Xstabeth

by David Keenan

A transcendent love letter to literature and music, Xstabeth is an exciting new work from a writer who, book-by-book, is rewriting the rules of contemporary fiction.

Aneliya’s father dreams of becoming a great musician but his naivete and his unfashionable music suggest he will never be taken seriously. Her father’s best friend, on the other hand, has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs, and moral philosophy. Aneliya is torn between love of the former and passion for the latter.

When an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives Aneliya and her father’s world is transformed.

A short, stylish novel with a big heart, humor, Xstabeth moves from Russia to Scotland, touching upon the pathos of Russian literature and the Russian soul, the power of art and music to shape reality, and the metaphysics of golf while telling a moving father-daughter story in highly-charged, torrential prose.

Genres: Fiction, Scotland, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Russia, Music, Novels

128 pages, Hardcover

Published February 8, 2022

About the author

David Keenan is an author and critic based in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been a regular contributor to The Wire magazine for the past twenty years. His debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, was published by Faber in 2017.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

An experimental ghost story feat. explicit sex scenes, Russian roulette, and an ephemeral muse that possesses people in order to create mystical beauty - you have to give it to Keenan that this is quite a concept! The Scottish author sticks to his favorite theme, music, and gives us a young narrator from St. Petersburg, Aneliya, who dearly loves her father, a naive folk singer, but still enters an affair with his professional rival. Rather soon, the question arises how much of the story takes place in a bardo or in how far it is populated by ghosts: Aneliya's mother has drowned, or been drowned, or drowned herself, or is some kind of sea ghost; Aneliya survived a drunken game of Russian roulette with her lover - or not, which turns her unborn child into a ghost - or not; the lover declares he's a ghost and disappears; and then there's Xstabeth, the ghost-like muse who possesses her father and temporarily turns him into a vessel for music so wonderful, the secretly recorded and then published record leads to a whole Xstabeth cult. Who is Xstabeth? Will she re-appear? What will happen to Aneliya and her child? The questions move the story forward as Aneliya and her father move from St. Petersburg to foggy St. Andrews.

The novella is crafted, as the introduction tells us, as a text by authorial alter ego "David W. Keenan", a Scottish eccentric who threw himself off a tower in 1995. Aneliya's narrative is interspersed with commentary from his disciples, the inner order of "St. Rule's School for Immaculate Fools". These, ähem, scholars ruminate on the nature of themes like "ennui", "rainbows", or "synchronicity" - and these pesudo-academic riddles don't really help to make the main narrative thread more accessible, but they are obviosuly not supposed to. This book is meant to be a foggy, intuitive spectacle on the nature of non-narrative, thus the connection to self-emerging music.

The text also contains several sex scenes that are difficult to process as they contain degrading behavior (and I do say that because Aneliya doesn't seem to experience the practices as kink, even going as far as acknowledging that she herself plays along because she feels like the situation requires it). While you could read these scenes as discussing a sexual awakening, Aneliya remains passive, a projection surface for the two more powerful men she has sex with. Note that Keenan does not comment on that, he only shows it, and he certainly intended the disturbing effect that comes with these encounters.

So this playful, experimental extravaganza is full of wonderful, whacky ideas, but it gets a little lengthy in the second half set in St. Andrews. Also, the degree of fragmentation and the overall enigmatic character is certainly not for everyone, but to quote from the text: "Knowledge can be cynical. It just gets used to undermine things." A challenging read that relentlessly dances to its own beat, and I admire Keenan's uncompromising, daring concept.

[Trudie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I came to Scottish author, David Keenan, via his 2019 novel For the Good Times , a violent and hallucinatory exploration of 1970s Belfast set to a soundtrack of Perry Como. I thought it was brilliant and so did the Gordon Burns prize people.

Xstabeth is something else entirely. I think it might be one of a few books where have no idea what the point is. It is not that it is unpenetrable but rather inexplicable. Tonally, it managed to get all my heckles up. Frankly, I don't think the point of view of a 19-year-old woman works here but for other readers that might be beside the point.

Keenan seems to have been aiming for this kind of head-scratching reaction all along. I at least feel vindicated that I am not missing anything :

I’m not 100% sure what’s going on in it myself, which is what I totally love. I no longer want a book with a point because once you’ve taken that point on board that book is solved and I don’t want art that can be solved. - Keenan, Guardian, 14th Nov, 2020

An odd and largely unpleasant, yet blessedly short end to my year of reading.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

So my books are mysteries to myself. I can’t get to the bottom of Xstabeth. It feels like a living thing to me, an organism. A manifesting of angel Xstabeth. A hallucinogenic love story about a young girl torn between the love of her father and her father’s creative rival and best friend. A detective novel. A suicide note. An attempted rescue. A channelled text. A magic spell. A prophetic book. Or is it?
David Keenan interview in GQ: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture...

