I recently had the great pleasure of sitting down with Ben Lindner for a wide-ranging discussion on his podcast, Beyond the Zero. You can listen to the full discussion below, but I’ve broken the transcript into three parts focusing on my publishing activities, my writing, and my reading habits respectively. In this third and final part of the transcript, I share the books that gave me entry into literature, some exciting new titles, and my all-time favourites.
BTZ
What were some of the books that got you into the world of literature?
Daniel Davis Wood
I wasn’t a huge reader as a kid. I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. So, for someone who didn’t read [many books], I read a lot of comics, to be honest. I was way into Spider-Man and X-Men and lots of Marvel stuff. Anyway, [thought those] I ended up coming to The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, which is an incredible series of comics—incredibly literary. Have you read it?
BTZ
I haven’t read it.
Daniel Davis Wood
Okay, so, Shakespeare is literally a character; the Greek gods and the Norse gods are characters. Milton’s Satan is a character. Dante is in there, Chaucer is in there, G.K. Chesterton. I’d had no exposure to the world of literature when I read that. I was eighteen or nineteen and I didn’t know literature at all until I read The Sandman and it pointed me in this direction. There was, like, [a whole] world out there that it was referring to, but I didn’t quite know why or how. So I was really into that, but then… I also followed Neil Gaiman for a long time, and he used to have this line whenever he went to events—I went to one of his events once—where he said, “Oh, I’m nobody, I’m just a storyteller. I’m just a man who tells stories.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s such bullshit!” [Because] what I responded to in his work, in what he was doing, wasn’t the story he was telling—it was something else. I felt like he was short-selling himself in this twee way, and there was this other, almost unknowable dimension to what he was doing that really spoke to me.
So I responded badly to that and kind of fell away from that world, the sci-fi world. But I didn’t really know what it was [about his work] that had grabbed me, so I just [took direction from] a list of books that was partly drawn from him, that sounded interesting, and the one I picked up and then realized, “Aha! This is this is the kind of thing that speaks to me. This is literature beyond the canon and it’s doing things that seem magical and inexplicable!”—was Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. I think I went to it on [Gaiman’s] recommendation and it’s—I still can’t account for that book; I still don’t know half of what’s going on in there other than the premise, and I think it’s such a feat of language and concept and opacity. That language is so hyper-precise, but the meaning is so opaque, and yet it’s gripping—from start to finish, hundreds of pages, I read it in like a single sitting, not knowing what I was doing, just knowing that it was magic.
I hunted around for books like Dhalgren after that, and it took me about a year, but the second gateway after that was Lanark by Alasdair Gray. Conceivably, it’s a science fiction novel, too—half of it is about people who get a disease that turns them into dragons, which is crazy—but it’s formally and structurally and stylistically just, I don’t know. I don’t really know how to explain it. That’s what I like about it. I guess I’d say that it tells two stories that are intercut and never really overlap except in very suggestive ways, and if you pick up on the suggestions you get a completely different book—a third storyline to it. It really showed me that writers could write in ways that seem obscure or, on the other hand, overdetermined, and that wasn’t a flaw: that was a way to create something else that isn’t on the page. I think that’s kind of what Delany’s getting at in Dhalgren as well, so those two together would be the two that really gave me an ideal of style and structure, as aside from story, that I am constantly searching for.
BTZ
Brilliant. Okay, what great gateway books. That’s amazing.
What are you currently reading and what books are you looking forward to at the moment?
Daniel Davis Wood
Well, this year I wanted to fill in some blind spots in my reading. So I’m slowly, throughout the year, reading all of Shakespeare and the Russians. I’d only read Crime and Punishment from among all the Russian classics, and that was twenty years ago, and I thought, “I don’t know anything about Russian literature, but particularly at this point in political history it seems pretty important.” So I’m going back through those guys as well.
But the ones that I’m looking forward to… There are only a few new books I’m really looking forward to this year, but I’ll run you through them.
You’ve already spoken to Emily Hall and The Long Cut is waiting for me at home. It’s the first thing I’m going to get to as soon as I get back. I’m so looking forward to it, based on what I’ve read. It seems incredible.
Cormac McCarthy is one of my favourite authors. I’m a bit dubious about what they’re doing with [his] two books, [to be published] back-to-back at the end of the year, but I will get them and I will read them. There’s no question about that.
Others that I’m looking forward to… Mark Haber’s Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. I read his book Reinhardt’s Garden three or four years ago and just loved it. It’s hilarious and wild, so I’m really looking forward to his follow-up.
Then there’s an English writer called Paul Stanbridge who, a few years ago, his début—it’s called Forbidden Line and it’s like a proper maximalist English novel, hundreds of pages about this guy who’s basically re-enacting the travels of Don Quixote in modern-day Essex—it’s crazy and funny and experimental with its form. He’s got a new book coming out this year called My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is, by Galley Beggar Press. I’ve no idea what it’s about, but he’s the kind of writer who takes crazy risks in that first book, so I’ll read whatever he publishes after that.
