Mercurial Minutes Bookclub
Leonora Carrington, Rene Dumal, Mikhail Bulgakov, Angela Carter and Alan Moore
My dear friends,
I’ve been complaining so long about not being able to relax that the universe found a solution for me. Since yesterday, my phlegm has been officially declared a biohazardous material, and I’m about to stay locked in my flat for almost two weeks. But no worries, I’m not feeling too awful, only the words don’t roll off my tongue with such ease as they usually do, so please, be gentle.
Mercurial Minutes Bookclub
Wrapped in a blanket, I browsed through my bookshelf alphabetically: Ballard? Burroughs? Bukowski? Bataille? … the Bible? Jesus Christ, don’t we have anything a bit more wholesome than that? Rodion Romanovich has been sucking my blood the whole of January, and Orwell’s essays are way too bleak for the season. I just want something nice for once.
My ambition to fish out something (relatively) wholesome from my shelves took me on a lovely trip, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, surrounded by piles of old papers and sketches. All in a company of strong ginger tea. I zoomed into many books, re-reading my favourite passages and silly notes scribbled all over, remembering the snippets of my life from the time of reading juxtaposed with the story. So from my side, it has already been a great success. And I hope you enjoy my little list of most beloved feel-good reads for this sickly season as well!
Leonora Carrington’s Hearing Trumpet
“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
The Hearing Trumpet is a beautifully bonkers book. It takes only a few chapters until the story of a 92-year-old lady sent to a retirement home unravels into a surreal, joyful adventure. It involves a murder mystery, toadstool houses, a search for the Holy Grail, a plan to escape to Lapland, orgiastic nuns, levitating abbesses and you know… this whole great celebration of life thing.
As I probably couldn’t say it better, I’ll share here a review from my fellow reader (I’m not entirely sure what kind of relationship this is, but I’m following them since I found their review on an obscure book I loved. Ever since, I diligently stalk this person’s reading habits without knowing anything about them, yet I feel somehow close. Forms of human bonds are truly manifold.)
“The novel is full of the things that interested Carrington- arcane mythologies of the world and their accompanying symbolism, animalistic humans and humanistic animals, cataclysmic world events told with a surrealism that is somehow understated. But the most powerful thing for me is the fact that, while to most people a 92-year old woman is fit for nothing and deserves her incarceration, Carrington makes the woman her hero- a forgetful heroine, yes, one who is a little slower to understand, but a heroine none the less.”
It has that alchemical element to it, so own to surrealism. Through its kind sense of humour and frolicking with deep symbolism, it has the power to convert a bedraggled late-capitalism zombie (me, Monday 18:00) into an awestruck 7-year old.
You probably know Leonora Carrington as a painter and sculptor, and if not, you might want to check out some of her works. I’ll leave this documentary here, which talks about her rebellious youth, relationship with Max Ernst, the period in a mental asylum and escape to Mexico City, where she spent the rest of her life.
I was also lucky enough to acquire a deck of her beautiful tarot cards from Fulgur Press, and I know I’m a bit of a tease as they are out of print now.
Rene Daumal’s Holy Mountain
Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks.
- Rene Dumal, A Night of Serious Drinking
From Leonora Carrington, it’s just a step away from her student, our dearest Jodorowsky. Did you know that his Holy Mountain was loosely based on Rene Daumal’s unfinished novel Mount Analogue (subtitled none less than A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing)?
The author was a passionate mountaineer, and the reader is taken on an allegorical journey towards the mystical Mount Analogue (Mount Meru, Axis Mundi, … ). Accompanied by a crew of archetypal figures under the leadership of father Sogol, we encounter many dangers on the path towards self-knowledge. The book is dedicated to Dumal’s teacher, Georgian painter Alexander von Salzmann, one of the founding members of Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. So yes, this too hints at the flavour of this adventure.
The story spans a mere 100 pages, and unfortunately, the author died of tuberculosis very young before he managed to finish it. So all we are left with is an unfinished sketch of the heroic quest of the human soul, with the open end accentuating the mystical allure of the whole composition.
I love the author’s sense of humour, obviously immature tone, and grandiose spiritual pursuits. It’s unspoiled by the mundane frustrations; everything’s so hopeful and full of glorious meanings! But Dumal’s writing is a bit of hit or miss - it has often been the most unremarkable piece I recommended to someone, met with a lukewarm “was ok” shrug. But if it strikes a chord, oh boy! You shall hear the harmonies.
And sweetly, in the spirit of Breton’s objective chance, I lost my copy of Dumal’s first novel, A Night of Serious Drinking, during an unexpected instance of An Actual Night of Serious Drinking. It just slipped out of my pocket in one of the dingy Neukolln bars - exactly as it should have.
