I bought Will Self’s book on the basis of the epigraph that appears after the title page: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella” — James Joyce.
I’m glad I did. I wish I hadn’t.
It’s a difficult book, almost without paragraph breaks, slipping centuries with little warning, and wild with words I’ve never run across in sentences as complex as consciousness itself.
The novel ends as Busner, a psychiatrist who for a short time rehabilitated a set of patients who had suffered from encephalitis lethargica for decades, reflects on his personal limitations. It all comes back to his brother:
“Colonel Blink sees clearly the vestibule fashioned from a mere fifteen feet of the old hospital corridor: those aren’t Barbour jackets hanging from the pegs but . . . bodies . . . the corpse of his schizophrenic brother, Henry, who committed suicide at fifty-two, after thirty years as an inmate of psychiatric hospitals . . . I visited him — but never enough.”
Audrey, the patient for whom he had the most hope, having fallen back into her troubled state, now appears as an umbrella: “her neck, gripped in the kyphotic vice of her extreme old age, curves up and over into a hook, so that levelled at him is its very blunt and accusatory end.”
The novel will trouble me till my last days. It gets at my deepest fears — that I will forget the brother whom I largely abandoned when he was alive and that my grown children suffer while I go on with my selfish life.
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About Scott Abbott
I received my Ph.D. in German Literature from Princeton University in 1979. Then I taught at Vanderbilt University, BYU, and Utah Valley State College. At Utah Valley University, I directed the Program in Integrated Studies for its initial 13 years and was also Chair of the Department of Humanities and Philosophy for three years. My publications include a book on Freemasonry and the German Novel, two co-authored books with Zarko Radakovic (REPETITIONS and VAMPIRES & A REASONABLE DICTIONARY, published in Serbo-Croatian in Belgrade and in English with Punctum Books), a book with Sam Rushforth (WILD RIDES AND WILDFLOWERS, Torrey House Press), a "fraternal meditation" called IMMORTAL FOR QUITE SOME TIME (University of Utah Press), and translations of three books by Austrian author Peter Handke, of an exhibition catalogue called "The German Army and Genocide," and, with Dan Fairbanks, of Gregor Mendel's important paper on hybridity in peas. More famously, my children are in the process of creating good lives for themselves: as a model and dance/yoga studio manager, as a teacher of Chinese language, as an ecologist and science writer, as a jazz musician, as a parole officer, as a contractor, as a seasonal worker (Alaska and Park City, Utah), and as parents. I share my life with UVU historian Lyn Bennett, with whom I have written a cultural history of barbed wire -- THE PERFECT FENCE (Texas A&M University Press). Some publications at http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/
I bought Will Self’s book on the basis of the epigraph that appears after the title page: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella” — James Joyce.
THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY 
I read several fascinatng reviews of Self’s book, and if I had the time, but I dont at present. Self on first encounter a decade ago I thought stank, then I ran across his description of wandering the coast of England and was amazed….” kyphotic” instead of hunchbacked…. definitely out of Joyce’s bag he seems and to delight in language. No need for the fine Abbott to be put in a state of self-mortifiation! http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
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michael,
you are right about the language, it’s joycean and precise and celebratory and profound and witty all at once.
self-mortification is absolutely required for all abbotts, that comes with the office.
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