And there’s a Canadian writer who lives in Edinburgh, called Camilla Grudova. She might be familiar to some people; her first story collection was published by Fitzcarraldo and it’s called The Doll’s Alphabet. You know how the adjective Kafkaesque gets bandied around for writers who do anything a little bit weird? No! This is the closest English-language fiction I’ve ever found to Franz Kafka. Genuinely, she cuts so close to the Kafkaesque ideal, it’s uncanny and unsettling. She has a new book coming out, Children of Paradise, and again I know nothing about it but I will read whatever she writes.
And there’s one more that I read recently, that anyone who liked Hang Him When He Is Not There should pick up. Some people will know it already because it was published a few years ago. It’s by a guy named Edmund Caldwell. He died some years ago. He was originally one of the bloggers who I got into in the mid-2000s and he wrote a novel called Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant, and the experimentation of it is like Hang Him When He Is Not There. That book has just been republished by a press I’ve never heard of in the UK, called Grand Iota. I don’t know anything about them, but I do know that that book is a work of genius—of real, singular vision, very uncompromising—and I think anyone who liked Hang Him, or indeed anyone who has read Babel by Gabriel Blackwell, should be reading Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant. You can get it now; it’s been out of print for a long time but I re-read it recently, and even ten years on since it was originally published, it feels so fresh and original. I love it…
BTZ
We’re back on Beyond the Zero. It’s time for Daniel’s top ten.
Daniel Davis Wood
My top ten is actually pretty straightforward. There’s nothing from out of left field, like there was with Mark de Silva, which I thought was an amazing top ten. I’m going to go for a lot of obvious ones, but all right. In no particular order, except for the last two...
The Plains by Gerald Murnane. I really ummed and ahhed on which Murnane to pick, and there are others that I like better than The Plains, but at the end of the day there’s something so appealing about the innocence of The Plains. It’s like Murnane coming into what he actually is as a writer, for the first time, fulfilling what he would later idealise in this book. I like the simplicity of it, the purity of it, the very quiet beauty of it, and the abstraction. Everything: he does it with a very light touch here in a way that he doesn’t really do later on, and I think I value that intuitively rather than intellectually. I like his other works intellectually, but The Plains just speaks to me on a different level.
As does Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee, which is kind of strange for me. I thought I would end up going for Waiting for the Barbarians, but again the straightforwardness and the simplicity and the abstraction and the weirdness of it just—in a way I can’t quite explain—just stick to me, and his other works don’t quite have that quality. It’s not something I can pinpoint other than to say, “Oh, yeah, that feels different to the rest.”
Then I’d say Voss by Patrick White. Again, I don’t know… I like The Tree of Man better sometimes, and sometimes I like The Vivisector better, and sometimes I like A Fringe of Leaves better. But at the end of the day, I keep coming back to Voss. The way it makes an epic of somebody who is really just putting one foot in front of another and thinking about a woman is unaccountably magical. And the language—his syntax is so strange and askew, in the way he gets rid of pronouns and starts sentences with “And” even though they’re not in the middle of anything. It’s weird. And the first time I read it, it jolted me into a different way of thinking about language and what it could do—and it still does; it’s evergreen.
Then, among all the McCarthy books, I have to choose Blood Meridian. Intellectually, again, I think Suttree is better, and that’s something that I think McCarthy fans go back and forth on a lot—“Is Suttree better than Blood Meridian or vice-versa?”—but Blood Meridian is the one for me. I think it’s where McCarthy’s vision really comes into its own and the language is so extraordinary. Even when it becomes comical or parodic of itself, it is still extraordinary and it’s just unstoppable. I love that about [McCarthy] and I can’t really deny what an influence he’s been on me.
Similarly, I’d say, from William Faulkner, I choose Absalom! Absalom! McCarthy owes a lot to Faulkner, so, in a way, I value Faulkner as the trailblazer for what for what became Blood Meridian. But there’s something in there that I try to pick up in my work, too, which is, if you’re addressing a subject of some discomfort or grotesquerie—and particularly if it’s historical so it can’t talk back to you—it’s hard to search for a language that is adequate to addressing that subject as fully as it deserves to be, and language is always going to fail. You’re never going to get to that level of adequacy and I think Faulkner really illustrates that [fact] in Absalom! Absalom!—but he also illustrates that just the search for language, the desire to find the right words, is as important as whatever you do find, even if what you find is not adequate. The search is its own kind of aesthetic endeavour and ethical endeavour, and that idea [is] partly what gets me writing. And I think, for [Faulkner] to come to that [conclusion] with the thoroughness that he does, and the vision that he does, is just extraordinary.
