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Alternative selves claw at awkwardly maintained sanity in the horrific psychological fantasies of Polish writer Stefan Grabinski, who died in 1936 and makes his first manifestation in English in The Dark Domain (Dedalus pounds 6.99, translated by Miroslaw Lipinski). An optimistic aesthete finds himself befriended by a cackling cynic in a sealed room who turns out to be another version of himself. A time-theorist who discounts time as a human invention is tormented by his alter ego an old watchmaker. The lover of an idealised ethereal mistress turns out to be pursuing a masturbatory fantasy with a ghost of his own invention. The libido pops up like a manic Jack-in-a-Box ('He took her like a flame . . . like a gale . . .'), but writing in the first decades of the century, Grabinski's commitment to a marriage of the newly announced unconscious with the supernatural gives his extravagances some conviction. These short stories offer the pleasure of myths we can crack and skilfully chilling denouements.
Cees Nooteboom's narrator Hermann Mussert in The Following Story (Harvill pounds 6.99) offers a more convincing libido for 1994; after sex he feels he's swum the Channel and gropes to retrieve his glasses. Mussert's tone of irritable scorn and dry humour leaves him unable to solve his immediate problem: he went to bed in Amsterdam but has awoken in Lisbon. As a dried-out classics teacher with a taste for Ovid, and a travel writer who does his research in libraries, he fiddles through his memories trying to find out why his body has returned to the room of his one achieved affair of physical love. Stargazing, he sees the 'blackboard of the sky inscribed in Latin', a cultural creation of meaning which has no physical reality. This witty and stylishly sad story seems to offer poetry as the only hope for a lonely species. The novel won the Aristeion European Literary Prize for 1993 and repays a second reading.
DOMESTIC trivia include the headlines stashed in a corner waiting for the paper bank. We live with heads full of news, opening our divorce papers and Christmas presents in a muddle of thoughts about Ireland, nuclear proliferation and, perhaps, overpopulation.
Amin Maalouf's achievement in The First Century After Beatrice (Quartet pounds 14.95) is to create the picture of a domestic relationship cemented by a couple's shared public concerns. The century in question begins in the year 2,000, round about the birth of the narrator's beloved daughter Beatrice, whom he dotingly protects and cherishes whilst his journalist partner Clarence pursues first her own career ambitions and then their joint cause: awakening the world to the dangers of drugs which enable the selective conception of male children.
At first this appeals in the stably populated northern hemisphere as a way of reducing the population in the hungry, poor south. But indigenous peoples there come to fear extermination; rampant excess males tip the world further towards chaos; and in the north a few positive choices from the 16 per cent who want boys make women increasingly coveted and endangered. Thirty years into the century the imbalance has become the dominant global fear as the increasingly unstable and resentful south becomes a no-go area for northerners.
The narrator's devotion to the care of his daughter whilst his warrior partner takes on the world is a neat counterbalance to his bleak portrayal of the cult of the male turning into collective suicide. A world authority on insects and most at home in his laboratory until his middle-aged acquisition of a family, his dry academic voice, objective and clear, is impeccably captured in the translation by Dorothy S. Blair and proves a perfect vehicle for expressing the care of an intelligent, self-controlled man.
As a main character he competes with the population of the world as a whole, 'a minute layer of flesh and conscience on the face of the earth'. The scope of this sharp, ingenious and well-crafted story of politics, opinion-forming and morality is impressive, mixing the evils of tradition with the opportunities for catastrophe offered by genetic research. In our carelessly tended Eden the new forbidden fruits are hard to recognise.
Geoff Dyer trails a Cheltenham birth behind him but has lived in France, like the Lebanese Malouf, and his second novel The Search (Hamish Hamilton pounds 14.99) has a cerebral European feel.
Walker is a 'tracker' looking for Rachel's missing husband Malory. The quest begins in what might plausibly be California, but Walker's journey gradually takes on a surreal edge. He drives through a biblical rainstorm and shelters in a hostile diner. The spinning of an overhead crane makes him feel his own world is turning. In a horror city of oil and excrement he gets caught in a subway crush of gridlocked pedestrians. One town is totally
deserted. In another everyone is frozen in mid-action, tableaux full of potential catastrophe and horror, like the suicide's leap arrested 18 feet above his impact with the pavement.
The novel is full of visual stills which suggest paintings: the loneliness of figures in Edward Hopper; the lighting of El Greco. But Dyer's narrative points more explicitly to photography. Walker never bothers carrying a camera, but part way through his search plunges into a Photo-Me booth minutes before catching a train. Though failing to retrieve the prints, he searches other photos for their elusive meanings in a quest which depends upon synchronicity rather than evidence.
Despite echoes of Chandler and road movie, Arthurian quest and Pilgrim's Progress, Dyer's arresting if obscure parable works well as a thriller in its own right, though the inconclusive ending can leave one feeling cheated, like searching for oneself and finding a photograph of an old coat.
Alternative selves claw at awkwardly maintained sanity in the horrific psychological fantasies of Polish writer Stefan Grabinski, who died in 1936 and makes his first manifestation in English in The Dark Domain (Dedalus pounds 6.99, translated by Miroslaw Lipinski). An optimistic aesthete finds himself befriended by a cackling cynic in a sealed room who turns out to be another version of himself. A time-theorist who discounts time as a human invention is tormented by his alter ego an old watchmaker. The lover of an idealised ethereal mistress turns out to be pursuing a masturbatory fantasy with a ghost of his own invention. The libido pops up like a manic Jack-in-a-Box ('He took her like a flame . . . like a gale . . .'), but writing in the first decades of the century, Grabinski's commitment to a marriage of the newly announced unconscious with the supernatural gives his extravagances some conviction. These short stories offer the pleasure of myths we can crack and skilfully chilling denouements.
Cees Nooteboom's narrator Hermann Mussert in The Following Story (Harvill pounds 6.99) offers a more convincing libido for 1994; after sex he feels he's swum the Channel and gropes to retrieve his glasses. Mussert's tone of irritable scorn and dry humour leaves him unable to solve his immediate problem: he went to bed in Amsterdam but has awoken in Lisbon. As a dried-out classics teacher with a taste for Ovid, and a travel writer who does his research in libraries, he fiddles through his memories trying to find out why his body has returned to the room of his one achieved affair of physical love. Stargazing, he sees the 'blackboard of the sky inscribed in Latin', a cultural creation of meaning which has no physical reality. This witty and stylishly sad story seems to offer poetry as the only hope for a lonely species. The novel won the Aristeion European Literary Prize for 1993 and repays a second reading.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers, Limited Jan 9, 1994