Daybook

by Nathan Knapp

How can a person speak when they lose faith in the authority of their voice? One night on the cusp of winter, a man sits alone, in silence, and begins to lay words on an empty page. He speaks of ancestry and stymied ambitions, of confusions and doubts, of what he despises and what he adores. He speaks of scripture and commandments, of conformity and evangelism; he speaks of the lust and the shame that have led him away from a doctrinaire upbringing, and of the love that has sheltered him in his spiritual exile. And yet, in order to speak of these things, he finds he must speak back to things he has already so he returns to his earlier words and casts doubt on their veracity, to elucidate the implications that were lost when he wrote them down.



Nathan Knapp's Daybook marks the arrival of a blazing new talent in contemporary literature, the Gerald Murnane of the American South. In the sinuous, incantatory style of a fugue in prose-and teasing out the tensions between carnality and theology, desire and disgrace-Knapp embarks on a dreamlike exploration of life's most essential, enigmatic questions. The result is self-conscious, self-lacerating, and self-deprecating, both deeply serious and darkly a testament to what a voice can say when it speaks without intent, with only a hunch that it might create meaning.

150 pages, Paperback

Published April 26, 2024

Reviews

[Katia N]

I’ve read this book a few weeks ago. Initially i did not create a special impression as it felt a bit derivative. I would explain later. But since then it has grown on me. The title is pretty apt as the book is written as a set of diary entries throughout a year. However, it is evident from the craft of the sentences that it took the author potentially more than a year to write and chisel out this work. The result is deeply confessional, reflective and quietly rebellious.

The only issue but the one that was quite important for my appreciation of the text was “the tyranny of influence”:

Earlier in this account I wrote that for most of my adult life I’ve believed that the entities that inhabit our dreams are only ourselves. I added thereafter that I have increasingly for some now time believed that all of the characters in a work of fiction are always only ever the author, perhaps especially when they obviously aren’t, and I further speculated that the characters in both fictions and in dreams are in fact living ghosts whose origin is their author, the writer or the dreamer, so that when a writer finds a particular entity manifested in his or her mind or on his or her pages— or now, I think, writing these words, in his or her dreams—this manifestation forms, in fact, a kind of ghostly visitation.

Whoever is familiar with the oeuvre of Murnane would not need to try hard to glimpse his very pronounced ghostly visitation, not only in peculiar, crafted syntax of these sentences, but also in the ideas they represent. I happen to admire the work of the older writer quite a bit. At the first glance, the views of the author’s and Murnane’s on their characters almost contradict each other. Murnane claims that the personages existing only in his mind are as real to him as actual people. While Knapp here says that any of those characters are just in fact living ghosts whose origin is their author. But in essence it seems to me the same view: the living ghosts mean the same as being real without being present physically. In this case does this brilliantly crafted sentence actually represent an original thought? The author does not hide the influence. It is on the blurb i believe. Someone called him Murnane of the American South or something like that. The problem is he is not quite; and arguably one does not need another Murnane as we have already have one. I accept that writing a piece of fiction does not necessarily need to be original. Also Umberto Eco once admitted that he occasionally have not realised that a certain element of the other writer has appeared in his text until being pointed by a reader after the publication. But here it seems that the influence is domineering for the big chunk of the text and serves more like a contraint and the surface rather than a tool, the one of many, internalised properly into the text Knapp owns.

Another example is the style when the paragraphs are explicitly referenced to each other so the reader has to remember what was the author talking about there to be able to fully appreciate the writing here. This trick used by Murnane requires a special concentration on behalf of the reader but it respectively brings a lot of rewards. Here is example from Barley Patch

While I was writing the previous paragraph, which is, of course, part of a work of fiction, I remembered for perhaps the first time in sixty years an event in the seventh or eighth year of the life of a person who can never be any more than a personage in the mind of any reader of this writing.

And here is a similar trick repeatedly used by Knapp in his book:

In the time so far that I have been writing the initial version of this paragraph and the preceding one today, I have smoked eight cigarettes and have a ninth sticking out of my mouth. I do not usually count them and am loath to count anything else.

