The Fuck Up

So there's a trend developing here! I finish yet another book on the Paddington train. This one (The Fuck Up by Arthur Nersesian) however could not be more different from the last one (Black Swans). I swapped psuedo business economic philospophy for fiction and the zeitgiest!

There's always a strange emotional reaction I have when finishing a book - or I guess finishing anything for that matter. But this book and the reaction I had to it was particularly strange. Why? Well I originally bort it a few years back and read about a quarter of it at the time. The quarter of it I did read didnt blow me away but at the same time didnt put me off that much - but something came up and made me drop it. Anyway after searching around for the next book to read I think I saw something on Amazon (one of those if you've read this you'll like this) things that referenced this book which got me thinking and motivated me to find it. This would have perhaps been impossible at any other time but as I'm furiously rifling through all my posessions at the moment and making the life/death decision of what goes and what I keep (what goes is getting posted straight on ebay where I'm now up to 59 sales!) due to my upcoming Sydney adventure, I managed to find it.

And delving back in it all came back to me. It's such a strange and difficult to describe book. The story, as the tile suggests, is quite a downbeat one. Basically it's the "darkly hilarious odyssey" (as the cover puts it quite aptly) of an "anonymous slacker" who is a:

"perennial couch surfer, an aspiring writer, searching for himself in spite of himself, and he's just trying to survive. But life has other things in store for the fuck-up. From being dumped by his girlfried to getting fired for asking for a raise, from falling into a robbery posing as a gay man to keep his job at a porno theatre, the fuck-up's tragi-comedy is perfectly realized by Arthur Nersesian who manages to create humour and suspense out of urban desporation."

So its a bit of a cop out quoting a back cover like that I know but... it hopefully in a few simple lines gives you the jist of what the book is about. But there's a few things about it that still sit oddly for me. The book isn't really funny despite the jacket claiming it is. In the same way it kind of sits oddly between the realistic and fantastic. Somehow its neither. And our main character likewise seems to straddle the position of having our sympathy and at other times just frustrating us. I guess in the end its this awkwardness, this tension in the text that drew me to it.

There is also some beautiful writing. Strangely this only really starts to come to the fore in the second half of the book where it seems to give up on trying to be funny and gets down and dirty in the more tragic stuff. Some great lines that jump out at me when I flick back through include:

"Greed has no patience, and there are no claims from beyond the grave". P150

"Helmsley: My mentor, that athlete of the mind whose passion was rivalled only by his logic, a minor twentieth century New York philosopher who had unfailingly caught me whenever I dropped from my tightrope. He was dead.
I didnt have energy in me commensurate to the loss. I sat on his bed and carefully labored to conjure, summon, recollect, and sythesize all the nuances twoard the identitiy of Helmsley Micinski; to address his distinctions, and why in a world of five billion he was indispensable, and how mankind somehow would never solidly complete its final purpose - whatever that might be - because of his robbed life. But most of all, I tried appraising how much of me was Helmsley: how much of my own thought syntax and spiritual matrix was traceable to him, was him? All of this stewed in that greasy pot of agony." P151