Gaudy Bauble

"Isabel Waidner is a debut writer published by a very small press in Manchester. I discovered her and Dostoyevsky Wannabe, which specialises in beautifully designed avant-garde literature, at the same time. What I was immediately struck by was her joyful linguistic playfulness. It seems a radical act. “Absurdism is completely out there – it’s about clashing and bright colours and over-the-top metaphors” Waidner and I talk – mostly on Twitter – and she tweeted to me once that avant-garde literature will come from women and writers of colour and queer writers. We were talking about the difficulty of radical writing and conservatism of form: radical standpoints don’t always produce the stylistically or structurally innovative writing that would seem the logical extension of such standpoint . But Waidner’s language is a joyful assault on sense, that she doesn’t try too hard to explain in any way, and she throws in the odd brand name or place name – like Brixton – and we hold on to it for some kind of anchorage. And then she puts in a lot of words that are just made up – there are whole sentences that just switch back, and she uses real things to refer to not-real things, and not-real things to refer to real things… And she builds up this whole posited world of a “Socialist Britain”, where [the TV channel] Channel 4’s entire remit is to produce increasingly diverse programmes. It’s a very funny, affectionate and satirical take on the very idea of diversity politics. It’s very funny and full of terrible puns, and then you realise that some bits do mean something specific and that she’s stealth-building a kind of taxonomy of queer cultural history. But on another level her writing is about words interacting with words and about language being as important in driving the narrative as character and physical setting. I love the exclamatory nature of the writing, and that’s something that’s more specifically to do with her than with absurdism as a whole. Her writing behaves like speech – it has this kind of momentum, with lots of exclamation marks and very little redundancy – there’s no time for ‘he said, she said’. And we are expected, as readers, to keep up. What I like in all of the books I have chosen is the exhilarating reading experience. It’s a wonderful way to read. It’s something I’m always thinking about – as all writers are, really – not just about absurdist literature but about literature in general: what can writing do, especially in this increasingly sharp political climate? To go back to Viktor Shlovsky, he wrote an essay in 1954 about writing and propaganda. He said that, happily, it is difficult to use writing as propaganda because it’s like trying to use a samovar to hammer in nails. “It’s nice to think that writing is too slippery to easily be used for propaganda, but this means it’s also difficult to use for more laudable political aims” It’s nice to think that writing is too slippery to easily be used for propaganda, but this means it’s also difficult to use for more laudable political aims. Absurdist writing, with its mix of violent joy, can express and stir up discontent, but its delight in the structure of language and the materiality of words, means it is impossible to harness in the service of anything in particular."