Michail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita
I mean, I know we all read this one. It’s a classic - the list of artists referencing the novel in their works on Wikipedia is almost threatening. But the book gets me excited every time I remember it all the same!
The story concerns a visit by the devil to the officially atheistic Soviet Union. And he doesn’t come alone. Professor Woland brings his entourage of gambling vampires and cigar-chomping cats to unleash lovely chaos over Moscow. But throughout the novel, the corruption and wickedness don’t come from the devilry of these hellish creatures but from the pettiness and greed of our fellow comrades. It can be read as a dark comedy, political satire or fairy tale, on so many interweaving levels. I love the charming characters, loopy self-references (“manuscripts don’t burn”) oh, and the mad Jesus too. Written in the heat of the Stalinist regime and published in a heavily censored version only after Bulgakov’s death, The Master and Margarita is a legend
Bulgakov was inspired by the book wonderfully titled “The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr“ by German E. T. A. Hoffmann that lays on my bookshelf for a few years, and I think it’s finally time to pick it up.
Angela Carter’s Infernal Desire Machines
Fanged sparrows plucked out the eyes of little children. Snarling flocks of starlings swooped down upon some starving wretch picking over a mess of dreams and refuse in a gutter and tore what remained of his flesh from his bones. The pigeons lolloped from illusory pediment to window-ledge like volatile, feathered madmen, chattering vile rhymes and laughing in hoarse, throaty voices, or perched upon chimney stacks shouting quotations from Hegel.
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
Yes, yes. It’s been me shaking my fist a couple of months ago about how none of these silly machine learning algorithms would ever figure out my exquisite literary tastes. I think I need to take it all back now; Angela Carter popped up as a “must-read” recommendation on my story graph account, and I said, why not?
I didn’t have many expectations as I had barely heard of Carter before and the algorithms on other pages usually recommend me books like Coehlo’s Alchemist (obviously because I’m into these “magical” things). But somewhere halfway through the second chapter, you might have heard an echo of my delighted shriek. It doesn’t happen too often that you start reading a book you dreamt of writing once.
How to sell it to you? I have to admit it’s not an easy one. It has hints of Lautréamont and Burroughs, nothing for the faint-hearted, with a trailing list of content warnings. It dissects the desire through the lens of twisted science, exploring the nature of reality through a dazzling festival of abrasive deviations and subversion - the results are truly psychedelic. It’s a phantasmic pastiche that sometimes reads like pulp magazine and other times like post-modern theory or an ancient grimoire. I now regret reading it in such haste last week - I really needed to know where it’s all going. I will give it another spin, this time sipping slowly; it has everything a good magic novel needs.
Alan Moore’s Promethea
And it's only symbolism puts magic and meaning into anything. You of all people should know that. We can make love amongst the gods, or we can screw on a dirty mattress. It's our choice.
― Alan Moore, Promethea, Vol. 2
Alan Moore is an incredible storyteller, and the graphic novel Promethea is even more esoteric than his other works. The very fabric of the publication is magical, and the occult acts as an effective plot device, rather than just another tedious “atmospheric” element. You will travel through the Tree of Life, visit the Major Arcana during various initiation rites, encounter the seventy-two demons from The Lesser Key of Solomon… yet the road is paved with nifty contemporary cultural references that are quite refreshing. It’s all about the imaginary, mythmaking in progress, the power of story to bend reality and the relationship between the reader and the read - It’s so meta even this acronym ~
Thank you for staying with me! I feel a bit upset for leaving out Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Neverwhere, and Vonnegut too! But I rather save some of those gems for later and bid you farewell now.
Let me know how you liked the list and if you have something that I definitely need to read. Or if you picked up one of those books and liked it. Or actually, if you hated it, too, hahaha. I might be a bit slow with replies, but I never miss an opportunity to have a good book chat! ✨
And now I’m off to make myself some pancakes and listen to my 100 favourite Cocteau Twins songs on repeat until I feel like a human being again.
Stay kind.
~ k.
I’m so glad I signed up to your newsletter! Every single one of these has my interest peaked and it’s so rare to find someone who seems to share my tastes in books. Such a treasure to find a list like this. Now, have you read anything by Jeff Vandermeer? I’m thinking especially about Venice Underground and City of Saints and Madmen. All though I love all his books equally CoSaM is probably one of my favorite books ever because no other book has ever made me both fall so in love with it I wanted to melt into it’s world and also make me so mad I had to restrain myself from tearing it up! (I would never damage a book ordinarily) It’s profoundly weird and evocative, but also so arrogant (the arrogance goes away in his later work, which are even better but the world he creates in his earlier books is like nothing else.) I could go on and on about his work but will restrain myself. Thanks for this inspiring list!
/Gabriella