An Antic Romp: Niccolo Ammaniti’s The Crossroads

“Wake up! Wake up, for fuck’s sake!”

With this opening line we enter The Crossroads, Niccolo Ammaniti’s frenzied, beautifully crafted tale of the crash & burn of three blue-collar buddies in present day Italy. These words are spoken by Reno Zena, one of the buddies, to his 13-year-old son Cristiano, as he shakes him awake in the middle of the night. Next door at the furniture factory the guard dog is having a barking fit and Reno can’t sleep.

Dead again, David Eagleman’s Sum

There’s nothing people spend more time consciously avoiding and subconsciously obsessing over than death. And, bar clairvoyants and priests, there’s no profession that has gained more mileage out of what exists beyond, what Hobbes called “the great leap into the dark,” than writers. When idly considered, the mind falls into clichés regarding the afterlife; bare-arsed cherubs plucking lyres on passing clouds or cloven-hoofed pyromaniacs roasting Nazis on pitchforks. Beyond the West and in the less visited corners of culture, there’s a rich selection of afterlives to choose from. Paradise as vast bird-filled reed fields, plentiful benevolent jungles, palaces with hanging gardens and banquets where you’re lavished on by 72 virgin concubines. Or hell as some subterranean cave system where you’d spend eternity doing handstands in boiling effluent, swimming in rivers of rabid jaguars or climbing trees made from razor blades. Bosch. Dante. Blake. Doré. Each had their own teeming and unique visions. For Flann O’Brien, it was a depressing rural village in Ireland where men slowly became bicycles. Will Self had the afterlife as simply a suburb of London.

Dark genre-transcending absurdity

GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominator) has what is to the best of my knowledge a unique selling point, in that it offers readers the opportunity to save money by purchasing only the parts of the magazine that are of interest to them – a “pay-per-view” service. This makes some sense, as GUD is highly eclectic, with Issue #4 combining apocalyptic sci-fi, comic fantasy, alternative history, dark poetry, surreal artwork and – just when you thought it was getting predictable – social realism and an essay on Kafka. With a net cast this wide, many readers are bound to prefer some parts of the magazine over others.

Sadness & death, Jose Luis Peixoto’s Blank Gaze

Blank Gaze is the first novel by Portuguese writer Jose Luis Peixoto to be translated into English. This is a story of love, death, fatalism, triumph and defeat told through two generations. Giants, Siamese twins, the devil amongst others inhabit the nameless Portuguese village where this novel is set.

The Long Murderous Life of Serena Pemberton: Ron Rash’s Serena

The moral center of George Pemberton, timber baron and hero of Ron Rash’s fourth novel Serena, is elusive at best. The time is 1929 just after the stock market crash. Pemberton has knocked up and abandoned a local mountain girl named Rachel. In the opening scene Pemberton returns to his logging camp in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, bringing with him his new bride Serena. Rachel’s father waits at the train station armed with a hunting knife, intent upon revenge. While Rachel watches Pemberton disembowels her father and walks away. That night Serena confesses to Pemberton her deep desire to experience killing another person by her own hand, to feel the surge of adrenalin in her imagined cojones.

The Past is Never Past: Carlo Lucarelli’s De Luca Trilogy

At last, Europa Editions has published the final novella in Carlo Lucarelli’s superb historical crime trilogy starring Commissario De Luca. These three linked tales [Carte Blanche. The Damned Season, Via delle Oche] are a great read, rich in atmosphere, sense of place, history and character. As an added bonus each book includes in its cast of characters a strong-willed sexy woman with whom De Luca fornicates heroically and without sentimentality. After the first encounter (pgs 52-53 of Carte Blanche), in which a beautiful and busty fortuneteller with wavy red hair fucks De Luca’s brains out during an air raid, I knew I was hooked.

The horror, the horror

Hanif Kureishi, speaking of the influence of his dead father, likes the Ibsen line, ‘We carry a body in our cargo…’ One could apply this to perhaps the most disquieting piece in Andy Murray’s collection of modern horror shorts, ‘The Coue’ by Jeremy Dyson, when the acquisition of a jar (the cargo inside is a scarified fetus) from a ratty salesman leads to hell, a taut piece with some sly references to Barker’s Engineer, “no tears please, it’s a waste of good suffering.” Kureishi’s entry ‘The Dogs’ is similarly horrifying, wherein a mother and child have the flesh ripped from their bones by feral dogs.

A Beatnik Stew: Kerouac & Burroughs

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel written in 1944, by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, has at last found the light of day. Presented in alternating chapters narrated by Will Dennison [written by Burroughs] and Mike Ryko [written by Kerouac], the story follows a rootless group of characters adrift in New York City’s demimonde in the last year of WWII.

In the opening scene we’re introduced to the major players sitting around an apartment smoking schwag. One of the characters eats broken glass. Another character brings the diner a plate of old razor blades. Your typical day in coolsville.