I must begin this review with a disclaimer – no thanks to the FTC – I have never met the author, Dan Holloway, though I do share tweets with him via Twitter (@agneiszkasshoes) on occasion and it has been through our ‘meeting’ via his site ‘View From the Shoe‘ (for which I gave a brief email interview) and his growing Year Zero Writers webzine – a site that advocates, essentially, art for everyone – a ‘free’ site for writers to share their works with readers on a ‘real’ level – not elevated or encumbered by the elusive ‘middle men’ of publishing.
“Who can see their life from every angle?” This is a question posed early in Dan Holloway’s Songs From the Other Side of the Wall, and, like the tether of a balloon, it snakes through the hands of his protagonist, Sandrine as she puzzles over its shape and where it may lead her. There is no question that, at some point, it will slip her grasp, but it is Sandrine’s journey from ignorance to understanding (and back again) that gives us the outline of this complex tale of identity, perception and art.
Sandrine is 18 and motherless, raised by her father on his vineyard in Hungary, absorbing the mutability of grapes and life as she contemplates university abroad and the memory of a brief exchange that, perhaps somewhat improbably, affected her so deeply the very fabric of her life is unraveled by it.
Growing up in post-Berlin Wall Hungary, Sandrine is surrounded by the ghosts of horrors past and politically and culturally aware youth, including musicians of which Sandrine is a sometime member, and one in particular named Michael, a European rock star with his own website (through which he and Sandrine meet). Her own blog, Songs From the Other Side of the Wall is something of an outlet to the world that she never quite participates in, choosing, instead to ‘wander around’ or, in Michael’s words: “Sometimes you don’t want to be in the middle of things. Sometimes, when something’s really important, it’s best to watch it from the edges, from the spaces. Or even to watch other people than the thing itself.”
The ‘thing itself’ in this case, takes the shape of a woman named Claire, whom Sandrine has never actually met (yet has obsessively fallen for) and whose accidental death (caught on camera and posted on Youtube) that Sandrine witnesses forever alters how she perceives her life and the those around her. Seeming coincidences keep taking shape in Sandrine’s life as she later meets Michael’s father, whose own story – and perhaps knowledge of Claire – keeps her in literal suspense.
Comparisons to Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart may come automatically to mind in the description of the mysterious Claire – a gifted, intelligent woman whom we only meet through her letters to Sandrine and through pages of her journal – she lived and worked in Oxford with Sandrine’s long-missing mother and it was on a trip to Hungary with her that she first spies Sandrine through the younger girl’s bedroom window. Though possibly infatuated with Sandrine’s mother, Claire’s letters and journals indicate an immediate fascination for Sandrine that is also immediately and silently reciprocated. Do we see what we think we see? Sandrine will never know Claire and all the loose threads that surround their attraction give way to an almost obsessive desire for closure that Sandrine may never truly find.
Like Sputnik Sweetheart, Holloway’s prose gives shape to his characters and delivers us to a time and place, from the end of the Cold War in east Europe to the dead-end enclosures of modern Oxford, the world inside and out, the interior mechanisms and escapements that tick and tock, leading to the next hour or the next half-empty station. Songs, in a sense, reads like the inner life of 21st century bloggers and artists piecing together whatever has been left behind by the last generation.
Like K in Sputnik, Sandrine is searching for something frustratingly vague and all the clues left behind only bring her to a kind of self-knowledge, though not the kind she was seeking. Interconnectedness is another theme of Songs, so, unlike Sputnik, we are given a narrative resolve to Sandrine’s journey, one that takes up the loose ends of these relationships – parent and child, lover and other and the wanting nature of love – and sets them adrift, free.
Songs From the Other Side of the Wall is available as a free download for anyone – and if this review comes offs sounding like an endorsement I suppose it is (an entirely unpaid one at that, FTC) – not just for the book, but for the quality of what can be: ebooks or print-to-order offerings from independent or self-publishers are often maligned as the ghetto of the publishing world. With so many economical changes happening, the idea of the author/entrepreneur who provides direct commerce with his readers is no longer a bad joke publishers and agents can tell themselves anymore.
The capitalist infrastructure is disintegrating from its inner rot and those with the will and talent to re-imagine the world will be its new engineers. This is not a note of hopelessness or cynicism – we should always be willing to explore the possibilities and throw out that which no longer works. From there, we truly move on.
For more articles on this ‘direct to you’ movement, read artist Hazel Dooney’s The Ka-Boom of the System, From Writer’s Digest: The Future Role of Literary Agents, or Amanda Palmer’s Why I Am Not Afraid to Take Your Money.
2 Comments
October 7, 2009 at 1:06 am
Wow. Thank you so much. And I’m flattered beyond flattered at the Sputnik Sweetheart references. It is – as you must know – my very favourite book in the world ever.
It’s also fantastic to hear you say that outside the mainstream doesn’t have to be the resort of those whom the mainstream has spurned. The mainstream’s not really a place any of us at Year Zero have ever felt we belonged to. Life is more interesting and exciting when you create your own spaces and share them with people and things you love – whilst never forgetting that you can’t fail to engage altogether, because you owe it to yourself and society always to critique what needs critiquing. But critiquing capitalism or “the mainstream” is not (and this is the big myth capitalism perpetuates) the refuge of those it has rejected. It’s the standpoint of someone happy with their own place.
Can I recommend you chack out the “Isocracy” group on Facebook – it’s a fascinating poltical group combining collectivism and anarchy
October 9, 2009 at 11:31 am
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