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A review by arirang
Break.up by Joanna Walsh
3.0
The desire to observe comes only where there is emptiness in place of emotion.
Kierkegaard, Repetition
Ex sounds like it should be a suffix, something in the past, but it’s a prefix, a beginning. As I am not a satisfactory ex, love is nothing from which I can begin to leave? Unable to exit as to stay, where can I go from here?
Joanna Walsh, in Deborah Levy's words "is fast becoming one of our most important writers”, a nod not just to the quality but also the quantity of her output in the last 5 years. This includes 3 books of short stories, Fractals (2012), Vertigo (2015) and Worlds from the Word's End (2017), a collection of short inter-linked fairiy tales about Sox Grow a Pair (2015), the non-fiction Hotel (a third book in 2015), and most innovatively the fully digital novella Seed (2017), which I must admit, as someone who only very reluctantly bought a smartphone for the first time last year, defeated me technologically.
Interviewed in the Irish Times (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/joanna-walsh-interview-i-spent-a-long-time-deliberately-not-writing-1.2701401) in 2016, she explained her approach:
Break.up as the title suggests is a novel about relationships in the digital age, although, unlike Seed, one told in a relatively conventional sense: relatively at least in the sense of it being a linear story in a printed book, although this is still a hybrid thing, part travelogue and part highly erudite essay, and with no particular narrative drive as such.
Our narrator has recently experienced the end of a relationship, of just less than one year, one that was largely virtual, although Walsh has their first meeting being physical not online (so not a case of not-love at first-real world-sight). Her partner, at least in the narrator's retrospective rendition of him, seems to have kept their relationship within strict bounds:
Having everything to lose, why did I, do I, play your game?
Because if I let you have power over me, we have a relationship.
Their last physical meeting, in a hotel room, an example: she undressed at his request but he merely observed her, not even wanting to hold hands:
We never slept together.
We were together in Real Life for hardly more days than a working week and never the same place twice. I spent time in between places: on trains, on buses, in hotel rooms, on international flights. We met in city centres, nowhere else to go. We always met alone. We never met each other’s friends. Where did it all happen? In airports, in anonymous coffee shops - not really ‘in’ anywhere. Outside then: on park benches, on street corners. Most of all online, which can be something you’re ‘in’ like a net or a web, or something you’re ‘out in’, virtually limitless, a (Cyber) space. We met whenever there was WiFi, which is almost everywhere nowadays so that, when you left, there was never a space from which you could be erased, tidied over. There was never a place you weren’t, a place from which you could properly be missed.
...
I am still inside. I am in love. I love you, still. But I’m out of place everywhere. No places feel like places any more. They all feel like somewhere I have to get out of.
I don’t like places.
I don’t like being in the world.
I want a world of other people’s places, places I haven’t had a hand in.
I am leaving the place I know to find some new places.
It’s not entirely true that I won’t know these new places: does anyone know nothing of anything, now that nowhere is more than a click away?
She embarks on a month long trip across Europe from London to Athens and back again, taking in among other places Paris, Nice, Amsterdam, Sofia and Budapest, the novel a form of diary of her travels and the different cities providing a narrative drive of sorts. Some cities are new to her but others bring back memories, of her time with her ex (if that's the right word - You’re not even my ex, you told me once.) and her honeymoon from her previous, failed, marriage
Professor of the Social Studies of Science, MIT and author of Evocative Objects and of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.
The narrator also documents her travels with photographs, including in the text in Sebaldian fashion, or perhaps more like those in Sara Baume's brilliant [b:A Line Made by Walking|30971749|A Line Made by Walking|Sara Baume|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1488552364s/30971749.jpg|51589488] (and indeed both books feature the performance art of Marina Abramovic.)
Walsh's are not the usual tourist photos as the narrator sets herself the rules:
Avoid: museums, galleries, churches, tourist spots
Avoid photographing anything too ‘typical’ of the country
Avoid anything ‘beautiful’
(Try not to operate these rules too consciously)
Her first rule compliant attempt: I take some shots: wires crossing above the crossed train-tracks. As she observes: My photographs look like tourist photos gone wrong: ratés they say in French, which means missed, as in ‘I’ve missed a good shot,’ but it also means ruined.
