Later Books
Stet (2006), Chapman's most ambitious book to date, takes the form of a bitter "Russian novel" about an ecstatic and weirdly oblivious Soviet filmmaker and painter, who ends up in prison camp as punishment for his private and antisocial tendencies.
How is This Going to Continue? (2007), a shorter work in the form of an oratorio libretto, seems to carry the artist-figure, a composer this time, further into private grief and alienation. The subject of this "libretto" is the death of the composer's wife, followed by the composer's own death. The novel, if such it is, consists entirely of quotations from other sources (many of which are, however, invented).
Degenerescence (2009) appears as a kind of endpoint of this alienated phase, where the author has finally turned away from the last of his own recognizable mannerisms, in favor of pseudo-ancient repetitive incantation about how the invention of narrative story causes the destruction of the hymn foundation of the world: what might be called a home-made Sumerian myth.
The Rat Veda (2010), for all its dire setting (its "hero" is a rat in the subway), in fact marks a change for the brighter, in that as the rat waits to transcend his self-made imprisonment, he worships beauty in the form of an idealized love, a dancer who seems to exist just over his head.
Qurratulain (2012) might be seen as the last in a "religious" trilogy (Degenerescence having drawn imagery from Sumerian myth, and The Rat Veda from devotional Hinduism). A Christian priest in the time of the monastic Desert Fathers falls in love with the title character, and together they go to the desert to pray and argue with God. As in Rat Veda, beauty and ecstatic love seem to outweigh all other aspects of existence.
Read more about this topic: James Chapman (author)
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