12/100, My Heavenly Favourite
or a book is a narrow room
In Autoportrait Edouard Leve says he has written books that are small narrow rooms and ones that are houses with many spacious rooms. I do not italicise this because I cannot remember precisely how he worded these sentiments. This is not so much a quote but the way I remember the quote.
I would check. I know exactly where the thin volume is in my house. I am on a train. In front of me I have five notebooks, a proof copy of August Thompson’s Anyone’s Ghost, a pen with a hair bobble wound around it, sunglasses, a bottle of water and a small dog, but not Leve.
I often think of this idea of a book being a narrow closed room or a spacious house with many rooms. The Last Days was not so much a room as a tunnel without light. Not a railway tunnel but rather something dug by an animal; a claw made thing, dug from the ground, the dirt under my nails. Making it was a suffocation of sorts. I have not yet known what it is to write a book that is a spacious house, although I have the sense that what I am making now feels slightly like this. It has over the last few years been something to escape into. A way to obliterate myself, but in the most hopeful sense. I do not believe in being entirely present all the time. How tiresome it would be to make work only from yourself. I like the sense of disappearing work demands, of being entirely out the way and off the page for characters to come fully into being.
I think of Leve today because I have just finished reading My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld. I suspect this was a closed room to write although it does not read like one. It is beautiful to read in way his debut, The Discomfort of Evening wasn’t. I came to his work when Ava Anna Ada was comped with The Discomfort of Evening along with Slimani’s Lullaby and Melchor’s Hurricane Season. I loved this book so much I was fearful to read My Heavenly Favourite, I didn’t think anything could stand up to it, especially the ending. I was wrong. I finished My Heavenly Creature this morning, and it is too soon to write about it in a reasoned way other than to say that it likely will win Rijneveld a second International Man Booker nomination, if not win. I really think he’s a writer whose boldness sets him apart, if he keeps this up he’ll be in the running for the Nobel in 30, 40 years time. I can’t think of any of his peers who’re operating at that level. It’s rare and it’s valuable. This boldness perhaps the most valuable thing in a cookie cutter climate, a difficult thing but necessary thing too, to be bold enough to write rooms that are closed, to dig with your bare hands and barely come up to breathe at the end of the day, to continue with the scars of what you’ve made, to emerge from the rubble of two years spent making over attending to life, what a snake I’ve often come to think of art and the making of it as; how seductive a serpent, how far I will go to pursue the fruit it promises into closed and narrow rooms with doors sealed; thought this too when watching All of Us Strangers, the madness of memory, the danger of incanting the past, it does not ever end in sanity, better then tom just submit.
I came to Leve’s Autoportrait when I came to Jesse Ball’s book of the same name, an endeavour along similar lines, hypnotic both of them, although I preferred Leve’s more although maybe it was only the bias towards the original and not remake that made me think I liked it most, preferring flesh over spirit, reality over ghost. A strange thing to say when about to spend another week with the dead, bringing them back, and hoping not to wrong them, as Janet Malcolm reminded in a quote I can’t remember accurately, they cannot talk back.