As she travels, our narrator reflects on their relationship and also what it means to break.up in the age of social media. When wondering whether to contact her ex companion:
I didn't call you: instead I posted a new avatar of myself without my habitual dark glasses. I have learned: an image, any image, is a blind. A photo, a map, a drawing, all avatars give different information, illusions of contact called telepresence, none of them the Real Thing.
....
And your telepresence is fragmenting: when I type its first few letters into the menubar, my computer no longer turns up your name like an unlucky card (the King of Hearts again? There’s no such thing as chance). An intelligent machine, it has begun to forget you before I can. Your telepresence telescopes itself: a house of cards, every card the King of Hearts, a box of air, they collapse: it seems like nothing.
There seems a deliberate nod here as Walsh herself as her own author publicity photo, featured in the cover pages of the book, has her wearing dark glasses:
and she has acknowledged her debt to auto-fiction which she traces back to Marguerite Duras and Natalie Sarraute. Notably, while the novel is clearly fictional, the narrator is notably called Joanna ... or perhaps not, as the name is mentioned only in an email sent from her ex, suggesting she divert her trip to meet him in Prague, and in the novel is preceded the recollection that all the time we wrote to each other you supplemented mine with the names of people from books. You called me Macabea (insignificant, ignorant, dirty) from Clarice Lispector’s [b:The Hour of the Star|762390|The Hour of the Star|Clarice Lispector|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1325790532s/762390.jpg|3496197], you called me Gudrun (bluestocking) from [b:Women in Love|9784|Women in Love (Brangwen Family, #2)|D.H. Lawrence|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386919531s/9784.jpg|3302695], you called me (epicene) Shakespeare’s Viola.
For a novel about the break up of a relationship (our narrator also reflects on her failed first marriage) it is a curiously unemotional experience to read. I''m not sure I ever believed in the relationship: the set-up (or should that be set.up) feels more a vehicle for Walsh's thoughts and literary references, rather deliberately so one suspects given Walsh's view on writing conventional narrative and character driven novels. As the narrator confesses directly to the reader towards the end:
How could I have ever tried to build a story about love, which is all fragments? ... All these words and I still don’t know how to make art out of love.
And while the backgrounds of the different cities provide a useful (perhaps overly constrained) structure to the narration, this isn't a book to read for in-depths insights into each. Although, again, in a way that is Walsh's point - her narrator isn't the typical mansplaining travel writer, in contrast to her partner, who when he introduced her to his home town:
You gave me the facts, or things that sounded like facts - information, at any rate. I was surprised you thought they mattered. These were things I did not need to know.
Her short stories were notable for their word play. Someone she meets in Bad Benthof says:
‘I don’t like to talk on the internet. I always have to explain myself twice. I am not good with words.’
‘But you speak four languages.’ He has already told me: French, Dutch, Spanish and English. He understands a little German too, yes, he says. But not to write, no.
‘I’m the opposite,’ I say. ‘Also, sometimes a good writer will write something that means two different things, even at once, and in the same language.’
‘Ah,’ he says, ‘now that is very confusing.’
But in the (much) longer form, this is unfortunately rather diluted, albeit still present - for example in the following, rather Ali-Smith-like, musings:
Time flies like an arrow.
But then:
Fruit flies like bananas
Bananas are curvy so maybe time flies less like an arrow, more like a boomerang, or maybe time flies are the flies that zigzag below the square old-fashioned modern lamp in my apartment, turning back on themselves as they bounce off invisible borders.
...
There are no adjectives to describe time’s passage. It can last slower or faster, like a volume dial can turn louder or quieter, but no more than that: it has no texture, no timbre. Sound can be loud and cheerful, or loud and sad, or loud and aggressive, but time can’t be aggressive, or cheerful, or sad, not really, only the things that happen in time, which means these events must be made of a different material from time, though they are woven with it. It’s the quality of these events that turns time’s dial, speeds it up or makes it heavy.
which, inspired by a discussion of Budapest's bridges, is then followed by an extended riff on nodes, logos, the Königsberg Bridge problem and the travelling salesman problem. At such points the book is reminiscent of Olga Tokarczuk's MBI winning [b:Flights|35535012|Flights|Olga Tokarczuk|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1498711365s/35535012.jpg|2014747], although Flights is superior - the most direct point of comparison is a discussion in each about the physical nature of airports. But the book that most came to mind when reading this was the Goldsmiths and Man Booker shortlisted [b:C|7465814|C|Tom McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320486889s/7465814.jpg|9540419].
