Read and Appreciated in 2003
A Year’s Best List
Chromos, Felipe Alfau
This is the ‘lost’ novel of one of the most innovative (and underrated) authors of the last century. Alfau anticipated by several decades most of the techniques used by metafictional writers such as Pynchon. The manuscript of Chromos lingered in a drawer for more than forty years before being discovered and published by Dalkey Archive in 1990. Alfau takes as his theme the magical troubles of Spanish immigrants in New York, including the remarkable and unlikely rivals, Don Pedro Guzman O’Moore Algoracid and Dr José de los Rios, both patrons of the arts, absurdity and Café Telescopio, and horribly real among characters who are still in the process of being written. One of these latter, the unfortunate Ramos, has acquired the power of leapfrogging the painful segments of his life, a trick to which he becomes addicted as he grows oversensitive to minor sufferings, until he uses up his entire existence. This is one brilliant conceit among many.
When Dreams Travel, Githa Hariharan
Sumptuous prose and narratives with a peculiar and original slant are the result of Hariharan’s elaborate framing device, based on that used by Scheherazade in the 1001 Nights. Delicately strange, erotic and exotic, Githa Hariharan’s writing is also surprisingly refreshing and crisp. Together with Sunetra Gupta, Vikram Seth and Kamila Shamsie she is living proof that we are in a golden age of modern Indian literature, but there is something even more unusual and special about her style, for it somehow manages to be direct and pithy even at its most lyrical and ornamental, a trick which so few authors seem capable of. “The curtain rises. Darkness, that furry old familiar of night, spreads itself on stage. It means to stay, this sinuous, long-tailed night, moulting its woolly skin again and again, a thousand times if necessary. Or a thousand and one times—a safer measure of uneven infinity.”
The Poor Mouth, Flann O’Brien
A satire on the traditions of the Gaelic novel, with some of O’Brien’s most absurd scenes and funniest dialogue. A novel about poverty, rain and potatoes, not to mention sea monsters, immortals, eternal streams of whisky and catastrophic floods. The narrator grows up in a house in the west of Ireland and spends the remainder of his life accepting his fate as a Gael, which means endless troubles, thievery and the risk of being suffocated by gigantic pigs. He meets various characters who continue in their normal business of attending lethal cultural festivals and abandoning humanity to live with seals. This book is no less funny than O’Brien’s other masterpiece, The Third Policeman, but it deals with another type of Ireland, a further step removed from the already dislocated Republic which talks and thinks in English, a land which seems to be halfway down a pit of fatalistic misery and genetic incomprehension on a descent to hell.
Music
I discovered an incredible amount of music in 2003.
Some of the new acts I discovered include Kampec Dolores from Hungary; the Malagasy outfit Tarika; Tam-Tam des Cools from La Réunion; the wonderfully mysterious Belle Lumiere from Comoros; Sezen Aksu and Ebru Gundes from Turkey; the African funksters, Ephraim Uzomechina Nzeka and Sidiku Buari; the Latin dance maestros Un Solo Pueblo, Quinto Criollo and Tambor Urbano from Venezuela; Adriana Calcanhotto, Zuco 103 and a host of other glorious ‘Nu Brazil’ ambassadors; and various ‘Asian Underground’ acts such as Sister India, Ravi Harris and the phenomenally funky Ananda Shankar.
Bizarrely it was also the first year that I heard tracks by such esteemed acts as Transglobal Underground, Saint Etienne and Moloko. How I managed to miss them before I really can’t imagine!