[Adding a link to Jonathan's review who notes many of the musical links in the novel that passed me by completely - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... - 'Leonard who?' was a bit my reaction]

David Keenan's novel Xstabeth, and the companion novella The Towers The Fields The Transmitters, are both published by White Rabbit Books, "dedicated to publishing the most innovative books and voices in music and literature", most notably recently Mark Lanegan's Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir which was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, a prize for which David Keenan's first and second novels won and were shortlisted and won respectively. The publisher Lee Brackstone explains the background to publishing Xstabeth (https://www.thesocial.com/gnostic-gol...)

Today, a few days into official British Summertime we announced the third novel by David Keenan as a new season in his publishing life commences at White Rabbit Books. It will be the first novel published at the imprint, which is dedicated to literature related to music, because Xstabeth is full to the brim with music. It is, among other things, a novel about singersongwriters, St Petersberg, St Andrews, golf, and music as a visionary and transformative experience.

Xstabeth arrived with me accidentally. Last year I had arranged for David to be the inaugural Writer in Residence at Andrew Weatherall’s Convenanza Festival in Carcassonne. Andrew and I had talked about the idea of starting a private press publishing one short book a year (fiction or non-fiction) to coincide with the festival in September. The imprint would be called Convenanza Press. Safe in the knowledge there are many files of books in various finished and incomplete forms on David’s hard drive (at least six that I know of) we discussed what might be a suitable title for such a venture. A week or so after the festival he sent me Xstabeth which was then called This is Where the Heart Ends claiming he couldn’t remember having written it. I believed him.

The Towers The Fields The Transmitters (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), set in St Andrews, referred to a local writer and historian “David W. Keenan” who had committed suicide from St Rule's Tower. Xstabeth begins by suggesting another, more spiritual, dimension to this figure and informing us this is the one novel he wrote... this one:

David W. Keenan was a (non-political) writer, teacher and local historian (whose 'great passion in life [was] literature and music, as well as the researching and publishing of the local history of his home town, St Andrews, in Scotland'), who committed suicide by throwing himself from the top of the tower of St Rule in the autumn of 1995.

In the early 1990s he ran a correspondence course that taught magick, tarot and bibliomancy via ethno-poetics and avant-garde literature, which was known as St Rule's School for Immaculate Fools, or SR SIF for short. It also had an inner order: Dx(e).
...
He self-published one novel in his lifetime, 1992's Xstabeth, reissued here and updated with commentary, newly discovered, by students of SR I SIF, alongside assorted addenda.

After a brief introduction, about introductions, by a SR I SIF student, the novel itself begins with the first person narration of Aneliya, who tells the story of her teenage years, beginning in St Petersburg:

When I was small and the trees were very high. This was in Russia. My dad was a musician. A famous musician. But he was friends with a musician who was even famouser. I went to his lecture. The famouser musician. He did a lecture. His speciality was moral philosophy. But in this lecture it was different. In this lecture he spoke against morals. I couldn't believe it. My teenage mind was like that. What. He said it was okay to be immoral. That's what he said. In so many words. Words like 'permission', 'authority', 'refusal'. 'Autonomy'. I remember that one. 'Belief. That was still key. Funnily enough. Afterwards we went with him. My father and I. And we drank vodka. I know it's typical. But we also drank stout. Russian imperial stout 12 per cent. That's also typical.

Aneliya begins a relationship with the 'famouser musician', who is called Jaco. Meanwhile her father's career has stalled, but Jaco arranges a gig for him at a bar, actually to get him off the scene so he can sleep with Aneliya. While performing, Aneliya’s father finds some new music coming from within him, one which leaves the audience (who had actually been lured by the support artist, Donovan) baffled.

But someone had recorded the performance, and the music is released under the name 'Xstabeth'. No one knows Aneliya’s father is responsible and he decides to keep it that way, Aneliya believing that Xstabeth is a muse, a form of angel, who created the music, using her father as a vehicle:

Then my father made a startling decision. I was like that. What. He said that we would tell no one. Tell no one little one. He said. Tell no one. And it was like being buried alive. The arrival of Xstabeth. Like being sealed in a secret tomb with my father.

Then Jaco heard about it. He said to me don't tell your father who did it. And of course the guy who recorded it was telling no one. Under the instructions of Xstabeth. And the promoter of the club. He didn't keep up with new music. How would he know. And the 20 people who were in the club. They were there to see the Donovan character. What would they know. And would anyone remember. And then the reviews started coming in. In the underground journals. Then The Snork began selling the record by the boxload. Then the rumours started up. The rumour was that it was a bluesman who had sold his soul to the devil. At a crossroads. And then disappeared forever. The rumour was that it was a suicide note. The rumour was that it was a mental patient on day release. The rumour was that it was a famous musician in disguise. The rumour was that it had been recorded in a cave. At night. And that the audience had been led there in blindfolds.

But then another Xstabeth record appears, to her father’s bemusement, and Jaco disappears after a confrontational TV appearance (leaving Aneliya pregnant).

