THE GREATEST EUROPEAN NOVELS

SOLOS SEEEP – AAA: The Lost Room

 

Solos Seeep

The three ‘e’d creep

The bat-nosed freak

With blackened teeth…

 

And so the ditty goes…. A delusional desire for respectability stops me from quoting any more than this, but I fancy you may be able to imagine the rest. A line or two later we find a tremulously witty allusion to Robert Browning. Further on we see a needlessly detailed, sub-Keatsian description of the gaseous emissions that may or may not emanate from Seeep’s rectal passages. The search for maturity is, as ever, a search in vain.

    There are, apparently, two versions of this crude and insulting rhyme. The first form can be found on the wall of the men’s toilets at the Strasbourg Institute of Arts, wedged in-between the proverbially spurious phone numbers, promising wild manifestations of the love that dare not speak its name all that softly any more.  Its author, need I say it, is unknown. The same goes for the second form, the start of which is quoted above, and which has (in its unfortunate entirety) been doing the rounds at dinner parties and literary festivals for about fourteen months now, beyond the hour, as Poyet once put it, that ‘spirits are buoyed by spirits, as sense takes a dip in the winey ocean of absurdity’.

    Was it Heidi “Double-X” Kohlenberg who, propped up against a bar in her usual fashion, first declaimed the paltry poem? Or did Herr Riecke himself have a major hand in its invention? I can see some logic in this (who else could have suggested such a rhyme for ‘indefatigable’?) but ultimately I am inclined to look elsewhere. Follow my gaze…. A sturdy Roman nose, a honey-coloured hive of a beard, eyes that cut through clay and huge hands capable of cracking open coconuts…. Are you seeing who I am seeing? Yes? Now, look away….

 

    Two questions interest me. One: what is it about men and toilet graffiti? And two: why does everyone despise Solos Seeep so much? The first question has been well tackled by others – on which basis I will leave it well alone. The second question I will now proceed to unzip, unpack and explore.

    What is there to hate about Seeep? Is it the three ‘e’s – described by one critic as ‘a typically self-indulgent gesture from an egocentric slime-ball’? ‘More ‘e’s than ideas’ joked another journalist. ‘Eeenough is eeenough’ concluded an insufferably knowing third. What’s in a name, I ask? Too much, it seems. Funny how the very sound of someone’s name can put you off them forever – and vice versa. Funny and unfair. After all, Solos Seeep did not choose his surname. He stumbled into this world carrying three ‘e’s – and what a heavy burden they proved to be.

    On their own, however, they can hardly justify the universal hatred that is so often, unanimously tossed in Seeep’s direction. The case against him contains more files than this. It’s a large and stately cabinet. I’ll open another folder…

    Hmmm. Could it be, perhaps, a physical thing? Many are blighted with terrible names; others are blighted with frightening faces. Curiously, just as many are blighted with both. Seeep falls into this unhappy category. Drifting out of a book by Dickens, Seeep looks very much like he sounds. He is on the small side, rather skinny, baring a face that would be pale to start with, only to be exaggerated by the raven black hair that sits on his head like the pat of a cow on a diet of black treacle. If he and Turgidovsky were to compete for the prize of most unpleasant looking European novelist, it would be a close contest. Admittedly, I’d put money on Turgidovsky, but that barely exonerates Seeep. I have seen spiders with less sinister an aspect; less slimy toads and, dare I say it, many a prettier preying mantis.

    The anecdotes aren’t all that attractive either. Beneath the unpleasant exterior, could Seeep be sweet-natured? If the rumours are true, the odds are stacked against him. There has been much talk of him being a kleptomaniac. This may be true. Was it at the Sträunhoe festival that I caught him trying to steal a chair from the main marquee? This was blatant, embarrassingly so, but this isn’t always the case. I have a friend who recently interviewed Seeep. It was only after the author had left that she noticed she was one shoe short. He had slipped it from her with his own feet. According to an unreliable yet quotable source, he has a collection of footwear from our best critics. I am far too humble to wonder whether the fact that I have escaped from a conversation with both of my shoes proves this to be incorrect. I suspect, nonetheless, that it is an exaggeration; that Seeep’s bad habit has been blown out of all proportion. It tends to happen with characters such as these.
 

