The BURIED Book Club discussion

Here's another great 60s/70s experimenter in dire need of reanimation, though he is actually still alive. (Someone get in touch with this guy, see if he has any new unpublished novels from the last 27 years!) Unremembered member of the same, largely Calder-published, British avant-garde circle as B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Tom Mallin, Eva Figes, etc.

Brought to my attention by Declan O'Driscoll, who excellently spear-headed a new awakening of interest in Tom Mallin recently, you may recall. There's very little information out there right now, but I managed to lay hands on a copy of his second novel Europe After the Rain, which was quite excellent (so go read that review for specifics).

Full bibliography, to my knowledge:
Buster (1961)
Europe After the Rain (Calder, 1965)
Celebrations (Calder and Boyars, 1967)
Babel (Calder and Boyars, 1969)
Dreamerika! A Surrealist Fantasy (Calder and Boyars, 1972)
The Angry Brigade: A Documentary Novel (Allison & Busby, 1973)
The Day Daddy Died (Allison & Busby, 1981)
The Imagination on Trial: British and American writers discuss their working methods (eds. Burns and Charles Sugnet; Allison & Busby, 1982)
Revolutions of the Night (Allison & Busby, 1986)

As of May 23, 2013: 20 ratings · 4 reviews · 11 works

Here's a link to one of his interviews:

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa...

A copy of his Babel is available at my local uni library. I'm on it.

A seller on Abe has a copy of Babel described as: "Calder & Boyar, London., 1969. First edition. Octavo. 159 pages.Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper: "Eva [Figes] love Alan - 11.6.69". Figes and Burns were part of the informal literary group surrounding B.S. Johnson."

It selling for £75 plus postage. I wish I had the money, the fact that it's signed for Eva Figes makes it pretty special because she's another writer whose early work we need to uncover.

I've said this elsewhere before, but I hope no one will mind me repeating how indebted I am to my late brother Dennis for my knowledge of Burns, Johnson etc.

To quote what he wrote in a poem called Declan at Twenty:

"Only a few years ago, it was Jennings schoolboy stories
that I brought you. Now I pack avant-garde books:
Tom Mallin, Alan Burns, a B.S. Johnson play."

All I could check out of the Brooklyn Library was Europe After the Rain (and the main New York Public is non-circulating), though I have a copy of Revolutions of the Night. So I'd be thrilled to get an account of Babel. (Or an inscribed copy, but that's really not in the cards at the moment!)

I got a copy of the Summer 1997 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction today, the one that includes the interview to which Garima posted a link above. There are also articles about Burns fiction and two pieces by him, an "Imaginary Dictionary" and - especially intriguing - "Two chapters from a Book Provisionally Titled "Human Like The Rest Of Us: A Life of B. S. Johnson".

I was ogling that as well, after following the terribly helpful interview link (thanks Garima)

Also: just added the stats as of right now, after some cleaning up and removal of three extraneous other Alan Burnses: 20 ratings · 4 reviews · 11 works. (9 discounting the anthologies, 8 if only the novels)

Nate D wrote: " after some cleaning up and removal of three extraneous other Alan Burnses"

Thnks. Should have picked him up today. Next time.

Now, if only I could lay hands on a copy, then.

Europe After the Rain was relatively grounded-seeming by probable comparison. Any given scene could virtually be reportage of actual post-war confusion, it's only in sequence that the narrative unspools into a miasma of conflicting details. Parts where the actual descriptions broke up into insanity were relatively far between.

Alright, I laid hands on a copy. It's in the mail, evidently. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime I read Revolutions of the Night, which seem more directly engaged with its surrealist inspirations, though sometimes in an arguably surface manner that I'm not wholly on board with. But it's a bizarre and interesting book nonetheless, and his prose is quite unique. It'd almost be bad writing in places, if it wasn't clear that he was specifically trying to derail logical narrative flow at those points.

Interesting that you have some doubts about his writing Nate. I mentioned him to John O' Brien recently and he said he was never taken by Burns' novels, even though he did devote part of an issue of RCF to him. I read 'Revolutions...' years ago and can barely remember it. The fact that I didn't keep it does, however, say something about what I thought of it at the time.

I don't exactly doubt his prose, I just think he intentionally makes it awkward in places. It works for his subjects.

I do have doubts about repurposing entire paintings as book paragraphs. I think good surrealism is too personal to have complete symbologies lifted and repurposed meaningfully. Which I fear means that those parts are less meaningful in themselves as they are simply references pointing at outside sources. At worst, a kind inside joke for those in the know. Though they do seem to work better than that alone.

Alternative edition Burns book covers, recently acquired/scanned:

he's got a book called Babel? count me in. count me in anything Babel.

It's rather gibberishical, as MJ has noted, but fantastic in its seemingly intended brief bursts of splendid linguistic-informational garble.

I read Celebrations not so long ago (having purchased it not so short ago) and, in the spirit of this club, have posted a review. Can't pretend I was thrilled by it, since the modified cut-up technique he employed makes it hard-going for the reader without any great reward for one's effort. An occasional line works well, but (for me) most don't. At least it's short...

