James Meek / Features / Untitled Books

What I'm reading: The Gambler, and Eunoia

James Meek

Author of The People's Act of Love and We are Now Beginning Our Descent.

The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Pure, distilled Dostoevsky, he grabs you by the lapels and won't let go until he's told you his story, and even though sometimes the story seems to ramble and not quite make sense, you don't want to even try to break free, so compelling and intense is the gaze of the storyteller on you, and on his characters. A desperate group of half-ruined Russian, French and English chancers loiter in a German gambling resort, longing for an ailing relative in Moscow to die so they can get their hands on her money. One day, the old lady on whose death they have pinned their hopes unexpectedly turns up at the casino, and, to their horror, begins to stake the fortune they think belongs to them on the roulette wheel...on the larger canvas of Dostoevsky's world, many of his greatest characters are gamblers, eternally ready to stake all they have - their money and their lives - on a moment of fate. To win, for sure; to win love or fortune. But not just to win - for the love of the game.

Eunoia by Christian Bök

I still can't make up my mind about this extraordinary work of poetry, but I do keep going back to it, so it does exert a fascination. Is Bök's project to write coherent poems employing, successively, words using only one vowel, a daring experiment, and proof that modernism is not dead? Or is it an ear-catching post-modernist gimmick, a game more clever than significant? The nit-picking purist in me wants to point out that even in the first three words of chapter 'O', for instance ('Loops on bold'), there is, for sure, only one spelled vowel, but there are three different vowel sounds. The word-lover in me luxuriates in the richness of the language, and the ingenuity with which Bök makes sense within his constraints. And my amateur inner etymologist is intrigued by the evidence inadvertently provided for the onomatopoeic origins of language.

Friday, 6 June, 2008