Indian Himalayas

A GROUP of people are bent over a bundle on the ground –a middle-aged woman and some younger men, including one with a ponytail sprouting from a shaved head.
Gradually they start to shuffle the bundle towards the river, the man with the shaved head descending a couple of steps into the fast-flowing water and with the help of the others eases a large black plastic bag towards himself.
He tilts the opening and pours a cloud of dust that briefly swirls on the undulating surface of the river before dispersing. The shaven-head man submerges the black bag and fills it with water, washing out the remaining contents before releasing it as well to be swept downstream.
The man in the River Ganges lifts handfuls of water to douse his upper body before mounting the steps to the ‘ghat’ – a paved area with steps dipping into the river where Hindu rituals take place.
He briefly rejoins the woman and young men to stand and gaze downstream as the ashes of their dead relative disperse before making way for others who wish to perform rites, rituals or simply douse themselves in the river’s waters.
The River Ganges, worshipped as a manifestation of the goddess Ganga by Hindus, emerges from the Himalayas just a few kilometres from Haridwar.
The city has added spiritual significance because Hindus believe it is one of the sites where a celestial bird called Garuda accidentally spilt drops of the elixir of immortality.
As evening darkens to night those gathered on the ghat release wreathes of flowers with candles burning in the centre into the river to swirl in aimless eddies before catching a current and being swept
way.
Others gather in groups to chant mantras accompanied by drums, tinkling bells and crashing cymbals.
As well as milling pilgrims, and aimlessly meandering cows of course, there are wandering sadhus – holy men dressed in orange robes. Some of the younger ones have simply dropped out for a while but for the ones with longer beards it has become a way of life.
However, away from the ghat the spirititual frenzy takes on a more commercial tone and the streets bulge with souvenir kiosks, food stalls, shops selling mobiles phones, hotels and ashrams.
It’s all a bit tacky – Lourdes or Knock for Hindus.
Green hills rise in the countryside surrounding Haridwar towards the Shivalik mountain range that in turn ascends into the Himalayas.
Ragaji National Park is home to herds of wild elephants, two species of deer, monkeys, tigers and leopards.
In the distance a herd of elephants lingers close to the shelter of a tangle of bushes, a mother and baby lagging behind.
Sitting in a tree a white eagle screeches in the air while a stork, visiting to escape the savage winter of Siberia, soars overhead.
As the day fades the bushes rustle, the deer stand still, tense and sniffing the air but the tigers and leopards stay hidden and I leave disappointed.
From Haridwar I shift base 17 kilometres up the road to Rishikesh where the Ganges pours out of the Himalayas and down through India and into Bangladesh.
Here too Hindu pilgrims gather on the ghats to worship at its multi-tiered temples, but the shops are more new agey and the restaurants, while still for the most-part vegetarian, offer pizza and Tibetan cuisine catering for western spiritual seekers and trekkers who also gather here.
Rishikesh gained its international reputation in 1968 when the Beatles and their entourage came to find enlightenment in the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Back then the ashram included a hospital, post office, supermarket, hotel, luxury apartments and meditation pods overlooking the Ganges but it has lain abandoned since the early ‘70s.
It lies past the last settlements of Rishikesh and there are no signposts to it – a sign on the padlocked gate says ‘No Entry’, however an accommodating security guard (who is happy to accommodate
the 50 rupee note I slip him) unlocks the gate and ushers me in.
Pod number nine was where John Lennon meditated but it is cracked and crumbling now, tendrils of jungle slithering through its brickwork. The pathways are overgrown and strewn with huge elephant turds.
The luxury hotel, the hospital and even the Maharishi’s private accommodation are all being slowly sucked back into the foliage which was once cleared to make way for them.
At 1,500 metres the temple on top of Kunjapuri isn’t the highest in the area but it is from here that I catch sight of the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas proper.
Stooping into the temple to be engulfed by a billow of incense an old woman marks a tilik – a pressed thumb of red dye and some grains of rice – onto my forehead.
Brightly painted, almost cartoonish paintings adorned the walls as pilgrims mutter prayers before coming back outside to ring a bell.
The rituals and the significance of the temple are mysteries to me but the shimmering snow-covered crags on the horizon – Bandarpoonch and Chaukhamba, which is nearly 8,000 metres high – are hauntingly beautiful and I want to be on them, even more so as my superbly knowledgeable guide Chandar tells me about expeditions he has led or taken part in.
We start to descend along the winding road which leads up to the temple but soon cut off into barely defined track of shifting shale, past scrub and forest.
Occasionally the foliage is broken by a strip of cultivated land and a few houses, but Chandar tells me that most of them have been abandoned as people flee the unpredictability of life in the country for the crowded but more stable incomes provided by the cities.
Chandar stops to talk to a group of women gathering sticks and while I can’t understand the conversation their narrow, sinewy faces say more about the lives they live than language could ever do.
This article first appeared in The Irish News on March 10.

