Yesterday I instagram posted the photo below of the first page of Roberto Bolano’s story Sensini from the collection ‘Last Evenings on Earth’. The story had impressed me but mainly I thought I had to post something. To say I’m not a natural on instagram would be like saying ravens aren’t natural underwater swimmers. But ravens don’t have to swim underwater (except in Peter Cook sketches), whereas a social media presence is sine qua non for writers these days.
Maybe some people hate Bolano for a reason I love him: his narrators are almost always struggling writers. But one thing they didn’t have to struggle with was social media, and sometimes their struggles seem to help them write. My favourite lines from that page are:
“…and I had just lost my job as a nightwatchman in a Barcelona campsite, a job that had exacerbated my tendency not to sleep at night. I had practically no friends and all I did was write and go for long walks…”
Reading this provoked in me a ludicrous feeling of jealousy: if only I could flit between stints of meaningless employment, friendless and insomniac – then I might be able to write!
It tallied with one of the other short story collections I’m reading at the moment (I’m finding it refreshing to alternate between different ones, as opposed to the long time in one writer’s company you get with a novel). This is Camilla Grudova’s ‘The Coiled Serpent’: Mad, dark stories, quite a few of them about terrible jobs or bosses or both.
In Avalon, the narrator resigns from a second hand bookshop because of the seedy owner’s unwanted approaches, only to end up working in a basement sauna that takes filth and sordidness to comic extremes. Other stories feature a maid for a poisonous chemical manufacturer, exploited workers at a custard factory, and a museum curator so poor she has to sleep in the museum. Spectacular acts of revolt are the common thread in these stories of dreadful, precarious labour.
I used to do such jobs myself. In fact I think I might have worked once, for less than minimum wage, in the bookshop that inspired Grudova’s story (though in my case what drove me to quit was the owner’s insistence that ‘the new boy’ categorise his collection of paper clips in different jars). These days however, my job that isn’t writing is both meaningful and pays the bills. I teach English in a college, mostly to refugees and asylum seekers. It has its soul-destroying adminny side, but at the core of it you’re helping people who’ve fled terrible situations settle and build new lives. It’s far more than just teaching a language. Among the other things you end up doing are helping find jobs, writing references and organising football teams. You do all this because you care, no different from school teachers who care about their pupils. That job, too, is probably incompatible with writing now, even though the likes of William McIlvanney and Iain Crichton Smith used to combine it with a prolific output. But that was the 1970s, and now I think teachers have a lot more to deal with. As do writers.
Technology is in no small part to blame. Yanis Varoufakis makes this point: what is supposed to liberate us ends up enslaving us – and yet we can’t turn away from it. I suppose I’ll keep feeling compelled to make at least the occasional post on Instagram. And since I’m not insane, I won’t quit my meaningful job to find a meaningless, minimum wage one as a nightwatchman or sauna attendant. The best I can do is get better at saying no to extra hours. Then for at least two days a week put my phone in another room and try to be like one of Bolano’s narrators.
T.Y. Garner Writer 