Overall - certainly a very worthwhile read, and one I suspect that may be in contention for the Goldsmiths Prize. But I preferred Walsh in the short story form - this experiment rather justifies her disavowal of novels, indeed for a non-novelist the book feels a little over constrained by the form (again contrast Flights, from a novelist, that feels much less constrained)
3.5 stars - rounded down to 3 for now.
Two excellent reviews - the first highlighting the strengths of the book, the second expressing some justified revelations
http://thequietus.com/articles/24388-joanna-walsh-break-up-review
http://www.drb.ie/essays/not-so-simple
Walsh speaking about the book outside the finest book shop I know:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yMtuY0hin3o
Kierkegaard, Repetition
Ex sounds like it should be a suffix, something in the past, but it’s a prefix, a beginning. As I am not a satisfactory ex, love is nothing from which I can begin to leave? Unable to exit as to stay, where can I go from here?
Joanna Walsh, in Deborah Levy's words "is fast becoming one of our most important writers”, a nod not just to the quality but also the quantity of her output in the last 5 years. This includes 3 books of short stories, Fractals (2012), Vertigo (2015) and Worlds from the Word's End (2017), a collection of short inter-linked fairiy tales about Sox Grow a Pair (2015), the non-fiction Hotel (a third book in 2015), and most innovatively the fully digital novella Seed (2017), which I must admit, as someone who only very reluctantly bought a smartphone for the first time last year, defeated me technologically.
Interviewed in the Irish Times (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/joanna-walsh-interview-i-spent-a-long-time-deliberately-not-writing-1.2701401) in 2016, she explained her approach:
Q: In the last eight months we’ve seen three books from you – that’s a lot by anyone’s standards, never mind a debut author. How did that come about?I have read and very much enjoyed Walsh's short stories from Vertigo and Worlds from the Word's End, but now from someone who is fundamentally not a "novelist", we have this, her debut novel: and at 272 discursive pages decidedly not a quick cinematic experience.
A: I did spend a few years working on the books, but you’re right: I write quickly. I’ve only been writing with any idea of publication since 2012, but I spent a long time before that in a state of deliberately not writing, of not wanting to put words to things, so that when I started, I had a lot of things to say. I not only didn’t want a “career” in writing; I actively told myself it was inappropriate.
I’m not very interested in the model of fat books, or books that an author spends a long time writing – not that I disapprove of it as something other people don’t do brilliantly, but it’s not for me.
In some other countries, it’s normal the think of a writer producing a book almost every year. In France they say, “C’est comment, le dernier Nothomb?” or whatever (“how’s the latest?”), and I love the way César Aira works too (around 80 short books in 40 years). Why shouldn’t reading a book be like going to the cinema: something that only takes a few hours, and that some people do every week. A paperback often costs less than a cinema ticket.
I think, perhaps, I’m fundamentally not a “novelist”, which is difficult, as that is so often synonymous with the word “writer”. I have urgent things to say, and I’m not sure it wouldn’t be a detour for me to do this via conventional ideas of narrative or character – but I also can’t stand the measured tone of many essays: I don’t come from a place where too many things are set in stone. I write hybrid things: my short stories are always ideas stories, often explicitly so – they can occasionally sound like literary criticism or a Wikipedia entry – and I love to write creative nonfiction or whatever you want to call it, but my work in this area resembles story as much as essay.
Break.up as the title suggests is a novel about relationships in the digital age, although, unlike Seed, one told in a relatively conventional sense: relatively at least in the sense of it being a linear story in a printed book, although this is still a hybrid thing, part travelogue and part highly erudite essay, and with no particular narrative drive as such.
Our narrator has recently experienced the end of a relationship, of just less than one year, one that was largely virtual, although Walsh has their first meeting being physical not online (so not a case of not-love at first-real world-sight). Her partner, at least in the narrator's retrospective rendition of him, seems to have kept their relationship within strict bounds:
Having everything to lose, why did I, do I, play your game?
Because if I let you have power over me, we have a relationship.
Their last physical meeting, in a hotel room, an example: she undressed at his request but he merely observed her, not even wanting to hold hands:
We never slept together.
