Aspiring writers often praise Shklovsky’s oeuvre as a guide to writing fiction, but ordinary readers will be delighted too, for this book tells you how some of the greatest works of the world literature are made. Shklovsky dissects the process looking at a range of texts, from fairy tales to Kafka’s “anti-novels”. Those who remember his magnum opus, A Sentimental Journey, can also work out how this book is made: the trademark one-sentence paragraphs, seemingly stray thoughts, memories of youth, tributes to friends – all this as a backdrop to the main theme.
Anna Aslanyan reviews Viktor Shklovsky’s Bowstring.
Night of course fascinates us. Most children go through a phase of being afraid of the dark - and it’s odd that the darkness of the bedroom is so different to the darkness of outside, and that you can be scared of one and relaxed in the other. Night is when the best things happen, conception and laughter and roaming through cities, and it’s also when the worst happens, suicides, murders and a life-altering mistake behind the wheel: the bad, hesitant phone calls (’Is this [Title] [Last Name]? I’m terribly sorry, but I have to tell you that your -’) always seem to come at night. Men and women who work nights aren’t always well paid but seem to carry more weight and experience than their dayclock counterparts.
Telegraphic Transcriptions is not an easy read, nor does it seek to be. It is confrontational, unapologetically dense and complex. Emmerson notes, amongst other ephemera of a late twentieth century childhood and adolescence (I think this is the first time I have seen the triangular savant and shaman Bod used as a poetic reference) Stock Aitken and Waterman, but in musical terms Emmerson himself is much more Stockhausen. This is sharp edged, jagged, determinedly dissonant work. 
What is important is not so much censorship as pre-censorship - whips in the soul. Cohen argues that ‘with censorship in all its forms’ you should ‘remember the far larger class of works that authors begin then decide to abandon. The words that were never written, the arguments that were never made.’ Do you believe in freedom of speech? Are you sure? You’re a talented writer, a good professional, you have something to say, a story to tell, a warning to give, a truth to expose. But are you sure you want to risk your life, your job, your home, your relationships? Are you sure you want to go through all of that just to write?
The first performances of Ubu Roi caused a stir. Partly, this was because of the shock of the new – as Brotchie points out: ‘it was as though a modernist play from the middle of the next century had been dropped on the stage without all the intervening theatrical developments that might have acclimatized the audience to its conventions.’ On the other hand, many of Jarry’s friends in the avant-garde weren’t leaving anything to chance: they turned up with mischief in mind, and caused – or at least contributed to – an uproar in the theatre. At one point the poet Fernand Gregh shouted out his opinion: ‘“It’s as beautiful as Shakespeare,” to which his own brother shot back from the balcony: “You’ve never even read Shakespeare, you imbecile!”’
Clough’s zenith was at Nottingham Forest, and it’s in that club’s back-to-back European Cup victories that the author seems most determined to locate hints of a sharp tactical mind. The games which led Forest to the finals, and those climactic struggles, are combed over for evidence of managerial shrewdness and grand strategy. There are a number of instances where Wilson’s usual stoic style slips into vaguely triumphant declarations that these things were going on all along. However, the writing never seems to capitalise on these: it’s as if, despite the reams of primary source research that have manifestly gone into this book, it remains dazzled by the enigma.
Harbach reveres American transcendentalists of the nineteenth century but his baseball diamonds are scored on the rolling fields of the modern republic. Scott Fitzgerald, for his reckoning with dreams and the ends of parties, is as present here as he is in Robert Altman’s film A Prairie Home Companion. Melville’s statue looks on at Westish, Wisconsin as a bust of the Great Gatsby author does at St Paul, Minnesota. I thought of him as the Harpooners traversed the Midwest: “Every guy on that bus… had grown up dreaming of becoming a professional athlete. Even when you realised you’d never make it, you didn’t relinquish the dream, not deep down.” 
The short form is hard. You need to have the scope of a novel on a canvas a fraction of the size. Your story should be something a reader will turn to from time to time in the same way that people listen to certain songs before they get ready to go out or fall asleep. You’ll need to be economical, and resist the urge of parable or one-act morality play. You need a beginning, middle and end, and a last line that resonates long after the story is over. Sarah Hall can do the short form. Reading The Beautiful Indifference gives you that cold, solid, rare feeling — that this is something special.
Berlin is his monument to the trauma of modernity. It is the physical instantiation of dread. Barber’s looming consciousness walks through the solid flesh of the city. It is a minded pervasiveness that generalises into an inchoate, monstrous familiarity that leaves us shuddering with an unnamed, unnameable dread. Our deepest century, our deepest time, the twentieth century, our birth time, is here piercing Barber’s strange, hallucinatory prose as he wanders, like a ghost, through a cosmopolitanism that is the root of intolerable evil. 
Vault deals with storytelling (you have to read Vault) and the mechanisms of storytelling. It deals with the many simulacra that build up a story, brick by brick, lie by lie, fabrication by fabrication.Vault is as fragmented as Europe before and after the war, Two not One. Vault has to be fragmented. McKuen is fragmented. The book is fragmented. David Rose himself is fragmented. I am fragmented. You are fragmented.
