Here’s the second forward from Olaf…——————————————————-
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 13:12:28 +0100
From: “Olaf Schneider” <ola_____@_____.de>
Subject: grotto review
To: “The Kraken” <the_____@_____.com>
Hello folks,
I tried out a new serach machine (www.google.com)
and fout this Grotto review
http://www.independent.co.uk/enjoyment/Books/Interviews/hobanrussellint30109
9.shtml . Enjoy,
Olaf
A screen star named desire
Once famous as a kids’ author, Russell Hoban now tackles the very adult
theme of Internet sex
By Guy Mannes-Abbott
30 October 1999
In many ways, Russell Hoban ought to be a national treasure. Eventually, a
blue plaque will surely adorn his house in Fulham. This is still rather odd
for a 74-year-old American writer whose latest novel is an unflinching
exploration of male sexual appetites set loose on the Internet and
confronted with their real-life consequences. The narrator of Angelica’s
Grotto (Bloomsbury, �10), Harold Klein, has an uncannily similar biography
to his author and says at one point “I’m the answer to the question, ‘Who
will play the Old Fool in a geriatric-sex farce?’”
But then Russell Hoban is self-consciously strange, as I knew without having
met him. His books reveal a recklessly exploratory writer who, aged 50 and
with a reputation in bud, took the suicidal gamble of writing an entire
novel in a made-up dialect. That novel, Riddley Walker, about a futuristic
post-nuclear Kent returned to the Iron Age, proved to be such a
reputation-making success that it still overshadows Hoban’s diverse
achievements.
Hoban is also unusual for having revealed an extraordinary amount about
himself and his home of almost 30 years in Fulham, which he has gutted as
well as stuffed in the service of his art. In Angelica’s Grotto, he takes
London’s porn underworld home and ends up killing someone in his study. I
can’t say I approached Fulham too nervously, though – and not only because
of Klein’s life-threatening ailments and cranky fixation with the signature
details of Underground trains.
Klein’s creator is an overtly contemporary writer, and funny in peculiarly
British ways. Most of all, he’s a man who lives to write. Hoban’s books
explore realms and experiences beyond the bounds of would-be national
treasures. He’s curious enough about things to go out on a limb to discover
them for himself.
In Angelica’s Grotto, this involved confronting graphic pornographic images
and what he really felt about them. He describes it as “a dirty job –
someone had to do it”, adding that when he saw where the novel was going,
“it scared me and so I thought it must matter.”
In person, Hoban strikes me as small, relaxed and gentle; but also
methodical, driven and sure of his territory. He knows that he takes risks
as a writer, but couldn’t help himself and wouldn’t try. He describes what
most writers say about their work as “bollocks” and litters his speech with
sing-song homilies like “life is just a bowl of cherries, don’t make it
serious, it’s too mysterious.” He says of his own work, “I use myself… I’m
a body of perception and that’s where I write from. He avoids contemporary
writing “as much as possible”, not wanting to be “interfered with”.
We talk in between continental biscuits in his study, which is exactly as
described in the books – hugely messy and overstuffed, books and videos
cascading from the ceiling and growing from the floor. It’s encrusted with a
working life and embodies his imagination: masses of figurines and animals
surround a Meissen statuette, a lion mask and various incarnations of Punch.
The walls have posters of King Kong on them, but most telling is the huge
map of Kent that has covered the wall behind his desk for over 20 years.
We sit, nibbling in his head as it were, and Hoban describes himself as a
“painstaking writer” who constantly redrafts a novel from scratch until it
works. I remark that his books are strange solutions of fabular, mystic,
literary, lewd, and comic elements, mixed with lament, exuberance and the
everyday. He says, slowly, “well, I work at it”.
In conversation, he can be quick, concise and breezy on familiar ground. But
then he trawls deeply for less accessible thoughts, pausing for as long as
necessary to give a truthful answer. I asked him whether he would prefer to
die hungry or sated and he laughed, floundered a little and said he’d come
back to it. After a while he said “I could peg out at any time. Death
doesn’t worry me because I’ve given it my best shot. I’m doing whatever is
in me to do and I’ve done as much of it as I could up to now. And whenever I
go I’ll be up to date with doing what I could do. Is that hungry or sated?”
There was a pause. “It’s not sated!”
Angelica’s Grotto is a satisfyingly unsated novel. It follows Klein’s sudden
loss of his inner voice, his subsequent vocalising of every thought in his
head and the violence that results. He resorts to the Internet, where he
types the word “sex” into a search engine and soon becomes entranced with a
website called Angelica’s Grotto. Soon his fantasising is made actual, but
in highly unexpected ways that involve him in new sexual experiences,
forcing him to confront what he wants and what that means.
Angelica’s Grotto is typically funny-melancholic, but looser and more
rounded than earlier novels. It displays Hoban’s ability to write about the
here and now at its best. Together with his searing honesty about the sexual
imaginings of an old man, this is an intelligent book about contemporary
life, its technologies, sexual politics and urban culture. It re-enacts the
foreshortening of experience that the Internet effects but also achieves a
rare degree of perspective. Hoban argues that “there is no unnatural act”
for human beings and remains fascinated by the “self-revelation of humanity
on the Internet”.
Hoban grew up on a smallholding listening to Yiddish, Russian and English
and was “a proto drop-out” before eventually becoming a successful
illustrator. He came to London in 1969 as a children’s writer and the city
made him into an adult novelist. “London,” he says, “is very juicy for me…
it’s my place now, the place where it happens for me.”
Hoban feels closest to his second novel, Kleinzeit , “which was the first
novel of mine in which I found what I’d call a Jewish, wry-humour voice. It
was a lot of fun.” This is the chattering internal dialogue that also
appears in Pilgermann and The Medusa Frequency, the inner voice that Klein
loses – and vocalises – in Angelica’s Grotto.
London also ended his first marriage, but it’s where he met and married
Gundel. Both, he says, felt like strangers at home and so felt at home in
London, where they actually were strangers. This “strangeness”, he has
written, “is the essential human condition”. He told me that he’d always
felt “affinities” with European and particularly German culture. “There’s
this openness to the darkness imminent in everything,” he said, which is
“not a bad chaos, but a warm or fruitful chaos.” This, together with his
remarks about satedness and his argument that “a lot of lamentation doesn’t
preclude having a lot of bounce also,” conveys the character of his books.
So, there you have Russell Hoban: a collection of unlikely elements ranging
from Rilke to Garbage’s Shirley Manson. He would say that life is like that,
but he is no less unusual for affirming it. It all comes together in
Angelica’s Grotto to produce an impressively vigorous and enjoyable novel, a
bit like Kleinzeit and The Medusa Frequency folded into one. It’s a
challenging late novel from an unpredictable writer whose books are worth
treasuring.
Dipl. Biol. Olaf Schneider
-Interface- und Interaktionsdesign-
Projektleiter TIDE – Texte in digitalen Erfahrungsr�umen
Universit�t Bielefeld, Fakult�t f�r Linguistik und
Literaturwissenschaft,
Postfach 10 01 31, 33501 Bielefeld
www.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/~lili_lab/home/personen/schneider/index.html
Tel.: Uni 0521/106-3697
email: ola_____@_____.de
Privat:
Jakobus Stra�e 2
33604 Bielefeld
Tel.: 0521/2703175
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