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño

Are dark, sinister forces at work, the embodiment of evil, or is the narrator, Udo Berger, just losing touch with reality and experiencing the world through a cloud of paranoia?
He is a German on holiday with his girlfriend Ingeborg in a Mediterranean coastal resort in the Catalonian region of northern Spain.
While Ingeborg suns herself on the beach, Udo works in his hotel room on strategies for a board game called The Third Reich.
He is an arrogant man, contemptuous of the frivolity of the tourists around him and full of self-importance over his reputation as a champion gamer.
Udo and Ingeborg fall in with another German couple, Charly and Hanna, and through them with two Spaniards, the Wolf and the Lamb, who Udo tolerates rather than likes.
He is also drawn to a badly scarred man El Quemado (the burnt one), who hires out pedal boats to tourists during the day and sleeps beneath them on the beach at night.
Charly seems to be going off the rails, drinking heavily and getting in to fights, disappearing until one day he sails out to sea on his windsurf board and doesn’t return.
As events unfold Udo becomes haunted by the notion that there is a guiding hand, or force, behind what is unfolding and is convinced that El Quemado is the personification of that force.
As he watches people coming and going in a hotel “convinced they were at the center of the universe” Udo muses: “What did it matter whether Charly was alive or not, whether I was alive or not? Everything would roll on, downhill, toward each individual death. Everyone was the center of the universe! The bunch or morons! Nothing was beyond their sway! Even in their sleep they controlled everything! With their indifference! Then I thought about El Quemado. He was outside. I saw him as if underwater: the enemy.”
Ingeborg and Charly’s girlfriend, Hanna, return to Germany, leaving Udo alone with the Spaniards and to begin a game of The Third Reich with El Quemado in which the stakes are never defined but which Udo becomes convinced will result in a terrifying forfeit.
He tells the German-born hotelier, whose husband is dying, and with whom Udo has an unconsummated affair: “And if I tell you that I feel something intangible, strange, circling around me in a threatening way, do you believe me? A higher force keeping watch over me.”
This “forgotten” novel by the late Roberto Bolaño was apparently discovered among his papers after the Chilean novelist’s death.
It has a raw and unfinished feel to it, as if he were working out ideas, playing with tropes and styles, all of which more fully realized in his later, more mature fiction.
There are better Roberto Bolaño novels already out there, but The Third Reich stands up well and gives us an intriguing insight into how their author’s world view was informed paving the way for those better novels and the underlying sense of dread and tangible evil that weaves through them.

From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón

Icelandic magic realism, sinister comedy, and dark deeds unfold in a series of vignettes and set pieces in From the Mouth of the Whale. Natural historian, runic scholar, poet, and healer Jónas Pálmason has been exiled to a remote island in 1635 as the Protestant Reformation sweeps Catholicism and pagan superstitions underground. Literally.
In an early tale Jónas, aged five, is swept along with his family and the people of his village to a mound where spirits are said to live. The earth is cleared from the side of the hill to reveal a buried statue of the Virgin Mary, still venerated by the older people who have been forced to abandon their former faith and its icons.
As he grows older Jónas gains a reputation as a healer and a shamanic figure, an animist who seems to share a psychic link with the naked Iceland landscape in which he travels. But from early on he arouses suspicion.
Sjón—deftly translated into English by Victoria Cribb—writes a rich layered prose that, like his protagonist, seems to spring from the extremes of Icelandic dark and light.
Describing Jónas composing a poem on Iceland’s birds with a youthful accomplice Sjón writes: “Láfi had begun the poem, the first three stanzas were his, but had run out of birds and inspiration by the time I turned up. As we walked from farm to farm we took to chanting the poem together. He recited the first verses, which he had knocked together with some skill, and I slid into the metre—slipped into like a tongue into the socket of a well-boiled sheep.”
From early on we know that Jónas has been exiled with just his wife for company. She constantly berates him for “that sort of nonsense that got us here in the first place.”
“That sort of nonsense” is Jónas’s apparent mastery of dark arts, his reputation as an exorcist and healing skills that are rooted in the folklore of his country and pagan rites.
He admits himself that he brought unwelcome attention to himself by “meddling in affairs too deep for a poor poet, by which I had provoked enmity of powerful men with who I could not contend, failing to realize they were jackals, not lions, that they would not be satisfied until they had severed my head from my body.”
Jónas seems at times to live in a hinterland between the harsh reality of his life in 17th century Iceland—the deaths of three of his children and the communal frenzy that resulted in the slaughter of a group of Basque fishermen—and an esoteric hinterland, grounded in nature but which shimmers into other worldliness.
These experiences define him and draw down the antagonism of the puritanical Christians who now control his country, who burn books and execute heretics, and who want to impose their worldview on those who do not share it.
Switching from first to third-person narrative, From the Mouth of the Whale is a story of a man out of sync with the time in which he lives but whose very sense of being is wired into the physical environment into which he was born.
Beautiful prose, sharp observation of nature, folklore, poetry, grotesque violence, human loss, and outright comic chaos weave in and out of this confidently written novel in which the narrative tone is in perfect pitch with the story being told.