    Are we there yet? Could there possibly be any further excuses for our abhorrence of this poor man? There certainly could. Have I not yet mentioned his bank balance? Admittedly, I don’t have the exact figures to hand, but rest assured, Mr Seeep is and has always been securely on the merry side of wealthy. Many of his friends are equally rich. He moves in – how can I put it? – particular social circles. Bat-nosed he may be, but he holds a golden halo. He knows men who know other men who know men who keep horses. He knows women who think that an expensive watch is a window to the soul. He is seen in bars more often than pubs (rest assured, he has never set foot in The Crippled Bee). Oh dear me.

    One can forgive a man for many things. But forgiveness is never so fickle than in the face of men like Seeep; the sort that, against their will, seem destined to be despised. They are not real people; they are instead carefully designed targets: a space on which to concentrate the petty gripes one has with other, obviously forgivable people. There is nothing to be gained from feeling sorry for Seeep. It’s not as if you’d be glad to have his approval. I’d rather court a cockroach.

    But that’s not exactly true, is it? For don’t I like to imagine that, unlike everyone else, I actually like Seeep? The spider’s web of sub-text stuffed judgment has caught me like the fly I am. Do I really like him, or do I like the idea of liking him? Do I only like him because others don’t? Is there any reason why I should like this greasy shoe-thief: this bat-faced chair-burglar? Ugliness is not an offence, nor a glowing bank balance - but neglecting to locate a bar of soap, or consistently failing to exercise common politeness – surely this must edge on careless felony? He’d have to be harbouring greatness, surely, to be excused for all of his failings. And defend though him I might, Seeep is not great. He is not great at all.

 

    Some files were left unopened. The case against goes on and on. I should ask the prosecutor to take his seat, but unfortunately his speech runs through relevant streams. First stop: the Widgeon Press, the publishing house behind all of Solos Seeep’s books. What’s wrong with the Widgeon Press? Having criticised Seeep for his lack of good looks, watch me throw some stones in the other direction. The problem with Widgeon Press is that their products are too damn beautiful.  Not my opinion, by the way: it’s general opinion (which is to say it’s the opinion of a person who no one dares to contradict for sake of losing face). The official - or should I say officially envious? - line is this: the folk at Widgeon Press are not publishers. They are a pack of designers. They create pretty products. Oh the fonts they use! You could peal those letters off the page and pop them in your wallet as keepsakes. And those front covers! Temptresses all of them. Bookshop sirens. Buy me, buy me, buy me, why why why won’t you buy me?

    Oh yes, they look the part. But what is hiding between the covers? Food for angry critics, that’s what. Celebrity memoirs, self-help books, collected tit-bits, ‘poetry for the masses’, that kind of thing. You may recall the work of the photographer Heidi Jacks. She garnered some fame in the late 80s with moody shots of snakes and socks. She had some fine ideas to start off with, but somewhere along the way originality left her for another artist. It's no coincedence that that’s when she started having her books published by Widgeon Press. This is, you could say, a habit of theirs: they pick up people at the tail-end of their careers and assist them, not by leading them into new territories, but by going back over the old ground, merely packaging it with a lot more style. They say that they’re ‘producing quality books’. Others say they’re the dribbling sycophant at the table of culture; the smart-suited faker with the pin-on smile and clip-on tie.