Aneliya and her father take a holiday in St Andrews, where they meet a “famous golfer” playing in a prestigious tournament there, and Aneliya begins an affair with him, deciding, as she watches him play, that golf has existential similarities with Russian novels:

Everyone tried to listen to things like dog-legs and bunkers and fairways. And of Course rivers. Small rivers. You can see why this would appeal to a Russian. Or a novelist. Or a Russian novelist in particular. The fairway. The blank canvas. The page. The always up ahead. Like in a Russian novel. Faith. Faith in the future. Faith in the up ahead. And awe at its construction. And the relationship of everything with everything else. up ahead. When you arrive there. And the small part you played. in its construction. Up ahead. Yonder. Even as playing is effortless. Golf.

Neatly, one of this novel’s scene retells one from The Towers The Fields The Transmitters from another perspective – the narrator of that novella was convinced he had seen his daughter, but here we learn he actually pursued Aneliya.

There is a lot of music in the novel, indeed some sections come with guitar chords, and one was sung at the book’s launch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppp87.... And various songs and artists are featured, notably Leonard Cohen – the author added a playlist to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0zo...

This part of the novel unfortunately passed me by a little – the only Leonard Cohen song I know is Hallelujah – and I felt rather like the narrator’s father’s companion who also confessed no knowledge of the artist, but shares my taste otherwise:

You don't like music. My father was amazed. Is she for real. What do you like. He said. Sheila sat there for a moment. Like she had never really thought about it. Then she said. I like squid. That's what she said. Like squid.

And the main structural innovation of the novel – the interspersed commentary from students of the St Rule's School for Immaculate Fools – came across for me at times as cod philosophy and I couldn't connect it with the main story.

Overall – a book I suspect Keenan fans will love (I haven't read his first two books) but which didn't quite work for me. If anything I found the novella (given free to those who pre-ordered this book) stronger. But perhaps one I will revisit if it does appear on prize lists next year (the Goldsmiths and Gordon Burn Prize particularly), and nevertheless a very striking and original work. 3.5 stars

Keenan's own take on Xstabeth:

I have little memory of the writing of Xstabeth, but I believe it took place just after, or just before, the publication of my first novel, This Is Memorial Device. In other words, it was written in a state of possession. And then it disappeared. I moved onto something else and forgot I had even written it. Then I stumbled across it one day while tidying files on my computer and finally read it for the first time. And it spoke to me in an unrecognisable voice, a voice that seemed fathomless, bottomless. I came to the point of figuring out what my own book was about, or rather, more, what it wanted to be. Though in a way I’m still figuring it out. And besides, there is no point.

I have been a lifelong fan of William Blake. I always thought my studying of him would one day pay off in some kind of gnosis or illuminated understanding. But truly, I have lived with Blake long enough to know that there is no stopping, no place of rest, in Blake, no final judgement. Blake’s works are alive, energy in eternal delight, and so are not resolvable, and have no ‘point’ to deliver or to be gained. Blake cuts through literary materialism, which is why he is as alive, now, today, as he ever was.

There is no resolution in life, people simply disappear. Authors, then, are like ministering angels, with the balm of continuity, the blessing of resolution, the benediction of sense, and structure. But as Blake notes, throughout his work, there are infernal angels too, and these, also, have their holy duties.

Keenan reading from the novel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ePx...

An in-depth interview with the excellent Unsound Methods team:
https://audioboom.com/posts/7693891-d...

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

Themes

A Guardian review in November 2020 has a byline quoting David Keenan:
“I no longer want a book with a point”
At first glance Keenan is not being disingenuous, and Xstabeth challenges the reader to pick coherence of any sort, let alone a theme. That said, the thoughts and musings of nineteen year old narrator Analiya Andropov demonstrate a parent child bond in Analiya’s love for her father, Tomasz, (who calls her ‘Little One’). That's my takeaway thematically.

Author background & Reviews

David Keenan has had recent critical success as his first two novels both of which were listed for the prestigious Gordon Burn Prize. For the Good Times won in 2019. Keenan’s novels, including Xstabeth are widely reviewed on release by the main newspapers and literary journals (including The Guardan, FT and Spectator. It feels necessary to acknowledge this, because the Keenan writing style, and subject matter, is anything but mainstream. Unsurprisingly some online reviews express surprise that he is an award winning writer. His is not easily categorised, or genre writing.
Keenan has spent the majority of his life writing up niche, and obscure musical styles and artists. In Xstabeth and in This Is Memorial Device Keenan’s knowledge of the minutiae, and absurdity of musicians, bands and styles are given full rein as a means to explore original, wild, fictional storylines.

Synopsis

Father and daughter spend impromptu, spur-of-the moment, boozed up days and nights in darkened music venues. Adventurous, unconventional sex, and avant garde music flow throughout the various anecdotal stories of strange local characters. Initially starting in St Petersburg Russia, the action shifts imperceptibly to Fife, Scotland, and the unlikely setting of the British Open at St.Andrews. Don't ask why, and don’t think too deeply about any significance! Famous golfers (unnamed) and local residents speaking through combs provide the foil to our father/daughter combination.