Acid Mothers Temple - Auntie Annie's, Belfast

Driving guitar noodles built around a single chord, aural landscapes layered in real time, bird calls, manic chuckles and all-out over-the-top explosive guitar.
An evening in the company of Acid Mother's Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO takes you through gently nodding, hypnotic trance to moments when, if you’re that way inclined, you can headbang your way into head-rush ecstasy.
Yet somehow in the middle of the sonic chaos that they are producing the band members seem to be just outside of it all, gently swaying during even the most feedback driven frenzies.
This laidback attitude was evident from the point of entry into the upstairs venue at Auntie Annie’s in Belfast's Dublin road where drummer Shimura Koji and guitarist/synthesizer (and according to the album notes on their latest album) dancing king Higashi Hiroshi, sprawled at the door beside a table laid out with a dozen or so albums, including their just released The Ripper At the Heavens Gate of Dark.
Lead guitarist and band founder Kawabata Makoto was also wandering round with a glass of red wine in his hand being ignored, or perhaps simply unfazed, by those who had paid to see him play.
The audience of a 100 or so mixed serious musos, people about town, students, hippies, metallers, grunge kids - nearly all male.
The band ambled on stage and spent about 10 minutes messing around with equipment before Hiroshi began twiddling his keyboard to produce those '50s B-movie sci-fi screeches which somehow define AMT's 'space rock' credentials.
The Led Zepplinesque Chinese Flying Saucer from their new album was given a good 10-minute workout, allowing Makoto to flay at his guitar while not seeming to move very much.
Hiroshi seemed to sway, as if slightly out of time - not in rhythmical sense but as if he was in fact chronologically out of time, in a different dimension - to the frantic rhythms in whose production he was taking part.
Bassist Tsuyama Atsushi took on most of the lead vocals and, from where I was, seemed to be in control of the loop programme that allowed the band to record different noises, both vocal and instrumental, that were then banked and replayed and added to, to create an aural collage over which hypnotic guitar and bass riffs were laid.
Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix all suggested themselves as big time influences (tracks on the new album include Back Door Man of Ghost Rails, Shine On You Crazy Dynamite and Electric Death Manta, the clues are writ large for those who don't twig on musically).
Yet there is also something indefinable about AMT, I hate to say it, but a Zen-like quality, a musical Koan in which the absurdity of the sonic chaos and apparent stillness of the band shocks the audience in to a state of enlightenment.
Or maybe, as for the two headbangers who spent much of the evening in front of the stage, it was just pure kick-ass metal to swing your head to and occasionally raise a single-fingered insult towards the band.
If I was writing this review as a Haiku it would read:
Loud guitars screeching
reeds in rivers sway.
Acid Mothers Temple.

