Andrew McCann

In the dentist’s chair, mortality is both obviated and underlined by the banality and the intensely personal quality of an experience that has almost no role to play in a narrative, other than to allow the banal and the personal to blunder tastelessly into the foreground. We are held back from platitudes about physical decay. There is simply no point, other than irony, in approaching the dentist with the mythical sense of crossing that grips Woolf as she breaths in the gas. The dentist is the everyday manifestation of our otherness to ourselves or, better put, the rearticulation of that otherness as a facet of the everyday.

‘Imperium is an allusion-filled, meta-fictional, inter-textual experiment that calls it own literary heritage into question, as if a certain kind of aesthetic experience were also one of the casualties of German history.’ Andrew McCann on Imperium, the first of Swiss author Christian Kracht’s works to appear in English.

At the conclusion of Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe, Chris Andrews captures the tension between the public articulation of Bolaño’s now canonical status and the almost inexhaustible fascination he provokes. Admitting that his own book of criticism is participating in the ‘process of monumentalization’ that has been going on around Bolaño virtually since his death, Andrews also reminds us of the ‘incalculably diffusive’ effects of Bolaño’s work.

The wager behind Barish’s book is twofold. Firstly, the book assumes that understanding de Man’s early life will cast some light on his subsequent work as a scholar and theorist. Secondly, and more pressingly, there is the possibility that de Man himself might emerge as a genuine ‘character’; that enough smaller transgressions and indiscretions can be clustered around the fact of collaboration to flesh out a coherent portrait of an anti-hero who never escapes his psychological and moral flaws.

In his posthumously published masterpiece 2666, Roberto Bolaño is clear-sighted enough to know that a visionary writer amounts to little without a visionary publisher. What would Benno von Archimboldi, the ‘great black shark’ of world literature, have been without Jacob Bubis, the German publisher unconditionally committed to him?

Wark’s two books work sequentially, although they also loop around the same figures and concepts. They could be treated as histories of the Situationist milieu and its aftermaths, but to do so would miss entirely what makes them such compelling and, at times, hilarious reading.

We could describe it as a memoir, given that Kulka’s own boyhood experiences in Auschwitz are at its centre. But the term memoir barely seems adequate to the introspective, often poetic, sometimes hallucinatory moments that it captures.