Robert Collins

Thursday

9 Jun 2016
Robert Collins

One country, two worlds

In October 1964, Charles de Gaulle visited Brazil. The country was six months into its military dictatorship. In April of that year, there had been a relatively bloodless coup against the sitting president, João Goulart, who one morning found a tank pointing its muzzle at his residence in Rio. The ensuing military regime lasted for two decades,and routinely tortured its dissidents. One of those tortured was a 22-year-old female member of a militant guerrilla group who was arrested in 1970 and subjected to paddle beatings and electric shocks to her ears, feet, breasts and thighs. Today, she is president. This is Brazil’s fairy tale. Except that Dilma Rousseff is now being unseated in her own coup, after the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house in the National Congress) voted last month to impeach her.

One country, two worlds

Thursday

4 Jun 2015
Robert Collins

A triumphant failure

I must be an idiot for pointing out the failings of a novel that’s so screamingly, self-denouncingly about failure. Steve Toltz’s Quicksand is a nutty, occasionally hilarious, flaccid carrier bag of a comic romp, all dazzling one-liners and no comic paydirt. Like his debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole (about a misfit philosopher and his troubled son), it is narrated by a pair of human catastrophes: a New South Wales police constable, Liam Wilder, who’s a failed novelist; and his best friend, Aldo Benjamin, who’s a failed husband, entrepreneur, everything. Toltz probably intended this novel to be a failure. It’s that difficult beast, his second book, after all (his first made the shortlists of the Man Booker and the Guardian First Book Award).

A triumphant failure

Thursday

26 Mar 2015
Robert Collins

Miranda July may be a film director, performance artist, sculptor and designer — but she is no novelist

Miranda July is a funny and brilliant film director, performance artist, sculptor and smartphone app designer. In 2005, she won the Best First Feature award at Cannes for her debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. Two years later, she picked up the Frank O’Connor short story award for her debut collection No One Belongs Here More Than You. She has been feted at the Venice Biennale for her artworks and last year released an app called Somebody, which encourages users to deliver messages verbally to strangers. Now, she has published The First Bad Man, her debut novel. I know: a novel. After conquering every arthouse peak imaginable, it seems surprising that July should give a fig about such a retrograde form.

Miranda July may be a film director, performance artist, sculptor and designer — but she is no novelist

Thursday

30 Oct 2014
Robert Collins

Cronenberg attempts a teleportation from cinema to fiction. Cover your eyes…

Following his beginnings as a science-fiction horror director, David Cronenberg has spent the past decades transforming himself into one of cinema’s most literary filmmakers. He has adapted for the screen — often brilliantly — novels by J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs and Don DeLillo. In each, he has paraded his obsession with lurid mutations in human form wrought by technology, disease and the imagination. In Crash (1996), he had bodies melding with machinery. In Naked Lunch (1991), he had bodies melding with insects — plus insects melding with typewriters. Most memorably, in his biggest commercial success, The Fly (1986), he had Jeff Goldblum melding with a housefly — after Goldblum’s scientist, attempting to teleport himself, failed to spot that winged hitchhiker had joined him for the ride in his teleportation device.

Cronenberg attempts a teleportation from cinema to fiction. Cover your eyes…

Tuesday

9 Sep 2014
Robert Collins

The Man Booker hoicks itself back on to the plinth of respectability with this shortlist

Remember when the Man Booker prize was as reputable as the Queen? When it served as the nation’s literary oracle? When nobody thought about doubting its authority because its juries were, well, made up of clever, well-read people who knew what was crap and what wasn’t and so dependably sifted out, every year, the best novels for everyone else? Well, heave back the hands of time. It’s just possible that today, after a shonky, near-horrific few years of the prize — following its annus horribilis of 2011, when chair of judges Stella Rimington steered her panel towards the award’s weirdest, crappest shortlist in living memory — the Man Booker might finally be hoicking itself back on to the plinth of respectability upon which it once rested its reputable literary rump.

The Man Booker hoicks itself back on to the plinth of respectability with this shortlist

Thursday

4 Sep 2014
Robert Collins

How on earth did David Mitchell’s third-rate fantasy make the Man Booker longlist?

Reincarnation has hovered over David Mitchell’s novels since the birth of his remarkable career. His haunting debut novel, Ghostwritten (1999), featured a disembodied spirit that wandered around making itself at home in other people’s souls. Transmigration spread throughout that book — the lives of its characters intertwined in brilliantly intricate ways — and has continued to throughout Mitchell’s fiction. When his characters aren’t being reborn as new people in one book, they’re turning up alive and well for a second outing in another. His latest, The Bone Clocks, continues the cycle of endless rebirth. Like four out of five of his earlier works, this supernatural, intertwining epic has made it onto the Man Booker longlist.

How on earth did David Mitchell’s third-rate fantasy make the Man Booker longlist?
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