The significance of Xstabeth “a name like a demon princess” is that it is a musical composition, secretly recorded, that once heard, elicits rapture from the (limited number) of people who hear it. There are evocations of Infinite Jest the David Foster Wallace epic, in which a mythical movie (Infinite Jest) exerts a compelling hold on all who watch it.
The book is structured in a metaphysical style so that David W. Keenan himself introduces the story as a character who committed suicide.


Highlights

• Humour David Keenan is often very funny.

o “I don’t really like music Tommy, Sheila said
My father was amazed.. is she for real
What do you like. Sheila sat there for a moment. Like she had never really thought about it. Then she said. I like squid. That’s what she said. I like squid. I could see that my father was head over heels” (119)

o A journalist writes that Analiya is the girlfriend of ‘a famous golfer’ “He said I looked like Olivia Newton John in Grease. But it was poor reporting because he failed to say whether it was like Olivia Newton John at the start of the movie. Or at the end.” (128)

o After “dating the golfer” “Anyway he said. Let’s talk about the future…… The near future he said…… For instance. What toppings are you going to get in your pizza pie this evening. He called it a pizza pie. I could have swooned” (130)


• Music

o Keenan is a well known music aficionado and critic, and deeply knowledgeable on the obscure and unknown artists and movements ( This Is memorial Device is a good example). In Xstabeth there are three layers that I could determine.
 Household names- notably Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake ( “Fame is like a fruit tree”)
 Fictional. Xstabeth
 Obscurities, woven into the book on various levels
• The chapter titles are introduced personally- for example Memory in Xstabeth, by Frances McKee; A Rainbow in Xstabeth by Dorothea Wiggin
This is where Keenan has the chance to have fun. An Xstabeth spotify playlist produced by Keenan taps into the introductions:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0zo...

• Dana Scallon- as in Dana. Irish Eurovision song winner
• Frances McKee from The Vaselines
• Denise Kaufman late sixties all-female rock band “Ace of Cups
• Ruth White sounds using the Moog synthesizer.
• Dorothea Wiggin The Shaggs, an American all-female rock and outsider music band

At one stage Tomasz and The Snork discuss blind singer and guitarist Bob Desper, the lost voice of loner folk music who lost his sight in a playground accident at age ten, who (in real life) talks a lot about “timing.” There must be some inspiration for Tomasz in Desper (also on Spotify playlist)

• St Andrews, Scotland

Despite the anarchic, and highly sexual nature of the book, Keenan also writes some passages in Fife that are conventionally beautiful, and despite the appearance of being weirdly off-the-wall, are actually quaint and sweet childhood memories (complementing the beautiful Xstabeth cover artwork/photographs).
Craigtoun Country Park . Tomasz’s friend, Sheila takes the group to search for fairies (!), and they come across “toadstools which looked like they were painted by someone who was half blind”. Reading about toadstools in the context of the book you would thing Keenan is on the magic mushrooms, but check out Trip Advisor and it’s a very literal description.
A Trip with father to Anstruther with stories about mammoth and evolution picks up on the real Puffin Island.

Lowlights

Its tempting to dismiss the separate, introductory, reflections which start each chapter and which do not form any direct part of Analiya’s story. Variously there is “Synchronicity”; “Anomic Aphasia”; “Memory”; “Equilibrium”; “Ennui”. In The Guardian Keenan says “I’m not 100% sure what’s going on in it myself, which is what I totally love” .
Maybe that’s what he means by these sequences.
Looking a second time at “Synchronicity”, Keenan refers to Carl Jung’s The Red Book.. Jung wrote : Synchronicity: An acausal Connecting Principle (1955) in which he analyses synchonicity as a meaningful coincidence.
So it’s possible that to a more knowledgeable reader what appears as random and rambling in Xstabeth, may well be grounded in properly serious academic work.

Questions

Is Aneliya Avtandilova , the St. Petersburg based, and singer (‘outsider pop’) in chkbns (Cheekbones), the inspiration for Aneliya Andropov in Xstabeth?

Too many other questions to mention!

Recommend

David Keenan is an acquired taste. The more of his work I read, the more I like it. I suspect that his next release (due within nine months of Xstabeth’s publication (Monument Maker ), will be radically different, and another challenging read.

I would recommend this cautiously; In parts the prose is beautifully written; many of the references are cleverly incorporated. I look forward to the next novel, and especially to hear Keenan when live readings and performances start up again in 2021 and beyond.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. Don't believe the blurb which implies Xstabeth is more real than it actually is. All I can say is that stuff happens to no particular effect interrupted by random interpolations from fictious writers.

[Charlotte Coles · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolute drivel.

[Ben Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Xstabeth is a presence haunting the pages of David Keenan's new novella, and the entity's tale is told here via the ingenuous music of Aneliya's folk singer father strumming his guitar to an an audience of ten in a club's darkened back room. Their journey from Russia to Scotland is a meditation on the power of art and music to alter our reality and this is a book to cleanse anyone's perception of our dreary workaday world.