    I won’t stand up for them, for most of what they produce is dross. Cometh the insult, cometh the sardonic stentorian encore. It’s drooosss. And in this I include, inevitably, the first two Solos Seeep productions. He first worked with them in 1992, if I remember correctly. Motorway Verse was the name of the earliest incriminating product. I can see it now. It was a square book, I recall, printed on paper that made you shiver to touch it. It looked good, you couldn’t deny that. It looked good, it felt good. What’s more, it came with an ‘idea’. Ah yes – an ‘idea’! Seeep was ‘onto something’. This man was invented for soundbites. He was a walking soundbite. If you hadn't met him, you might think him a charmer. In reality he is nothing of the sort; but he does hang around with a lot of charmers.

    Seeep’s idea was this. He wrote – or should I say, constructed? – poetry from roadside signs. Those acquainted with the more recent phenomenon of ‘fridge poetry’ will understand the concept well enough. The challenge is to create something poetic out of a given set of words; words that, in this case, are not obviously poetic.

    The question is not so much whether the idea is any good or not (it’s passable, in my book) as whether Seeep was any good at making it work. As far as Motorway Verse goes, the answer to this must be a booming ‘no’. I seem to remember Caspar Nietcher describing the book as ‘a stocking filler masquerading as Samuel Beckett’. That just about covers it. ‘Reading it is about as fun as being stuck in a traffic jam’ wrote a less original critic (which was, I fear, none other than myself). Much the same problem occurred with its follow up, the equally dreadful More Motorway Verse. Seeep was treading water. No, he was treading air. This is to say he was falling, or about to fall, Wily E Coyote style, into the canyon of absolute shabbiness.

    Who cared? No one much. The three ‘e’d freak was at the bottom of almost everyone’s sympathy list. No one was reading his work, but thanks to the design ethos of the Widgeon Press plenty of people were buying it. Seeep’s position, unenviable though it may have been, seemed secure enough. All he had to do was to continue producing his mediocre collections of Motorway Verse till kingdom come; ever assured of critical detestation, but equally assured of financial (and to a vague extent public) support. Easy.

   
Seeep’s next move was not necessarily a surprise. That is, it took no one by surprise; but then no one was really looking.  He was building on his idea at last, but how many storeys was his extension running to? Enough to get the critics interested again? Not quite. It would have taken a dozen or so storeys or more to get Georgy Riecke (or the like) to even glance in his direction. I did, however, look long enough to realise that what he was doing was, at best, a little more interesting than his previous work. Or to put it better; that he was at last showing signs of doing his ‘idea’ the justice that it did or didn’t deserve (depending on which way you look at it).

    So here we have it: AAA: The Lost Room. The third book in the otherwise resoundingly mediocre Seeep canon. A move in the right direction at last - or else a desperate attempt to poach an audience that doidn;t really belong to him. Which was it? Widgeon Press were up to their usual tricks; tricks we would best ignore. That’s it: turn away. For once, let’s try and see past the design; to peek through the packages to the world beyond the beautiful cover. Are you with me?

    AAA: The Lost Room improves upon Motorway Verse in two distinct ways. One: it is a novel, rather than poetry. Two: it takes as its source material not roadside signs, but the language of the ‘receipt’. On the understanding that the first of these things is self-explanatory, I will drive straight through to the second. This, as it happens, is also self-explanatory – and yet I fancy a tincture of elucidation will not go unappreciated.

   
    The language of the receipt is a language we all know well. We carry it around with us in our wallets. Few of us, however, think of it as the springboard for a novel. Not so Solos Seeep, who in 1997 took to keeping all of his receipts; not for tax purposes, but with a literary motive in mind. From hundreds and thousands of receipts, he weaved a novel. And that novel was AAA: The Lost Room.

