Capital Is Dead - McKenzie Wark (2019)
I couldn't get in to Wark's earlier and often highly regarded Gamer Theory. I can't quite remember why; I think the writing style was a little too zingy, ostentatious, distracting. I'll have to give it another go. I didn't realise that Wark wrote Capital Is Dead until I started reading it. However, Capital is a lot more readable.
Perhaps its due to already firmly agreeing with its central hypothesis; that due to shifts in digitally convergent technology towards a system of information as opposed to a system of material ownership, we have potentially moved beyond capitalism in to something completely different and much, much worse. This idea is controversial from two perspectives: from the capitalists who foresee a perpetual status quo, and from the critical theorists who see any challenge to Marxist doctrine as a personal attack. This approach is refreshing. Constantly configuring and twisting Marx to remain relevant to an ever changing, mutant and difficult to define set of systems often feels as retrograde, dogmatic and inefficient as capitalism itself.
As usual, there's not much by ways of a concrete alternative, and it's frankly remarkably depressing, especially when considering how this new, information based successor to capitalism is so absolutely destructive yet not even connected to the environment. But the idea of a vulgar, tech savvy successor to Marxist thought is compelling.
Revenge - Yoko Ogawa (1998)
The Diving Pool was probably the best book I read in 2021. It introduced me to Ogawa's form of alienating existentialism, and how she can perfectly capture the creeping, abject horror of simply existing. The Diving Pool is essentially three novellas or longer short stories which, while separate, are thematically similar and chart a grand narrative of sorts from infancy, to motherhood, and to death.
Revenge is eleven stories long, and while through their short form they are summarily more intense and undiluted than in The Diving Pool, they still demonstrate a harrowing sense of fleeting misery, and an atmosphere both fecund and foetid. Their scenarios are perhaps also more alarming, though this again may be down to the fleeting time we spend in each world.
Ogawa's prose is spare and clean, yet also elemental. It is packed with obsessive and lingering images; a cream cake sprouting mould, a carrot with five fingers, a mountain of kiwi fruits. Each story is separate, yet closely linked through a shared character or object. Time lurches in a disorientating manner.
Revenge is more overtly horror than The Diving Pool. It's imagery is more fanciful, lyrical, yet often repulsive. Each of the eleven stories here are linked in some way to the previous one, which feels less like a coherent narrative being formed, and more of a round-robin of mania and obsession infecting the next person. Names, times and even genders are often not explicated, and there is a sense that everything is clouded through the depersonalisation of an anxiety attack. It is a wonderful book.
Looking up Ogawa on Wikipedia after finishing, to get a better sense of her work, I found that she's actually extremely prolific, and the books I've read are a small part of her 90's output. This reminds me of Ryu Murakami, another diverse and extremely prolific writer, whose more alarmist and grotesque work tends to be selected for translation. Being a feeble monoglot, I will have to be thankful for the handful of Ogwa's work which has been translated in to English.
Abara - Tsutomu Nihei (2005)
Nihei's necrotech classic is swoon inducingly beautiful and absolutely vile. Reading it is like stuffing your face in to a vast, broken car engine filled with offal. Abara makes little sense, but it really doesn't matter, as the hard boiled post-cyberpunk plot is largely an excuse for extended, wordless establishing montages and cables bursting out of flesh and rubble. It's unendingly beautiful in the same way Tetsuo (1989) is beautiful, and it's hyperchiaroscuro compositions feel like they've been wrested directly from the author's subconscious.