A dish of a Murnane with a dash of a Knausgaard for good measure.

Murnane and Knapp’s narrators seem to share themes of uneasy relation with religion, losing faith in the God chosen for them by their families, budding sexuality and related shame, the act of writing itself. The younger author is more explicit, confessional almost. But where he gains with the urgency he often loses with the lack of space for an ambiguity so sophisticatedly used by the older writer.

In any case, I appreciate and share the author’s admiration for Murnane and his desire to converse with the master in his own work. But as a reader well versed in Murnane’s oeuvre I could not help but compare the two of them and struggled to engage with this novel on its own terms because of that.

What has grown on me then? I guess first of all sincerity. The narrator is struggling with the shame of accepting who he really is in terms of his identity and sexual needs. And the author has managed to convey this fight quite vividly. It seems it was not an easy thing for him to write about. But he did deliver and also managed to create a meta commentary on the issue that seems quite profound to me:

Many years I muzzled my desire and spent the entirety of my twenties trying to find relief from it through the outlet of the written word. Instead of seeking access to the inner blur of my own sexuality, I tried to make for myself a world of language. (That sexuality falls beyond or rather outside language seems to me the reason that the sex act is so resistant to literary representation, and is what renders it the least inherently literary of all human phenomena, while at the same time lending itself so beautifully to cinema: the moving image describes but does not explain, while the very act of explanation forms the entire basis of the existence of language. This explains why literary representations of sex that are overly successful, so to speak, are often seen as gratuitous or even downright pornographic, whereas pornography, gratuitous by nature, once placed under the burden of explanation, both suffers and ends by yielding its oneiric power. It’s for this reason, I think, that I’ve stuffed this text with dreams.)

I have to admit that the explicit scenes in the narrative did not do much for me. But the commentary might have explained why is that. And I did think they were necessary to make a point important for the author.

Initially i found an elegiac scenes and the tone of some parts of the narrative rather morbid, but then it transformed in my head into something less literal more ethereal and “ghostly”. I’ve remembered that Murnane claimed to start his fiction with an image in his head. Since reading him I’ve noticed that often i tend to remember a book by a single image (in case the book is worth remembering). And it is definitely the case here. A single image comes to mind when i think of a “Daybook”: a six year old boy is running down the hills full of joy with his hands wide open to the wind. He is running like that in a place where there is no time anymore.

Behind the facade of the tyranny of influence, i’ve felt an alive pulse and throbbing in this writing. I look forward to what Knapp does next.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland, for small presses

Ever since I first began writing this account just over eleven months ago I have wondered what to call it. For many months I simply referred to it by the date on which I wrote its first words: 22 11 20. It is not a journal, nor a diary proper, though it hascharacteristics of both forms, being derived mainly from the raw material of my lived life and my thought-life, occasionally jerking forward in a more traditionally narrative fashion, though doing so without resolving the problems raised by the narrative movements themselves. In its early pages it was full of numbers.

Nathan Knapp's debut novel - which he decided to call Daybook - is set, or rather is written, over 365 days from November 2020 to November 2021, and begins and ends in narrator (and author's) childhood hometown in, per interviews, "a fundamentalist, cloistered, backwoods environment in southeast Oklahoma."

The novel speaks to the influences of sources as wide as John Berryman, Gerald Murnane, Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Mann, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Karl Ove Knausgård and Emil Cioran, but with a style of its own (Southern Baptist Gothic?), relentlessly circular and self-referencing and lacking a linear plot, except that the writing of the book itself, with shame-filled (see quote below) confessions that most authors would leave to be published posthomously rather than published as their debut, is perhaps the plot.

It begins: Earlier today, as we were driving along the spine of a ridge with a far view to the north of that steep range of low mountains I have known all my life, and which I to this day think of as my mountains, my papa said to me that his son, my uncle, had told him that he wanted his ashes scattered here on the day of the first snow of the year after his death.