[Karen Foster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gorgeous sentences and paragraphs, but a bit too opaque and experimental for me. Many ghostly presences wind their way among some beautiful prose, some pretty explicit sex scenes, and lovely musings on music and literature, as this ethereal story of a father and daughter and their ‘ghosts’ travels from St. Petersburg to a foggy St. Andrews. This lost me at times, but grabbed me again with a phrase that was arresting. Definitely not for everyone, but I would try this author again.

[Pamela Harju · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no idea what this is, except utter rubbish. Was the author high on drugs while writing it? Because reading this sober, it makes no sense.
The choppy sentences and heart-breaking punctuation in Xstabeth itself drove me up the walls. Flipping the book over, I was equally frustrated by the mile-long sentences. It's probably done on purpose, as an experiment or some artistic crap to prove rules are made to be broken, but really, punctuation and sentence structure are supposed to help the reader, not drive them mad.
At least that's X ticked off my alphabetical list.

[ExtraGravy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um. Hm. Interesting.

[Hưng Trần · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Then forgetting too becomes a graceful act. Grace descends and the pain becomes lighter. The memory softer. Grace works to soothe feelings and to quell rages. Grace allows us to separate ourselves from everything we believed we once were.”

[Bandit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ah, the literati strikes. You can almost hear the acclaim as you read this book. The praise for its moody ambiance, its peculiar structure, its wild disregard for convention, be it plot or punctuation. This is the sort of book that wins award and leaves the regular readers at best bewildered.
To be fair, there’s a basic plot here, it’s to do with a young woman and her father. The latter is a musician, the former is…um…sleeps around and gets knocked up. The daughter first gets obsessed with her father’s musician friend and later with some random golfer. She has these passionate(ish) affairs. The father plays music.
There’s another musical presence in their lives named Extabeth. She’s oh la la.
There just isn’t much here, though to be fair, the book does have the mercy of brevity. It’s a weird and thin plot populated with not especially likeable characters doing not much at all. At best, it's middle interesting, mostly stylistically with its tiny brushstroke sentences, but that's about it.
It touts itself as a Scot’s take of the great Russian novel and fails lamentably at that. Just doesn’t have the same soul. Vodka soaked or not.
Overall, this isn’t so much a work of literature as an experiment and for me it didn’t work. Thanks Netgalley.

[Patrick King · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful way to spend an afternoon, like listening to a song through a wall. Best received naively. “Naivety gets me every time. Knowledge can be cynical. It just gets used to undermine things. Sarcasm and irony are horrible. But naivety is the deepest form of belief. It’s closer to reality. To wonder. Plus it has more love in it.”

Doesn’t quite reach the heights of “Memorial Device” or “For the Good Times,” but I think it is trying for something completely different, more impressionistic, more Modernist. In these ways it succeeds greatly. It has a great rhythm, a song-like quality, and the illuminations do a great job of reinforcing and breaking it up. They read like deranged liner notes.

[jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

ennui, brave soul, is just another word for heaven.

ps: except vague, post-modern ennui, which is just another word for hell.

david keenan's xstabeth is a strange, ambitious book: a playful, somewhat metafictional tale of suicided author david w. keenan and his lone self-published novel (xstabeth), included within the actual novel alongside commentary from students of his correspondence course which "taught magick, tarot and bibliomancy via ethno-poetics and avant-garde literature."

naivety gets me every time. knowledge can be cynical. it just gets used to undermine things. sarcasm and irony are horrible. but naivety is the deepest form of belief. it's closer to reality. to wonder. plus it has more love in it.

xstabeth is the story of a father and daughter, of memory, space, philosophizing, sex, golf, saints, fairies, more sex, leonard cohen, a secret band, life as performance, and, maybe most of all, music and musicality. however inexplicably, keenan makes it all work and ultimately wins you over with xstabeth's preternatural charm.

this altogether unique novel, if indeed it is analogous to anything anywhere at any time, is perhaps like the disheveled passenger who mumbles something seemingly unintelligible to you on public transport, whom, at first, you simply hope to escape, but later find yourself thinking about over and over again, in meetings, at home, while eating, when attempting to doze, realizing that said mumblings actually contained some deep kernel of lived truth or hard-won wisdom, however inaccessible to you with your tidy place, square life, and rigid routinizations. xstabeth is the ornate key to a lock you didn't know you were looking for (but now cannot imagine not finding).

perhaps rather than see the self as diminished we must recalibrate our understanding of ourselves as being everything that we let go of. but it makes no sense, or little sense, more appropriately, to say that the self is the sum of everything we let go of and everything that remains. rather the self is what we are able to extract from all that we let go of and all that remains. but all that we are able to extract is all that remains. so, again, all that we let go of cannot contribute to all that we are, except, perhaps, in an empty, symbolic way, which is the domain of certain bad poets and not scientists, though i confess that sometimes the line does blur, ha ha (insert more jokes about science and poetry here).