We were together in Real Life for hardly more days than a working week and never the same place twice. I spent time in between places: on trains, on buses, in hotel rooms, on international flights. We met in city centres, nowhere else to go. We always met alone. We never met each other’s friends. Where did it all happen? In airports, in anonymous coffee shops - not really ‘in’ anywhere. Outside then: on park benches, on street corners. Most of all online, which can be something you’re ‘in’ like a net or a web, or something you’re ‘out in’, virtually limitless, a (Cyber) space. We met whenever there was WiFi, which is almost everywhere nowadays so that, when you left, there was never a space from which you could be erased, tidied over. There was never a place you weren’t, a place from which you could properly be missed.
...
I am still inside. I am in love. I love you, still. But I’m out of place everywhere. No places feel like places any more. They all feel like somewhere I have to get out of.
I don’t like places.
I don’t like being in the world.
I want a world of other people’s places, places I haven’t had a hand in.
I am leaving the place I know to find some new places.
It’s not entirely true that I won’t know these new places: does anyone know nothing of anything, now that nowhere is more than a click away?
She embarks on a month long trip across Europe from London to Athens and back again, taking in among other places Paris, Nice, Amsterdam, Sofia and Budapest, the novel a form of diary of her travels and the different cities providing a narrative drive of sorts. Some cities are new to her but others bring back memories, of her time with her ex (if that's the right word - You’re not even my ex, you told me once.) and her honeymoon from her previous, failed, marriage
Go to Berlin, since you were there once before, and you could in this way learn whether repetition was possible and what it meant. I had come to a standstill in my attempts to resolve this problem at home.The relevance of Kierkegaard? For the trip she takes with her five books:
Kierkegaard, Repetition.
Alain Badou In Praise of LoveQuotes from these and other authors, with whom the author has said (see interview at end of my review) she wants to have a dialogue as they have covered similar ground, are included liberally within the book, intruding as sidebars, a technique that, I think deliberately, interrupts the flow of the text. As one example:
Soren Kierkegaard Repetition
Barthes Lover’s Discourse
and Andre Breton Mad Love and Nadja.
Reciprocal love, such as I envisage it, is a system of mirrors which reflects for me, under the thousand angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful image of the one I love, always more surprising in her divining of my own desire and gilded with life.More modern authors quoted include [a:Chris Kraus|142778|Chris Kraus|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1359241611p2/142778.jpg], a particular reference point and [a:Sherry Turkle|153503|Sherry Turkle|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1351354712p2/153503.jpg],
Breton, Mad Love (tr. Mary Anne Caws)
Professor of the Social Studies of Science, MIT and author of Evocative Objects and of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.
The narrator also documents her travels with photographs, including in the text in Sebaldian fashion, or perhaps more like those in Sara Baume's brilliant [b:A Line Made by Walking|30971749|A Line Made by Walking|Sara Baume|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1488552364s/30971749.jpg|51589488] (and indeed both books feature the performance art of Marina Abramovic.)
Walsh's are not the usual tourist photos as the narrator sets herself the rules:
Avoid: museums, galleries, churches, tourist spots
Avoid photographing anything too ‘typical’ of the country
Avoid anything ‘beautiful’
(Try not to operate these rules too consciously)
Her first rule compliant attempt: I take some shots: wires crossing above the crossed train-tracks. As she observes: My photographs look like tourist photos gone wrong: ratés they say in French, which means missed, as in ‘I’ve missed a good shot,’ but it also means ruined.
As she travels, our narrator reflects on their relationship and also what it means to break.up in the age of social media. When wondering whether to contact her ex companion:
I didn't call you: instead I posted a new avatar of myself without my habitual dark glasses. I have learned: an image, any image, is a blind. A photo, a map, a drawing, all avatars give different information, illusions of contact called telepresence, none of them the Real Thing.
....
And your telepresence is fragmenting: when I type its first few letters into the menubar, my computer no longer turns up your name like an unlucky card (the King of Hearts again? There’s no such thing as chance). An intelligent machine, it has begun to forget you before I can. Your telepresence telescopes itself: a house of cards, every card the King of Hearts, a box of air, they collapse: it seems like nothing.