    What is it about receipt language that marks it out from our usual language? Firstly, the majority of it consists of items; of things that we buy. The receipt is, mostly, a list. And, as our longest receipts are from the supermarket, it stands to reason that this list contains a lot of foodstuffs. AAA: The Lost Room bears this out, with food figuring highly, though not always in its usual form (as we will see). Books or music can, on the other hand, supply the more rewarding receipts. Though some stores will print the word ‘BOOK’, others will print a full or partial title, with mildy comical results. ‘WAR AND PEACE: £6.99’; ‘SKY BLUE SKY: £15’; ‘HORSE’S MOUTH’: £7.99’. One of my favourites (‘YOU WERE RIGHT   £1.99’; referring to the title of a compact disc) I have kept, as it reminds me of an argument I once, which ended with my giving in to what were, let’s be honest, faintly pathetic demands. ‘You were right,’ I said to her, thinking to myself that I would one day pay for this comment. This receipt seems to suggest that I did.

    Simple in form, receipts are also famously enigmatic. Who has not spent minutes musing over an item on a receipt? What does ‘SF L-F FRCH’ mean? Why aren’t the tomatoes listed under tomatoes? The world of the receipt can be mysterious; a fact that is also borne out by Seeep’s novel – that is, indeed, reflected by the very title of the work, ‘AAA’ being no more than an ambiguous item on a receipt.

    Beyond the list of items (and, of course, their price) we have then the marginal, but nevertheless essential business of the receipt. Certain words are prolific: ‘credited’, ‘debited’, ‘total’, ‘due’, ‘records’, ‘served’ and ‘change’ chief among them. Added to this are things such as the cashier or store manager’s name (always a delight to know you've been served by someone called Zebedee). As far as Seeep’s project was concerned, this last detail, which often seems unnecessary, must have been a godsend. It supplied his novel, otherwise stuffed with several hundred vegetables, with some characters. Indeed, it is from here, one presumes, that he took his hero: Samuel (or ‘Count Samuel’ as he is known, the prefix cunningly filched from elsewhere).

 

 

    Here, in some sort of nutshell, is receipt language. Enough to sustain a novel? Strangely yes. But it takes invention; the kind of which was entirely absent from Motorway Verse and yet emerges, in no uncertain form, here. AAA: The Lost Room could so easily have been a pointless exercise: a fun, schoolboyish tease, given wings by the remarkable put-a-pretty-gloss-on-any-sort-dross tactics of the Widgeon Press. Instead, it’s a quietly effective piece of fiction, both for its own sake (as a story) and in terms of its construction. The power lies, inevitably, in what Seeep manages to squeeze out of receipt language. Though the novel is pieced together from thousands of the things, he is still limited. Certain words, it seems, never appear on receipts. But in having to make the best of what he’s got, Seeep proves that he does have an imagination after all. I especially admire the way he uses words in new ways - food in particular - as in the following affront: ‘I will button-mush you’. How long before that one hits the playground?

    I also like the way he negotiates the driest, dreariest of receipt words, drawing unknown emotional potential out of ‘debited’ and ‘credited’, or to stock phrases such as 'change due'. It may not be all that different to what he was trying to do with Motorway Verse, but it is a much more sustained performance. There the ‘idea’ dominated. Here it is as important, but it doesn't seem so. There is, believe it or not, a story jostling for position. And the ‘idea’ seems content to let the story have its say.

    Not bad for a bat-nosed freak. But if AAA: The Lost Room showed Seeep finding his feet, the balancing act was only temporary. He has dropped the ball many times since. Take for instance… No, wait. We won’t go there. It’s painfully easy to attack Solos Seeep, as you can see. In my line of business, it’s almost like breathing. Taunting Solos (‘elvering’ as I heard someone once call it) comes naturally.  We would best reflect instead on Seeep's brief moment of glory: the moment when, for once in his strange life, he got it right. Underneath the Bunker has, to its credit, always sought out the obscure, but its reveiewers' do sometimes forget that the obscure is not always found amongst the neglected. Great and great-ish things lurk in unexpected places. And I'm not talking about toilet walls here. I refer to books published by a press whose other work is poor, or to the source of the idea from which, after two failed attempts, Mr Solos Seeep finally reached his goal. The humble shopping receipt. Who would have thought you had a novel in you, let alone a rather good one?

Review by Adrian der Linger

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