38 | BIGISSUE.COM FROM 30 NOVEMBER 2020
CULTURE |
BOOKS
I
fi rst set foot in Europe’s last forbidden city on
a snowy morning in the early spring of 1990,
when the world was changing fast and about to
change forever.
I had been watching from the barricades in the streets of
Vilnius, capital of the mini Soviet state of Lithuania, in open
revolt against the Red Army that had marched in a�ter the
Hitler-Stalin pact’s implementation following the 1939 Nazi
invasion of Poland.
Just a few months earlier I had been in my one-time
home of East Berlin as popular protest did the unthinkable
and brought down the Berlin Wall. On that fateful evening
of November 9, I had been with the crowds, including long-
time friends, as we pushed our way through Checkpoint
Charlie or over the Wall itself. � e most tangible symbol of
the Iron Curtain was being torn down forever.Witnessingtheremarkablechangesofthelate
20th century led Peter Millar to pen a history
of the Germans’ tangled geographical pastState of mind
AUTHOR FEATURE
M
y fi rst instinct when setting about reviewing David
Keenan’s extraordinary Xstabeth was to write in the
style of the novel itself. � ere was, I felt, no better
way. To get to the essence, the essential.� e je ne sais
quoi. � e jokes. � ere are loads of them. � ough it’s not obviously. I
thought. Sincerely.
But then I decided, no, it would only read like a poor parody of
a voice which is defi ned by its singularity and personal truth. So I
dropped that idea.
It is a challenge though, to review a book whose character
and search for meaning is so tightly bound in the stream of
consciousness it’s written in. Readers who enjoyed Scottish writer
Keenan’s previous freewheeling novels, � is is Memorial Device and
the Gordon Burn Prize-winning For the Good Times, might feel more
challenged by this highly unconventional follow-up. Keenan had
a career (though he might balk at that word) as an experimental
musician and music journalist before he turned to writing, so it
might not be a crazy indulgence to say that Xstabeth is the moment
the record label liberated him and told him to knock himself out.
� is waxing waning story-ish about a young Russian girl, Aneliya,
whose love is torn between her complex but naive musician father
and his ‘famouser’ best friend, may initially seem overtly stylistic, but
once you fall into its rhythm it casts an irresistible spell. Its rejection
of standard punctuation – Keenan has no interest in pursuing a
dri�ting train of thought if it putters too far along a siding – becomes
oddly relaxing, like a dreamy bout of hypnotherapy.
Xstabeth has a structure most akin to early American ecstatic free
jazz. � ere are periods when Keenan wanders nebulously through
ideas about moral philosophy, the poetry of Leonard Cohen, the
slipperiness of memory, sexual fetishisation and golf (yes, golf, not a
typo) like a happy, uninterrupted and o�ten funny drunk. And then
there are sudden break-outs of simple melodic emotion, the most
moving of which is a painful memory of Aneliya’s father creating a
misjudged stir in a fancy restaurant a�ter he is told he mustn’t smoke.
His pathetic bid to display his power in front of his fellow eaters ends
in humiliating defeat, the recollection of which pierces his daughter’s
cringing heart.
“� ere was just something about it,” Keenan writes, echoing the
feeling of every child fi rst witnessing the public embarrassment
of a once seemingly omnipotent parent. ‘Something’ is happening
but you don’t know what it is. Yet somehow it’s at the centre of this
ultimately romantic tale of remembrance and lost things.
� e question of what Xstabeth is about is probably the point of the
book. Is it about magic, angels, and memory or is it more tangible, an
attempt to understand human behaviour? Or is it about ellipsis, so
that the least obviously explored relationship – mother and son – is
buried deepest beneath its passages? Who knows. I loved it anyway.
While we’re talking Russia-based mindbenders, a lovingly
rendered new hardback of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s visionary classic
We should bring a new generation of readers to this landmark
novel. Widely acknowledged as the forerunner of 1984 , this long-
banned tale of chief engineer D-503’s slow rebellion against an
oppressive surveillance-based dictatorship was hailed as “the single
best work of science fi ction ever written” by Ursula K Le Guin in- � is edition includes an introduction by Margaret Atwood and
Orwell’s 1946 review.
@Janeannie
Xstabeth by David Keenan is out now
(White Rabbit, £14.99)
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, translated by Bela
Shayevich, is out now (Canongate, £14.99)REVIEW
Fresh rhythm
Jane Graham hails the singular vision
of a unique Scottish writer