3.5 stars

[Jack Kennedy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I opened the book. All the sentences were short. So short. And dull really. Aimless. But if I kept reading, maybe I'd see the light of meaning shine through. Illuminating everything. I'd bask in its tawny glow. Like a child in the final moments of a summer evening.
The more I read, the less optimistic I felt. This is art, I thought. This elevates gack to a whole new level. It's pointless and boring and weirdly self important. So self important I nearly believed it was worthwhile, good. So self assured I was almost tricked.
Instead of the light of meaning, all I saw were the sticky stains of literary masturbation. So sticky it was like velcro. Slowing me down page by page like wordy adhesive. Despite this dawning realisation, I powered on. I wish I hadn't.

Wank in Xsabeth: by Jack Kennedy (d(x)e)
Wank can mean many different things. First and foremost, wank is a monosyllabic word, of British origin.
Wank is primarily used to refer to masturbation, which is the stimulation of one's own genitalia, usually in the context of pleasure. Normally, it is applied to males, but it can also be used to refer to females.
Wank can also mean trash. Crap. But a certain kind of crap. Work of self assured pomposity and grandiosity, that ultimately reads like the haphazard spillage of semen upon the page. Crusty, dried, meaningless.
Paradoxically, wank also denotes art of the highest merit. For all art is ultimately the expression of some inner desire to create, to seek pleasure from oneself, which is ultimately wank. And all truly great art exists outside other's evaluation of its worth. Thus, all work of true artistic merit is wank, as in masturbation, as in the fulfillment of some oanistic desire towards self release without worrying about the opinions of others.
The desire for masturbation and the desire to express oneself artistically are intermingled, interwoven and utterly inseparable. Thus, all truly great artists should considers themselves 'wankers', as in chronic masturbators, as in producers of 'wank'. Next time you feel like stimulating your own genitalia, grab a pen instead. Or a brush. Or something that is not phallic. Like a guitar. And make wank.

[Greg S · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a dreamy experience. What a wild ride. Did I always know what was going on? No! Did that bother me? No!

I think I just really loved the experience of reading this. There’s a story and fleshed out characters there but it’s the experimental music-like prose that I loved so much.

“But when Sheila went to talk. When Sheila went to talk she was playing with a comb. She was playing with a comb and holding it up in front of her face. And rubbing it on her chin.”

The fact that that section above then made me laugh out loud a few half sentences later is testament to the skill of the author.

I’ll be honest. This book won’t work for everyone. It will probably piss off loads of folk. But for me it was never short of exhilarating surprising and unique.

[Jeremy Garber · Rating 4 out of 5]

A peculiar and rewarding novel, but not for the faint of heart. On one level, the story of a young woman with a father who's a B-list musician, the story of her affairs with his compatriots. On another, philosophical musings on the nature of love, life, death, romance, and parenting. On a third, a mystical treatise by an author by the name of David Keenan who committed suicide in 1995, and its annotations by the cult that sprung up around him. Was it interesting? Without a question. Am I glad I read it? I'm still not sure.

[Hayley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Probably would have told everyone how amazing this is when I was 21 and pretentious but I'd prefer some decent punctuation nowadays.

[Bridget S. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I give it one star for it being so short. Therefore my misery was short lived having to read this garbage book. Like others have said, it is absolute drivel. A word I definitely had to look up but it is definitely fitting. David Keenan, this ain’t it, boo boo. Droning on and on about Leonard Cohen is not that deep. Come at me haters, this book sucked.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the characters drank a Russian Imperial Stout in the opening passage I stopped reading until I could get myself one, in order to drink along with them. Suitably refreshed, I re-joined them on their tale, which goes between St Petersburg and St Andrews. The bits set in St Andrews made me chuckle, as I had been there very recently. I did not expect to read about the characters enjoying a picnic outside the haunted house where my wife was born.

Overall it had a modest sweetness, big roasted notes with surprisingly little bitterness, moderate effervescence and a long, pleasing aftertaste. Although Gogol and Dostoyevsky were name-checked early on, I found large hints of Nabokov.

Full bodied, rich and complex. Would recommend.

[H R Koelling · Rating 4 out of 5]

A curious book. Both brilliant and perplexing; a paean to Life for those among us lucky and observant enough to realize that everything is and isn't as it seems.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this novel. The staccato rhythms of the language. The harsh half-sentences. The personality of its narrator: young, wise, frighteningly disconnected, bored by the idea of consequences, cynical, naive, loving. The story comes off the page in shattered pieces. Do I need to understand every word and intention? I decided I did not. I decided to approach this rush of linear language as I would a linear work of art in another medium. A piece of music. A film. I don't demand absolute literal clarity from these other genres. So why must I demand that the written word be so blocky and precise? Why not read this novel the way I listen to music? And so I did. The reading experience was one-of-a-kind. Harsh. Enlightening. It's not a difficult book. Just different. It's a joy to travel through one vivid scene after another, A joy to let go of all expectation because after the first page it was clear the book was not going to conform. An eerie and beautiful reading experience.

[P.D. Dawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mesmerising book that casts a spell of grace upon its reader. Never have I felt such joy in being lost to words, or not lost exactly, but beautifully wrapped up in them. Xstabeth almost defies description and instead floats upon a cloud of gravity, often without revealing its own mass. I don't know how Keenan achieved this, but I do know that I enjoyed it immensely.