And a few pages later, discussing this uncle, we come to a key passage, one that both explains why the narrator is so intrigued by this uncle - someone who identity was personal to him rather thna defined by his origins and religion - but also introduces us to a key narrative device - that the narrator is reflecting on, and reviewing, the text as he writes it:

My uncle was always something other. Now, writing this, I see that what I perceived then as his otherness was that unlike the rest of us, he was his own. He wasn’t God’s, like I was and my parents were, or so I was told. He wasn’t my papa’s or granny’s or mother’s, either, though they were of course related by blood. He was his own and it was through this, through his ownness, or so I now think, writing the initial version of this paragraph in the house where I spent the bulk of my childhood, on the night of the twenty second day of the eleventh month of the year after hunting this afternoon with my papa, his father—it was through this fact of being his own and no one else’s that he came to emanate that immense solitude which I detected in him even then, when I was but five or six years old, watching him drive nails into a horse’s hoof.

This is a stylistically innovative novel where one event (seeing his mother naked for the first time) is dated as It was when I was around the same age as that of the event mentioned at the end of the paragraph above the paragraph above this one, but also one where the narrator discusses his loss of faith, the strain of Covid on his relationships, the emergence of his sexuality with all its adolescent, and adult, embarrassments, his tumble into the world of online sex-streaming, but also American civil war history, his religious upbringing and his relationship with his father and grandfather (the aforementioned papa).

Later, after we’d gone back to the house in which I was raised and much later began writing this account, I stood on the side porch of the house in the dark and smoked and as I peered down toward the woods and the river beyond them I saw that I had written the kind of book which would only be of interest to anyone if it were written by some famous or at least quietly acclaimed author. I could claim neither title. And yet there I was, and here, in these pages, is the book. Those were my mountains I’d seen earlier, and that was my river I now heard through the darkened woods. This was my house. Three hundred sixty-five days had passed since I began writing my account. I was almost finished. On a distant hillside on the other side of the river, a pack of coyotes began to address themselves to the not-quite full moon. I stood in the dark and smoked and listened to them and recalled my papa telling me about the coyote (kai-yoat) exactly one year ago. I punched him,
he said.

And with this novel Knapp deserves at the very least to be quietly acclaimed.

Interviews

https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/qa-na...

3:AM: Daybook opens with a quote from Emil Cioran: “A writer’s ‘sources’? His shames”. To set the stage: what does shame consist in for you, and where does it get enough generative power that an entire book can spring from it?

NK: As far as the most powerful emotions we can think of, I’m not sure if there’s a stronger one for the writer than shame. Without shame we have no Dostoevsky. Probably also no one who emerges from his tradition, either, nor most of those capable of being terribly funny: no Nathanael West, no Flannery O’Connor, no John Berryman, no Sebald, no Dag Solstad, no Knausgärd. No Suttree by Cormac McCarthy nor any Outer Dark. Without shame there is no wrath and as such no King Lear nor Thomas Bernhard. Of all the human emotions, shame is the densest. In that sense it’s a good source of literary energy. And yet it has the potential to wreck the entire process of composition.

https://www.full-stop.net/2024/07/02/...

Q: "You don’t seem to have much use for plot. What do you look for when you read a novel? What do you want out of a novel?"

A: "So, there’s this quotation from a TV interview that Bernhard gave where he says—or the subtitles read—“internal procedures that nobody sees are the only interesting thing about literature at all.” I’ve been thinking about versions of this question, or rather the answer to it, for a while, but I guess I’m looking for an intense connection to another mind. That’s all. I don’t really care what a novel is about in a narrative sense. And that’s what’s tremendously moving about a writer like Gerald Murnane—his major interest is racehorses and his file cabinets and, well, looking at stuff. Ultimately, you feel this immense connection in his work to a very particular mind. Bernhard’s books are basically one big spiraling, howling complaint, with an incredible force of hysterical rage that turns into laughter: for me, most importantly, reading him is getting to be in his head, in his soul, in his eyes and even—this is perhaps too much but I’ll say it anyway—in his mouth. It’s the same with Joyce in Ulysses and in Faulkner’s best work and Gombrowicz’s Diary and Berryman’s Dream Songs and in Sontag’s criticism, all the things I like best. You’re inside of a mind. Therefore, also, a body. That’s the attraction of fiction to me."

