctuation) with the book we now know as Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. The similarity is both intentional and telling – on first reading, it’s difficult to tell which Leviathan’s real subject is: the humble flesh-and-blood whales of the world’s oceans or the gargantuan effort (for reader and writer alike) that is Moby-Dick.

In truth, it’s both. Part natural history, part biography, part literary critique, this is a mammoth book. In short Leviathan is a history of man’s relationship with the whale – the largest animal with which we share our planet – but it’s much more besides and to call it a book ‘about’ whales doesn’t really do justice to the impressive range of Hoare’s reference. Perhaps a third of the book is given over to a biography of Melville and an almost adulatory critique of his most famous work, while elsewhere an incredibly detailed history of man’s interaction with the whale – his hunting and fear of them, his awe and wonder at them – is narrated side-by-side with an amateur naturalist’s view of the creatures themselves. Most impressive, though, are the countless anecdotes, asides and diversions which run throughout the book – at times Leviathan feels like a brief history of life, the universe and everything as it relates to the whale, an endeavour which seems surely doomed to superfluity and spuriousness, yet which succeeds almost completely. The abolition of slavery, the emergence of the New World economies, the birth of maritime imperialism and the history of commerce – all are quite effortlessly incorporated, albeit briefly and sometimes almost invisibly, into this anarchic jumble of a book that suffers not one bit for its utter disregard of focus. This is a story told through tarot: one card – Leviathan, the Whale – surfaces again and again and so a tale of man and the oceans is scried, a history of their fortunes read.

There are limits to this method. There can be few subjects that could really justify the kind of all-encompassing relevance and symbolism that Hoare here claims for his own beloved leviathan, but the whale is rightly judged to be one of them. There are times when connections seem tenuous and the relevance doubtful and, though these are few and far between, with the book more than 400 pages in length their excising would surely have been painless. Better perhaps would have been depth in place of this breadth; scientific explanations and some of the more curious anecdotes sometimes lack the thorough treatment afforded to literary analysis and emotive personal accounts – the suggestion of a 225 year old whale, for instance, or the apparent detection of deepwater sounds hinting at a monstrous squid far larger than anything known are noted in such passing fashion as to cause perhaps needless doubt over their veracity – but again this is a minor quibble (and in fact beyond the book’s own limits the author provides comprehensive background notes on a website of the kind that really ought to accompany all non-fiction books these days).

Ultimately, this book is a love affair. Hoare’s love of contemplative analysis, obscure trivia and the syncretism of knowledge is channelled through his love of the whale; both are treated in a manner risking at once a sense of pomposity and a suspicion of undue admiration but in the end it’s honesty and passion that shows through and more than justifies the book’s many indulgences. Like an eccentric professor who can almost magically hold forth on just about anything from but one paragraph of but a single, humble tome, Hoare uses comparison, contrast, presence and absence to paint a picture of the whale as a creature somehow relevant to our entire existence, meaningful even beyond our simple wonder at their colossal size and impossible forms. Like magic, you’re left with the impression that it might not quite be true, that it could all be a trick, but it’s an impressive one.

Yes, yes, it’s the way blogs always go. Anyway, in an effort (yet again) to correct this, I’m going to start posting reviews directly to the blog section - but not just any old reviews, brand new ones; reviews of books I’ve read purely for my own pleasure or research and which I haven’t reviewed in print elsewhere. It’ll give me chance to cover a slightly broader range of books than the reviews on the site presently do, in particular it will allow me to review more non-fiction, and hopefully it will make posting a little more of a regular exercise. The first will be following shortly…

Matt