[Brian Keogh · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m sorry but there’s absolutely nothing I could recommend about this book. I read it in a couple of sessions as my kindle had purchased it rather than send me a sample and I wondered why I even requested a sample. Only for the purists

[Clare Robinson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Drivel. One star only because zero wasn’t an option

[Virginia · Rating 1 out of 5]

A waste of time.

[Leftjab · Rating 4 out of 5]

A much different animal than the other two Keenans I’ve read. Very much feels like a shut the door, turn on the computer, have a drink (or take something) and let ‘er rip. If you’re coming for plot or character development or anything like that, look elsewhere. Some of the more stream-of-consciousness specific (especially of the late 60s-70s realm) are pretty much unreadable but as with For the Good Times, I found Keenan’s voice to be clear and gripping. It seems like he was trying to tap into some feminine side of himself – a Russian young woman essentially being used by men – and damn the optics of what any of it means. And I don’t think it means really anything. I don’t know what it means to me and I know I will never know what it means to Keenan, so if it doesn’t mean anything, why bother?

Well, this might be a more accurate representation of how we bounce around throughout the days/weeks/years – any meaning is not underneath everything we do or think, but more on top of it all. We would assemble the meanings from the words and moments, not vice versa. The characters in Xstabeth are struggling musicians – performers who can recognize greatness but might not be possessed of the ability – though that would not stop them from attempting to achieve greatness – in this realm, that’s creating something outside of oneself that allows others to have a peek at the divine – and if a room full of strangers together feels they’ve witnessed a performance or something that is so true, so honest, so naked that everyone together is hushed in response to what they’ve seen – it’s beyond even the performers who could never recreate what they’ve done, or even remember what they’ve done. Again, I don’t know David Keenan, and I don’t know exactly what he was trying to do, but whatever he was channeling and sharing, there’s something against say a band going on tour and playing the same songs night after night, doing the same choreography, hitting the same beats. What’s alive about that?

And again, I’m projecting my understanding of David Keenan (he creates critics and writers attempting to analyze his own novel as it was written after his “death” – again leaning into the resonance of the created – Keenan avoids any discussions (as far as I could tell) of Art as I feel that the whole idea of Art really needs to become more like art so that instead of alienating people without post-graduate degrees they see aspects of themselves within the created so that to quote David Bowie “you are not alone!”) but I know he’s a Scottish man not a Russian girl. In our optically over-minded world, there could be a backlash for a man to write from the point of view of a gender, culture, and age not himself, but why not? These are acts of faith really, on the part of the creator, to throw himself into the darkness of his brain and to not really worry what comes out on the other end. The characters drink, the sex is graphic, there’s a lot of music, and we wander foggy and snowy landscapes that resonated within my mind’s eye like dreams. Sometimes when I read I underline passages that hit me – usually clever, sometime insightful. I really didn’t underline anything in Xstabeth – it was more of an experience of being in its pages – a whole rather than a part.

Even the title – Xstabeth – how would you pronounce it? As we go deeper into the novel, some other characters come up – Isrobing and Islence. Looking for a pattern in the naming, there seems to be some sort of even occult connection between the names here – pure letters that can’t be spoken out loud or if they are spoken out loud, there’s a debate exactly how they are to be spoken. So if you can’t exactly say what the words are, then they become pure written text, not spoken (or gestural) language and we are back to the space created by the novel in the mind of the reader. Pretty interesting stuff but I could see why readers wouldn’t have the patience for it. I finished it late last night and in thinking about what is resonating with me, I’m liking it more.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is prefaced with a biography of one David W Keenan who committed suicide in 1995, lists his interest in occult matters, his published pamphlets relating to his home town of St Andrews and that he self-published one novel in his lifetime, Xstabeth by David W Keenan, Illuminated Edition with Commentary, reproduced in full thereafter – including various commentaries (as by diverse academics) interpolated between the narrative chapters.
With this I found myself in Russia again, seemingly in the immediate post-Soviet era, though this time St Peters (not for some reason St Petersburg) rather than Moscow where narrator Aneliya is the daughter of a famous musician, who is friends with one “even famouser,” Jaco, though the story later transfers itself to St Andrews.
Jaco is not the type a respectable girl ought to be getting mixed up with. He drinks and frequents strip clubs. But Aneliya is drawn to him nonetheless, with the consequences we might expect. During one of their encounters, in which Aneliya describes one of Jaco’s sexual kinks, she has the disturbing thought that Jaco had performed similar deeds on her mother.
The mysterious Xstabeth enters the story when an impromptu performance by her father in a club is secretly recorded on an old reel-to-reel recorder by one of the staff who is so besotted by it he determines to release it pseudonymously. The music has a force all to itself which is mesmeric but an acquired taste.
The transition to St Andrews is somewhat surprising but gives Keenan an opportunity to display his knowledge of the town. The street known as The Scores - thought to be named after golfing record cards - is said to be a place to pick up prostitutes (think about it) but little evidence is given for this in the text. Nevertheless, the famous golfer – never actually named but sufficiently accomplished to be tied for the lead in the tournament ongoing in the town – Aneliya has met at the hotel asks her to attempt to ply the trade there. It is only he (the famous golfer, who opines that Russian whores are the most desirable,) who obliges himself though.
Aneliya tells us “Naivety gets me every time. Knowledge can be cynical. It just gets used to undermine things. Sarcasm and irony are horrible. Naivety is the deepest form of belief. It’s closer to reality. To wonder. Plus it has more love in it” and “Writing is always starting from scratch. On the blank sheet. Always beginning again. Even when you think you’ve cracked it.”
David W Keenan’s Xstabeth is a strange but compelling confection. The narrative parts are written in short sentences. Sometimes broken up. Into even shorter ones. The effect is as if we are listening to someone speaking to us in staccato fashion. The addition of the commentaries makes David (without the W) Keenan’s Xstabeth even more idiosyncratic. Like the music it is named for, Xstabeth is a genre of one.