Extract

https://minorliteratures.com/2024/04/...

The judges' citation

“A strange, sombre novel in which a troubled young writer unpacks the legacy of his religious upbringing. Told in the form of a memoir by a narrator prone to Bernhardian digressions, it devolves into a quietly absorbing meditation on literature, mortality and sexual shame.”

The publisher

Splice is a venture with a lot of moving parts, but there are three main pillars that support its work, each one operating at a different pace to the others…

Splice is a small press
Every two years, we publish three collections of short stories to showcase the work of three outstanding writers. Each collection stands on its own, but we hope that their shared aesthetic will encourage you to listen out for the harmonies and discords between all three. Once the three collections have been released, the work of the three authors will be brought together in an anthology. We also publish a novel during this period.

Splice is an online review

Importantly, most reviews will spotlight a recent title published by another small press. By devoting close attention and consideration to small press publications, Splice aims to shed light on the lasting value they possess beyond the minimal worth suggested by their market price. They cost very little, but often they mean a lot, and our hope is that good, insightful criticism can do justice to the qualities that can’t be accounted for in pounds and pence. Ultimately, then, Splice exists to attract adventurous readers to the innovative and unconventional works of literature that exist outside the publishing mainstream — works that usually come into being from writers and publishers involved in Britain’s community of small presses.

Splice is an anthology
At the end of each two-year period, the three authors showcased via the small press come together in anthology in which they “splice” their work with the work of another writer. Each author will contribute some previously unpublished material, and each one will select and introduce the work of another writer who they believe deserves more attention. These three new writers will contribute their own material to the anthology — some fresh, some previously published — and then they’ll be brought into the Splice stable, commissioned to publish new work in future and to nominate new and interesting writers of their own.

[endrju · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exploration of masculinity, faith, creativity and sexuality that has something interesting to tell, but also undermined by a very flat voice making it a struggle to read through to the end. I am looking forward to Knapp's next, which will perhaps dig deeper into even seedier sides of white masculinity.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ever since I first began writing this account just over eleven months ago I have wondered what to call it. For many months I simply referred to it by the date on which I wrote its first words: 22 11 20. It is not a journal, nor a diary proper, though it has characteristics of both forms, being derived mainly from the raw material of my lived life and my thought-life, occasionally jerking forward in a more traditionally narrative fashion, though doing so without resolving the problems raised by the narrative movements themselves.

 
Longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize for UK and Ireland Small Presses – set up in 2016 to “reward, celebrate and promote literary fiction (explicitly including translated fiction and short story collections) that mainstream publishing was not supporting - work that is innovative, creatively challenging, and a financial risk on behalf of the publisher.”
 
It is published by Innerleithen based Splice – who each year publish three short story collections and a novel (of which this was their 2024 publication), have an excellent online review/author interview section (which is well worth checking out, particularly for fans of innovative and small press literary fiction) and publish a bi-annual anthology “splicing” together the work of various authors.
 
Borrowing a rather brilliant phrase from my twin brother (who is also a Trustee of the Foundation which runs the prize) this book is best described as “Southern Baptist Gothic” – a newly minted genre combining elements of Bernhardian, McCarthy-esque and Knausgårdian writing – and a writing technique I am going to christen a “Shame of Consciousness”.
 
Written over a year from November 2020, and much of it taking place in the author’s Oklahoma hometown, the novel is:
 
Heavily autofictional in nature: although the author insists that ultimately it is a novel, he also makes it clear that the narrator, what he thinks and what he experiences are all very close to home including, if not especially the more embarrassing parts; 
 
Very self referential: commonly paragraphs will begin with comments on previous drafts of the preceding paragraphs as though the novel is being written and edited in real time – an approach I was unsure if genuine or a literary conceit but which I was sure did not really add anything to the reading experience for me – I think it would have worked better perhaps if we had somehow seen the drafts and redrafts) or perhaps I should say self-conscious (as the narrator is only too conscious of the disclosures he is making).
 