Unless it is not here that the great possibility of Nadja's intervention resides, quite beyond any question of luck. Breton, Nadja
There seems a deliberate nod here as Walsh herself as her own author publicity photo, featured in the cover pages of the book, has her wearing dark glasses:
and she has acknowledged her debt to auto-fiction which she traces back to Marguerite Duras and Natalie Sarraute. Notably, while the novel is clearly fictional, the narrator is notably called Joanna ... or perhaps not, as the name is mentioned only in an email sent from her ex, suggesting she divert her trip to meet him in Prague, and in the novel is preceded the recollection that all the time we wrote to each other you supplemented mine with the names of people from books. You called me Macabea (insignificant, ignorant, dirty) from Clarice Lispector’s [b:The Hour of the Star|762390|The Hour of the Star|Clarice Lispector|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1325790532s/762390.jpg|3496197], you called me Gudrun (bluestocking) from [b:Women in Love|9784|Women in Love (Brangwen Family, #2)|D.H. Lawrence|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386919531s/9784.jpg|3302695], you called me (epicene) Shakespeare’s Viola.
For a novel about the break up of a relationship (our narrator also reflects on her failed first marriage) it is a curiously unemotional experience to read. I''m not sure I ever believed in the relationship: the set-up (or should that be set.up) feels more a vehicle for Walsh's thoughts and literary references, rather deliberately so one suspects given Walsh's view on writing conventional narrative and character driven novels. As the narrator confesses directly to the reader towards the end:
How could I have ever tried to build a story about love, which is all fragments? ... All these words and I still don’t know how to make art out of love.
And while the backgrounds of the different cities provide a useful (perhaps overly constrained) structure to the narration, this isn't a book to read for in-depths insights into each. Although, again, in a way that is Walsh's point - her narrator isn't the typical mansplaining travel writer, in contrast to her partner, who when he introduced her to his home town:
You gave me the facts, or things that sounded like facts - information, at any rate. I was surprised you thought they mattered. These were things I did not need to know.
Her short stories were notable for their word play. Someone she meets in Bad Benthof says:
‘I don’t like to talk on the internet. I always have to explain myself twice. I am not good with words.’
‘But you speak four languages.’ He has already told me: French, Dutch, Spanish and English. He understands a little German too, yes, he says. But not to write, no.
‘I’m the opposite,’ I say. ‘Also, sometimes a good writer will write something that means two different things, even at once, and in the same language.’
‘Ah,’ he says, ‘now that is very confusing.’
But in the (much) longer form, this is unfortunately rather diluted, albeit still present - for example in the following, rather Ali-Smith-like, musings:
Time flies like an arrow.
But then:
Fruit flies like bananas
Bananas are curvy so maybe time flies less like an arrow, more like a boomerang, or maybe time flies are the flies that zigzag below the square old-fashioned modern lamp in my apartment, turning back on themselves as they bounce off invisible borders.
...
There are no adjectives to describe time’s passage. It can last slower or faster, like a volume dial can turn louder or quieter, but no more than that: it has no texture, no timbre. Sound can be loud and cheerful, or loud and sad, or loud and aggressive, but time can’t be aggressive, or cheerful, or sad, not really, only the things that happen in time, which means these events must be made of a different material from time, though they are woven with it. It’s the quality of these events that turns time’s dial, speeds it up or makes it heavy.
which, inspired by a discussion of Budapest's bridges, is then followed by an extended riff on nodes, logos, the Königsberg Bridge problem and the travelling salesman problem. At such points the book is reminiscent of Olga Tokarczuk's MBI winning [b:Flights|35535012|Flights|Olga Tokarczuk|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1498711365s/35535012.jpg|2014747], although Flights is superior - the most direct point of comparison is a discussion in each about the physical nature of airports. But the book that most came to mind when reading this was the Goldsmiths and Man Booker shortlisted [b:C|7465814|C|Tom McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320486889s/7465814.jpg|9540419].
Overall - certainly a very worthwhile read, and one I suspect that may be in contention for the Goldsmiths Prize. But I preferred Walsh in the short story form - this experiment rather justifies her disavowal of novels, indeed for a non-novelist the book feels a little over constrained by the form (again contrast Flights, from a novelist, that feels much less constrained)
3.5 stars - rounded down to 3 for now.
Two excellent reviews - the first highlighting the strengths of the book, the second expressing some justified revelations
http://thequietus.com/articles/24388-joanna-walsh-break-up-review
http://www.drb.ie/essays/not-so-simple
Walsh speaking about the book outside the finest book shop I know:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yMtuY0hin3o