[Aaron McQuiston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Xstabeth has something of a life of it’s own. At it’s simplest, the novella is about a girl, Aneliya, her love for her father, a failed musician, and her affair with her father’s friend, who is a successful musician. This is the story that is told, yet it is nowhere near the story that it told. David Keenan has written something that is strangely confusing but beautifully compelling. If you are to strip down all of the elements Xstabeth is a pretty simple story, but the elements are what make this novella.

Half of the time, the reader does not know what is happening, if the characters are dead or alive, if the events are really happening, and there is a question on whether David Keenan is alive at all. The beginning of the novella is a short biography saying that the author David Keenan had self-published one novel in his lifetime, and this would be Xstabeth. Toward the end there is a report of how David Keenan died. There are also papers written about the fictional Keenan and this novel by members of St. Rule’s School for Immaculate Fools, a school where he taught a correspondence course in avant-garde literature. Most of these papers are more about science (mRNA, rainbows) and language than about the story, yet there are things that tie into the story throughout.

You also do not really know if the main character, Aneliya, is alive or a ghost throughout most of the novella. She says she is dead, but she says a lot of things.

What also makes this even more compelling, besides the purposeful confusion and lack of cohesion, is the writing. The author writes his story and it reads like a song. There is a rhythm to every sentence, a structure to every paragraph, and reading this for pages at a time gets you thinking about this as more of a song than a story. It helps that there are many parts that talk about music, from Leonard Cohen to Nick Drake, but in the end, most of this feels like music, like you could sing the chapters of this to your family at a gathering if you wanted to. Even the section about Aneliya’s mother dying has the chord progressions that go along with the story. I do not know enough about making music to actually try this, but I’m interested in hearing what it would sound like as a song.

In the end, this is not a book that I would read for the sake of reading a good novel. This is a book that is more of an experiment, a way of looking at something and reading something that makes you think about the way you perceive and enjoy art. It is a simple and beautiful book to read, but it is not a simple book to understand. You will not read another book like it.

I received and ARC through NetGalley and Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.

[Paul]

I am fond of David Keenan's work. I liked the wayward documentary of This Is A Memorial Device and the, firsthand, black/comedy of For The Good Times. Xstabeth makes sense in his style and canon but, to me anyway, it felt oblique.
It's a book that presents itself, initially, as a couple of different things at the same time. The main one is the account of a witness to everything that follows and the other is chapter points that seem to not immediately connect to anything but which make a bit more sense as you progress. As the book goes through its journey (almost entirely without punctuation, beyond capital letters and full-stops) a young girl/woman experiences the last period of her father's presence in her life. He's a struggling artist and we are driven forward through a fuzzy, fever dream where events happen at random. Vivid fragments of whimsy blend together into a document about art. An attempt to define the indefinable. The point at which art happens, why it happens, and the struggle to get a hold of it again. Bleak and beautiful and dangerous. These things are figuratively personified in the idea of Xstabeth. A muse that can't be contained, just felt as she slips, past you or, through your fingers. Well, that's what I got out of it anyway. I could be completely wrong. Serious art is serious business. ...but also sad and naive.
This clearly isn't a traditional novel. There is a story. It starts, it has a middle, it has an end. It's linear but it's not a nourishing experience. It leaves you hollow. I'm not sure that I liked it but I liked the ambience of it. Its tone is as cold as the Russian streets in winter and as chilling as St Andrew's sea breezes that make up its geography. I found it interesting, at the very least, but if pomposity ain't your bag then you'll probably really dislike this. Shame really, because the little nuggets in there, like the motorbike tangent, are really quite great. Little windows that hook into moments of brilliantly realised instances, like our narrator's nightmare experience in the strip club, that resonate with an uncomfortable clarity. There are numerous moments like that but the way they are tied together will probably put a lot of people off. It also reeks of the black-eyed-dog and the tragic glamour of art at its extremes. 'Peoples' often feel very uncomfortable and disconnected from that sort of thing. So, there IS gold in them, thar, hills but you'll have to work for it.