Vilnius, Lithuania

Getting lost in a strange city can be unnerving, especially when you find yourself in the less salubrious areas, but having survived the experience it can be quite invigorating and leave you feeling that you have peered behind the tourist façade.
The centre of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius oozes quaintness: narrow cobbled streets, crumbling buildings, baroque churches – both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox – tavern-style bars and restaurants and even clanking armoured guards outside the presidential palace.
Surrounding the old city is a more functional belt of late 19th/early 20th century buildings rising three to four storeys and it was in this area that we ended up staying – a good 20 minute walk to the more picturesque part.
However, Lithuania is a former region of the USSR and that legacy is evident in the outlying suburbs where functional blocks of flats and industrial estates sprawl.
Most Lithuanian street names seem to have five or six syllables which when squeezed into a map can make them difficult to read – well that’s my excuse for getting lost anyway.
The advantage was a long peregrination into areas which were well of the beaten tourist trail but left me with a smug feeling of having experienced Vilnius in a more intimate way than if I had simply traipsed the cobbled roads and the not unpleasant streets leading back to the apartment where I was staying.
Although there is a distinct Lithuanian national identity the country has had historical ties with Poland and been claimed as part of Russia at various periods in its history. The onion-towered Orthodox churches stand testament to that legacy.
Lithuania’s 50-year membership of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is grimly marked by The Museum of Genocide Victims located in the former headquarters of the KGB. Its main purpose is to remember the country’s partisans who resisted Soviet occupation until the mid-1950s. Tens of thousands were arrested and sent to gulags thousands of miles away, often with their entire families and their stories are told in words and pictures.
In the cellars below are dozens of prison cells where the dissidents were kept before being deported and where others, even deeper underground in a sinister bunker, were executed.
During the Second World War Lithuania was occupied by Nazi Germany and the country’s Jews were gathered into ghettos in Vilnius and murdered there or sent to concentration camps. Their fate is commemorated in a small but poignant museum and the former ghettos are close to the city centre.
There are more than 30 museums and art galleries listed on the tattered tourist map which led me astray but quite often these seemed to have disappeared or to be inexplicably closed.
A museum of Russian Art was closed on the two days that I tried to get in to it and a long trek – four kilometers each way – outside the city to visit a museum dedicated to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin also proved fruitless. There were signposts, but no museum, or at least I didn't see it.
Pushkin never actually visited Vilnius, although his grandfather lived there and one of his sons did as well. Neither did Californian psychedelic jazz-fusion guru Frank Zappa, but there is a statue to him in Vilnius anyway which, after a fair bit of searching I did manage to track down.
A 30-minute bus trip took us to the small town of Trakai on Galvė Lake, where a 16th century castle overlooks the surrounding lush green countryside and five linked lakes.
The architecture here is unique and refelcts the history of many of Trakai’s residents whose ancestors were brought from Crimea 700 years ago.
I was expecting the food to be stodgy – blood sausages and cabbage with a side of gherkins and stubborn black bread – and to be fair it was there if you wanted it. However, the menus in the restaurants that I visited were varied and surpsingly fresh and healthy.
A Ukrainian restaurant close to our apartment was a highlight with superb borscht and some excellent fish dishes. The surprise treat was a bowl of cold beetroot soup, served with a hard-boiled egg and a dollop of sour cream. It shouldn’t work but somehow it did.

Tres by Roberto Bolaño

A series of prose vignettes, an extended verse poem and a sequence of short meditations form the three sections of this bilingual collection.
The first and longest section, Prose from the Autumn in Gerona, reads like a series of scenes in a movie—an experimental European one—in which a narrator living in the Catalonia region of Spain reflects on his life and a nameless woman.
The narrator is a familiar Bolaño creation that, as with so many of his literary personas, reflects the life of the author: a Chilean who has come to Spain via Mexico, an illegal immigrant, a poet imbued with a sense of alienation.
Words, phrases, and images repeat themselves to create a shifting verbal “kaleidoscope” (one of the recurring words) that draws the reader inward.
“Paradise, at times, appears in the general arrangement of the kaleidoscope. A vertical structure covered in grey blotches. If I close my eyes I’ll see dancing in my head the reflections of helmets, the quaking of a field of spears, that thing you called jet. Also, if I cut the dramatic effects, I’ll see myself walking through the plaza by the cinema towards the post office, where I won’t find any letters.”
The next section, The Neochilians, is a verse narrative telling the adventures of a young band traveling through Chile and across the border into Peru.
It is peppered with proper names of band members and those they encounter and the place names of the towns they visit. Straightforward narrative is interwoven with philosophical musing.
It opens with the lines:
“The trip began one happy day in November,/But in a sense the trip was over/When we started./ All times coexist, said Pancho Ferri,/ the lead singer. Or they converge.”
Finally, A Stroll Through Literature is the most uneven section of Tres, burdened by an aimlessness that makes it seem as if it was just thrown together—a few lines on each page that are sometimes not all that interesting.
However, there are moments:
“In these ruins, father, where archeological remains are all that’s left of your laughter.”
Señor Bolaño’s writing can haunt, exposing tears in reality and shifts in perspective and there is plenty in this collection to satisfy those who have already been hooked by the late Chilean’s occasionally flawed but always stimulating output.