The text presents densely – lengthy paragraphs (without real space breaks between them) – which sometimes give the impression they will not end, but which actually have a really interesting structure which only emphasises the self-referential nature of the text.  This is best explained by the author in an interview where he sets out his self-imposed constraint
 

I knew very early on that I would only be able to start a new paragraph at the point where I’d referenced something from an earlier paragraph. Whenever I’m beginning something new—which is usually just hoping that the thing I’m beginning is actually a thing—I’m always looking for a constraint of some kind. Some kind of blueprint inside the work that tells me how it works. For Daybook, that was the structure of the paragraph, which could only conclude once I’d made reference in it or even directly quoted some earlier line. This was both an immense relief to know, when it came to drafting, but also opened up and even emphasized the book’s strangely folded sense of time and space

 
As an aside for a book which majors as I comment below on institutionally, externally imposed behavioural constraints via religion, it is interesting that the author feels the need to internally impose a literary constraint before writing.
 
Woven through his meditations are formative incidents from his childhood, repeated visits to a cemetery, visitations from ghosts and frequent dreams. 
 
I found the first two of these effective, as the narrator returns often to an incident when his grandparents were involved in a car incident which killed a young man, reflects on his own mortality, thinks of funerals he has attended and of old acquaintances now dead and mediates on the stories behind tombstone inscriptions. 
 
The latter two initially not so much – as my ideal frequency of the appearance of both ghosts and of the recollection of dreams would be nil per novel – but in a quote the author cleverly draws both ideas together with his vision for fiction.
 

Earlier in this account I wrote that for most of my adult life I've believed that the entities that inhabit our dreams are only our-selves. I added thereafter that I have increasingly for some now time believed that all of the characters in a work of fiction are always only ever the author, perhaps especially when they obviously aren't, and I further speculated that the characters in both fictions and in dreams are in fact living ghosts whose origin is their author, the writer or the dreamer, so that when a writer finds a particular entity manifested in his or her mind or on his or her pages-or now, I think, writing these words, in his or her dreams-this manifestation forms, in fact, a kind of ghostly visitation. I further speculated that this spectral awareness might be in some way related to the act of visiting the grave of some person known or unknown, named or possibly nameless, though I did not then remark upon the apparent incongruity of the phrase living ghosts.

 
As an aside I note that for the author fiction is very much – for both writer and reader – about confronting and being confronted by yourself and of course this links very closely to the self-absorbed, self reflective nature of the text (no “the novel is an empathy machine” here)
 

for the very function of writing and writers and literature is to bring people into contact not with others but with themselves, and this contact, for most of us, is unbearable, because we find ourselves unbearable, because what we find when we find ourselves is that thing we know better than anything else about ourselves even though we hate knowing it and do not want to know it

 
Recurring external themes include: civil war battles (particularly the destruction of Atlanta), the suicide of the poet John Berryman, the philosophy of Emil Cioran (whose quote “A writer’s sources? His shames”  identifies the emotion which is the driving source of the novel – both in terms of the shame that was woven into the author’s very worldview from his fundamentalist strict Christian upbringing and the shame that permeates the novel as he reveals secrets – particularly sexual ones – from his youth and his current life).
 
And it is perhaps these last two aspects – which are fundamental to the novel – that rather marred my enjoyment.
 
Some of my very closest friends are Southern Baptists and my real sense on reading the novel was to feel desperately sad for the author’s loss of faith and his anger not just at the church but it seems at God (or at least the God who he believed in as a child – what he calls the ghost of God).  And the author’s adventures into sexual desire (online streaming, in person clubs) were of no interest to me.
 
And perhaps this is where the book ultimately failed for me – as the author’s clearly set out aim for writing – to bring me into contact not with others but myself – did not function at all with a narrator whose world views seemed diametrically different to mine (something which by contrast would work extremely well in a novel designed to foster or even force empathy).
 
But my lack of enjoyment – in fact my dislike of much of the book’s ethos - was offset by my appreciation for the literary techniques employed.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFk5P...

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*