So far nearly all the Goodreads reviews of my novel have emphasized how funny it is – which is gratifying, because it is a comedy, and humour is so hard to pull off. However, the best comedy usually takes as its theme issues of real importance, and it’s even more gratifying when readers understand the underlying argument as well. Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies was not merely ribbing the Beautiful Young Things of the 1920s, he was also showing how shallow and futile their lives were, and for me this tendency culminates in A Handful of Dust, which begins as a hilarious satire on the upper classes and the social climbers trying to enter that class, but ends up with real tragedy – the death of a small boy which is made all the more shocking because when his mother hears about his death, she is relieved, because her son shared the name of her lover, and her initial grief was for the latter.

Do you know what a ‘boyo’ is? The Urban Dictionary defines it as ‘An endearing term used to refer to (young) men searching for the meaning of life through the works of Jung, Freud, Nietzsche and other such psychologists/philosophers.’ I have only become aware of this meaning in the past couple of days. And yet, by happenstance, Huw, the Welsh hero of Our Parent Who Art in Heaven (Flame Books, 2022, already available for pre-order), often addresses himself in his thoughts as ‘boyo’, the traditional Welsh or Irish form of ‘lad’ or ‘dude’. In our age, when young men so often feel emasculated, neutered, and lost – when so few of them have had real present fathers who confirmed them in their manhood, and when so many of them have been told in the course of their education that they should behave more like girls, be nicer, less aggressive – vast numbers of young men are trying to confirm themselves, give themselves the rite of passage they never had, and become more self-assertive, self-affirming.

This is the weekend of the Oscars – an event most of us now avoid, because of its tedious and hypocritical virtue-signalling and moralising. (Not to mention the clips from all-too-predictable, formulaic films.) This has me wondering and worrying whether literary fiction will also become irrelevant. In a sense it already has. Few men read ‘serious’ fiction any more, although when I was young, half the readers were men. And I suspect that most of the women still reading the latest lauded offerings do so only so that they are not left out in conversation at dinner parties. I know women who have admitted to me that that is why they read.

Here’s another really incise comment from my friend, Luis Othoniel Rosa, whose words have been featured before on LLNB (Spanish-to-English translation by me, so if any of it is less than clear, it’s my fault):

“One of the great essays of Latin American criticism is titled, ‘Our America: The Art of Good Governance;’ it a marvelous close reading of (Cuban writer and patriot) José Martí by (cultural critic) Julio Ramos. Immediately upon contextualizing the brutal critique by Martí of the intellectuals of his time and of the global project to modernize, Ramos tells us that many decades ago, Martí constructed a new authority by means of the form and style of his writing: literature. Literature, according to this legitimizing strategy, was the discourse that could yet represent origin, the autochthonous, and all those margins that rationalizing languages, emblems of modernization, could not represent.

I recently discovered a superb scholarly review of my first book, by a self-described ‘intersectional feminist’. In the abstract to ‘Orientalism and the Failed White Saviour: A Study of Garry Craig Powell’s Stoning the Devil’,  (2020)Dr Rathwell writes that my collection of linked stories ‘delivers a critique of Western white expatriate saviourism by presenting a nuanced relationship between his British protagonist Colin, and his Palestinian wife, Fayruz. Through the use of meta-literature, anti-hero tropes and references to violence and sexuality, Powell critiques stereotypical tropes of Orientalism. (…) complicat(ing) them in a literary manner to provide biting criticism of white saviorism in the Middle East. The relationship between Colin and Fayruz therefore serves as a metaphor for relations between the West and the Orient, and in doing so, questions if there can be a post-Orientalist world.

The following is an imperfect translation of a commentary by Luis Othoniel Rosa, writer, poet, anarchist and scholar who, among other things, teaches Latin American literary studies at the University of Nebraska. Luis’s original text in Spanish follows my translation.

What Does It Mean Today to Be Disruptive in Literature?

It means to affirm and to stop making ourselves of interest. Being disruptive in literature today would be to put an end to the era of questions and paradoxes, of undecipherable allegories and of the “writing of the self,” where the children of the white middle class write novels and poems about the silly traumas of their insipid lives. Being disruptive would be imagining possible worlds and manufacturing bold, new mythologies without fear of getting it wrong because it is no longer the writing self that matters, but the collective mind that thinks by means of our writing.

Recently I’ve been following a YouTube channel called Weltgeist, which deals (exclusively, I believe) with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and to a lesser extent, Nietzsche. This has prompted me to re-read The World as Will and Representation, the great pessimist’s magnum opus. But Schopenhauer had opinions on nearly everything, as his entertaining (and occasionally outrageous) essays show, including reading and writing. And since he was one of the few philosophers who had a clear and elegant prose style himself, and since he was clearly one of the greatest intellects of recorded history, it may be worth considering what he had to say on the subjects.

First of all, he cautions us not to read much. This is pertinent, when so many people aim to read a book a week, or more – one of my friends felt guilty if he could not manage to read two or three books in a week.

My last post dealt with weirdness in fiction. This post is an extension of that topic, related to two works I’ve read recently. The first of these is Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, which I’ve only just gotten around to reading. (It’s nearly 800 pages long–that’s my excuse.) The second is a nonfiction memoir, Not the Kennedys, by a very talented newcomer, John O’Hern, who happens to be my cousin by marriage. These two books have absolutely nothing in common except that I happened to read them in the same month, and that both triggered more thoughts about how we humans confront an incomprehensible and incoherent world by writing about it.

The Goldfinch is, in my unhelpful opinion, less original and less spectacular than critics have made it out to be (maybe my next post will be about the weirdness of literary prizes).

Leo Tolstoy – the greatest novelist of all – and yet lots of readers, even serious ones, have never read him. Why? Partly it’s because his two most famous works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are on the long side. That’s true, but even so, if you read just an hour a day, and typically read a short novel in a week, it might take a month to read Anna Karenina, and six weeks or two months to read War and Peace. Not that long. And you’ll probably read them faster, because they’re so good you’ll find yourself reading more at weekends and on evenings when you have time. But let’s say you’re really busy, and intimidated by these monuments of Russian literature.