Declan keeps his cool with twist of noir

Crime writer Declan Burke has introduced a surreal twist into the genre for his new novel Absolute Zero Cool that is earning him comparisons to an Irish literary legend. The Co Sligo-born novelist talks about murder, philosophy and washing his laundry....
A psycopathic mass murderer who plans to blow up the hospital where he works is fairly standard fare in a crime novel, but when he steps out of an abandoned manuscript to confront the author who created him we are in to new territory.
Declan Burke’s surreal take on the noir genre is generating rave reviews – including thumbs up from John Banville, Ken Bruen, John Connolly and Colin Bateman – and the character-confronting-the-author twist has seen Burke being compared to Flann O’Brien.
“I’m a big fan of Flann O’Brien, and particularly At-Swim-Two-Birds – I’ve always loved that idea of messing about with the way you can tell a story and especially the idea that the characters in a book are entitled to have their say about how the story is going,” Burke says.
“You can get a bit heavy about it and talk about how it’s an expression of free will, with the writer being ‘God’ and the characters ‘human beings’ – I mean, if your life is a story, don’t you feel like you’re entitled to have some say in how it‘ll work out?
“I didn’t sit down and say, ‘Right, I’m going to write a Flann O’Brien book.’
“The way the story came out is the way it needed to be to tell this particular story.
“And besides, that kind of narrative playfulness is far older than Flann O’Brien. It’s nearly as old as the novel itself, going all the way back to Tristram Shandy.”
Absolute Zero Cool is splattered with literary and philosophical references, with Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus and even Nietzsche being namechecked.
“To be honest, all that literary stuff is part of the book being a bit of a spoof on literature, and especially literature with a capital ‘L’, Taking the wee out of the ‘literary establishment,’” Burke says.
“Again, it comes down to people taking things too seriously. I mean, Beckett especially, he can be a very funny writer, even if it’s a black kind of humour he uses.
“At one point the two main characters get into an argument as to whether the story is a crime novel or a literary novel and it becomes a big issue between them. But I don’t buy into that rubbish. As Raymond Chandler once said, there’s only two kinds of books, good books and bad books.
“Any other distinction is just marketing and snobbery.”
Despite the literary references and distrubing plot Burke spices his writing with dark humour and one-liners.
“It’s probably fair to say that the plot and the comedy fed off each other,” he says.
“I mean, it’s a serious enough story if you read a short synopsis – a deranged hospital porter sets out to blow up his hospital.
“But maybe I’m a bit strange because that story idea occurred to me as something funny, especially as the hospital porter is deranged by logic.
“Things that can seem very straightforward can very quickly get blackly funny if you push them to their extremes.
“I find it hard to write without injecting humour into the proceedings here and there, mainly because it can be very easy to take yourself too seriously if you don’t lighten up once in a while.”
Burke is well known to the Irish crime fiction fraternity – writers and readers – through his crimealwayspays blog.
It is the first point of call for fans of the genre from throughout the world. It was also a platform for airing Absolute Zero Cool as a work in progress.
“It was great to get feedback on the story from people who were reading it on the blog,” Burke says.
“Writing can be a bit of a solitary gig and there are times when you feel you’re just shouting down a well.
“So it was nice to know that people were paying attention and felt engaged enough to react to what they were reading.
“I know a lot of writers say they’re only writing for themselves but I don’t know about that.
“If you were only writing for yourself, you wouldn’t bother trying to get the book published once it was written, would you?
“That said, it did feel a bit odd at first, because you’re making your mistakes in public – it’s a bit like washing your laundry in the town square. It was a good experiment, though.”
And the writer in the novel who is confronted by his abandoned fictional creation is called Declan Burke. So, any resemblance?
“It was just a bit of fun to put ‘Declan Burke’ into the story, especially as the character is a writer, because the fact of the matter is that the real Declan Burke isn’t really a writer, he’s a freelance journalist who gets to write a couple of hours a day, if he’s lucky.
“And I should probably stop referring to myself in the third person, or I’ll be locked up.”
Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke is published in paperback and as an e-book by Liberties Press.

This interview was written for an first appeared in The Irish News.