Then, at the opposite end of [the spectrum], where the language is not so rich: Melanctha by Gertrude Stein. She creates such an amazing tapestry of sound through the most mundane words repeated to an extraordinary degree, and I think it goes along with William Gass’ essays on Melanctha. They’re not in my top ten, but I can’t read Melanctha without reading it the way Gass read it in those essays. [The novella and the essays are] conjoined for me.
Next, I’d say Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, particularly because Jones does one of the strangest things I’ve seen a novelist do and I don’t think anyone who’s tried to copy him has done it quite as well. He creates a narrator who can see all points in time simultaneously: so when the narrator is focusing on one character and telling you what they’re doing, he’ll also glance aside and say, you know, “This character was standing three feet from where someone would drop dead later,” and then he’ll go into that person’s backstory and then come back to the present, and the backstory has no bearing on [the present]. It’s like an omniscient narrator who gets caught up in its own omniscience—he overworks the idea of the omniscient narrator in a way that becomes kind of surreal and bends time in strange ways.
Then I guess the most recent book on the list would be Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, which I think is probably the best novel published so far this century. A very simple story about a guy who’s basically dead and it’s his ghost narrating the setup of his life. It’s not exceptional in any way with the subject that it takes up, but it does have the one sentence thing that Ducks, Newburyport ended up maximizing. It has that in a smaller form, but it also has an incredible scheme of repetition of lines and imagery and ideas of how time is structured, all throughout the novel. It begins with a heartbeat as a way of structuring time, [and] it goes all the way up to planetary orbiting as a way of structuring time, and then back down, and collapses them all into one, in ways that I think are just beautiful. And it has one of the most perfect single pages of prose I think I’ve ever read, towards the end. It really hits me in the heart.
So that’s eight, and those eight are in no particular order, but the last two books are equal number ones for me. They’re both by the same writer and they’re both the really obvious choices: it’s Moby-Dick and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville. The reason I put them in equal number one place is because I don’t think you can have those two books separately. I actually think they’re two versions of the same book, in the sense that they are both by narrators who are obsessively trying to address something that is inscrutable or ineffable, to account for something that cannot be accounted for, to inexplicably keep going and keep going as if you can ever get there when clearly you can’t, even though the writing feels like an accounting but really isn’t because they’re finally always detached from the object of their obsession… I think that’s an amazing thing for a writer to write about, to begin with, and then the fact that Melville did it in a maximalist way and then in a minimalist way, back-to-back, makes me admire him all the more. Moby-Dick is obviously about obsession—it takes a two-pronged approach: Ahab is obsessed with this one particular whale and Ishmael is obsessed with whales in general, as a species, and they both still can’t fully comprehend or master the thing that they’re trying to get at. But in Bartleby, [the obsessiveness is] less [obvious]. And because there’s been a modernist tendency to read Bartleby with an eye towards Bartleby [himself], with his renunciation—his refusal: “I would prefer not to,” and so on—you get it in Blanchot and guys like that, where Bartleby’s the focus. But Bartleby has never the focus of Bartleby for me. It’s the narrator of Bartleby who’s always the focus, I think, and who talks of himself at the beginning as a dead person walking: and then he encounters this inscrutable, obstructive thing in this [other man] and he can’t penetrate the mystery of Bartleby, and that obsession—that need to keep trying to penetrate even when he can’t—generates this beautiful book. There’s a great flourishing of creativity in this dead person’s life because Bartleby is the white whale there; Bartleby’s the inscrutable thing. That’s why I see them as, like, the same book told twice, at two different scales, and they have to be number one together.
BTZ
Amazing. That is an outstanding list. One of the ones I want to highlight as well is Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones. I think that’s a such a great novel; I really love that book. Amazing to hear it in your top ten.
Daniel Davis Wood
I’m glad you read it! I wasn’t going to say it, but I’ll say it now. When [the narrator] sits down in the café and he orders a sandwich at the end: this is the page I’m talking about. That is the closest I’ve ever come to tears while reading a piece of prose. It’s very secular prose that, to me, approaches something almost divine in the way he renders one or two paragraphs: just a guy wanting a sandwich. It seems ridiculous to summarise it like that—it’s laughable—but the way he does it on the page is amazing.
BTZ
All right, we should probably wrap it up. But before we do, do you want to tell us where we can go and get your books and go and find all Splice books?
Daniel Davis Wood
Yes. The Splice website is ThisIsSplice.co.uk. It does ship internationally. You can find me at danieldaviswood.com and the best place to find my books in Australia is Booktopia. Booktopia also owns my publisher, Brio Books, so you can buy through Booktopia and it’s totally fine. Just don’t buy through Amazon.
BTZ
Daniel, it has been such a pleasure speaking with you and I’m looking forward to getting over to Scotland and visiting you in person again. Thanks so much for talking to me tonight.
Daniel Davis Wood
Thank you, Ben. Likewise. You are always welcome to come over and I’ll take you hiking somewhere.