Peter wrote: "I read Celebrations not so long ago (having purchased it not so short ago) and, in the spirit of this club, have posted a review."

Thanks and welcome, Peter.

Don't hesitate to post links directly to your reviews. For technical reasons, it works better than linking to the book. Meanwhile :: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Ah, that's next in my Burns queue. After the complete fragmentation of Babel, I supect may actually find even the rough outlines of plot quite refreshing. Though I though Babel was often pretty fantastic in its own weird non-narrative way.

Alan Burns died earlier this year. Guardian obit (by his brother Peter):

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014...

Thanks for the link. Perhaps I'll finally read Celebrations this week, then, in memorium. I recently found out that he worked on short films with Peter Whitehead in the 60s, as well -- would be interesting to see those...

Last week I read and reviewed Burns's novel Europe After the Rain. This book had been on my tbr list for several years, ever since Nate D published his excellent review back in 2013. That review remained the book's first and only one on GR until I just posted mine nearly three years later. Given the interest Nate's review stirred at the time, I can only assume that its continued lack of ratings and reviews is due to its near absence from the used market. I checked out a copy from the library (via interlibrary loan), as I believe Nate also did. It's too bad this book isn't more readily available for purchase, as I do think it would appeal to many fans of Kavan's Ice, and there are plenty of those folks on GR. The narrative is even less straightforward than in Ice but I found it no less compelling. Burns used cut-up techniques, which explains, at least in part, the highly fractured nature of the narrative (details on Burns's source material and method for Europe After the Rain included in my review).

Sean wrote: "Last week I read and reviewed Burns's novel Europe After the Rain. This book had been on my tbr list for several years, ever since Nate D published his excellent review back in 2013. That review re..."

Yes! And you remind me that I've still got his Daddy Died book unread on my shelf all this time!

Yeah, I'm curious about that one, as an example of later Burns. I haven't found out much about it yet.

The situation with this book is also relevant to parts of the sprawling comments section beneath your recent status update about buried books. I do think if more copies of it were floating around that it would've gained a spike in GR readership by now.

Sean wrote: "The situation with this book is also relevant to parts of the sprawling comments section beneath your recent status update about buried books. I do think if more copies of it were floating around that it would've gained a spike in GR readership by now. "

Yeah, I heard echoes of that conversation in your comment. Some of these things are so deeply BURIED...

Thanks for posting here, Sean, as I might have missed your review otherwise, and this is a book I always want to revisit. Especially with your insights -- I had no idea how exactly it was composed, but it felt rigorous and concretely procedural, even as it generated amorphous landscapes of malaise and miasma. I've read most of Burns' ouevre since this one (most are far more acquirable), but this is still easily his best. Not that the others are bad by any means, but this feels much more urgent.

For what it's worth, Burns mentions that Celebrations was his own personal favorite (quoted in the RCF interview with David Madden, previously posted in this thread by Garima but the link is now broken). For those who haven't read it, it's a fascinating interview, in which they discuss all of his novels, and Burns talks a lot about process in a very open and gregarious manner. Unfortunately it cuts off at the end in the middle of Burns talking about how hard he finds it to write, being a page counter from page one, which is one reason he relies so much on 'all these aids and tricks—cut-up, pictures, etc.' In particular I found it interesting how he said he'd prop up a book of painting reproductions next to his typewriter and type up descriptions of what he saw, incorporating this into the text of whatever novel he was working on.

I spotted two of those very specifically in Revolutions of the Night. One Ernst collage, one Magritte painting that also turns up in Robber-Grillet's La Belle Captive. After that I had suspicions about many other scenes, but I never quite pinned down the others.

I jut want to note that MJ seems to be working through the entire Burns catalog this year, with more success in finding copies that I ever did. Go marvel at his review of Dreamerika! immediately.

^ Thanks, Nate. VPress is planning to reissue all AB next year in two omnibuses. At last, this remarkable writer will be back in print!

That is truly wonderful news. I will treasure my copies of Celebrations and Babel always, but will be thrilled to lay hands on reprints of the others. I stopped buying books for a while due to oversaturation of unread works, but I really need to catch up on Verbivoraceous soon.

MJ wrote: "^ Thanks, Nate. VPress is planning to reissue all AB next year in two omnibuses. At last, this remarkable writer will be back in print!"

Cool. Keep us posted.

. . . and so now we have volume one, The Alan Burns Omnibus: Volume One, featuring his first four novels. And volume two to come in September.

MJ wrote: ". . . and so now we have volume one, The Alan Burns Omnibus: Volume One, featuring his first four novels. And volume two to come in September."

Nice. So volume one's got ::
Buster
Europe After the Rain
Celebrations
Babel

What titles for volume the second?

Vol 2.:
Dreamerika! A Surrealist Fantasy
The Angry Brigade: A Documentary Novel
The Day Daddy Died
Revolutions of the Night

Thanks for the update, MJ. Great to see Mr. Burns back in print!

Wow, even Buster. In all of these, I never even suspected that would reappear. I've only read half, in all!