Too French by half
Lucy Beresford
ANTHOLOGY OF APPARITIONS by Simon Liberati Pushkin Press, £12, pp. 139, ISBN 1901285588 ✆ £9.60 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Take Harold Pinter: dismissed at the outset for having written an impenetrable play, but who nearly 50 years on ends up being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. I ask you, who’d be a critic? I mention this by way of an apology should, in 50 years’ time, Simon Liberati pick up a gong of similar importance. Because right now, his debut makes little sense.
It’s very French, in a surreal, selfabsorbed type way. At its core lies an exposé of a debauched layer of society, comprising a flaky group of world-weary, heroin-addicted teenage prostitutes and equally louche adults. The novel’s semihero is Claude, a man of ‘Luciferian beauty’ who in his forties is haunted by the memories (or apparitions) of girls he has slept with and pimped for. These include his sexually precocious sister Marina, who was seduced by her psychiatrist when 12, and who has been missing since June 1986. The question posed in the opening pages (what happened to Marina?) is only partially answered in the novel’s final paragraphs. In between, Liberati treats us to a meandering series of scenes in which sex and drugs are sought, bitchy quips are uttered and humanity is impaired.
It reads as if it’s been written in a narcotic haze and maybe one has to be in one to enjoy it. It’s one thing to depict successfully (and therefore obliquely comment on) the dreary lives of people who regard sleeping with a Rolling Stone, or being kissed by Bianca Jagger, as the height of sophistication and fulfilment; it’s quite another to inject it with narrative drive (or even a plot?), and therefore interest.
My difficulty in engaging with this novel is disappointing on two counts. Firstly, because Liberati’s writing does have its moments, particularly in his characterisation of Claude’s friend Ali, a bisexual who writes spiteful note cards on all his contemporaries. But secondly, and more importantly, because Pushkin Press (a small imprint established in 1997) is trying to reach people who are passionate about literature, for which they must be applauded. Their latest enticing catalogue features contemporary European authors in translation, whilst the backlist includes novels by Søren Kierkegaard, a thrilling, neglected Edith Wharton, and a collection of previously unpublished letters by Henry James. All have been chosen for their rich psychological terrain and should be, the publisher believes, books readers feel compelled to recommend to friends. With my hand on my heart I cannot do this with Anthology of Apparitions.
Rather, I steer you towards another recent Pushkin Press publication, Florian Zeller’s elliptical second novel, Lovers or Something Like It, which fuses existential angst with a modern love story. Still, outrageously, only 26 years old, Zeller could be the new Sartre for my money, and the perfect antidote, it would seem, to the nauseating underachievers populating Liberati’s world.
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