Sinister: 'Municipal tristesse'? I like it!

[Nick.Dastoor at xxx.uk]

I'm a little bewildered by this B&S mole who has burrowed his way into the
Guardian's book review staff.  Never heard of this Sukhdev Sandhu before.
Cracking review.  I hope it doesn't lead people to buy the novel and think 'this
is pish - the records must be too'.  I'm not showing much faith in this book am
I? I will give it a try, honest.  I just hope it's better than the last Scottish
indie scene-related novel I read - 'Morvern Callar' by Alan 'Superstar' Warner.
Someone on the list said it was great a while ago, which shocked me, because it
isn't.   Gosh, I'm getting beligerent in my old age.  What will I be like when I
reach 16?


Tender as a bruise
Nalda Said
By Stuart David
Rating: ****
Sukhdev Sandhu
Thursday October 21, 1999
Since the release of their first album, Tigermilk, in 1996 the Glaswegian group
Belle and Sebastian have acquired a large audience of young and really not so
young, boys and (especially) women. They're loved for their soaring, melancholic
melodies; their funny, worldly lyrics; and, most of all, because their songs
speak to the heart with knee-buckling emotional directness.
The group also pursue extra-curricular projects. Most successful has been Stuart
David who fronts Looper and has written two ludicrously charming books. The
first, Little Ink Polaroids, was a collection of sketches of the pictures he
would have liked to have taken.
His first full-length novel, Nalda Said, conjures up the same kind of municipal
tristesse as Belle and Sebastian. The unnamed narrator is a jewel thief's son
brought up by his Aunt Nalda. His father, on the run from both the cops and his
fellow crooks, visits him briefly and spoons him a diamond, smothered in milk
and moulded bread, for safekeeping. As he grows up Nalda goes mad and he
stumbles into an itinerant life, always upping and offing, fearful that his
secret will emerge - he still carries the jewel inside him.
Eventually he finds gardening work near a hospital. Here, in spite of his
taciturn shyness, a nurse called Marie takes a shine to him. She spends most of
the day wheeling around loonies who shout "How are your biscuits?" The rest of
the time she tries to get "Reynard" to open up a bit and trust other people.
Fearful that she's a secret agent, he struggles to break his vow of rhetorical
chastity and tell her something about himself.
It's an odd story, a care-in-the-community fairy tale. Slow and faltering, it
has the artful artlessness of Daren King's recent Boxy an Star. Yet Nalda Said
is far more disturbing - reading it I kept recalling the Gibbons twins, two
schizophrenic sisters who decided as infants to become self-elective mutes.
The novel shows how the stories we tell ourselves to ward off the panicky void
can end up disabling us. It also gives a horribly realistic depiction of
solitude. There's no teen angst or melodramatic self-flagellation here. Instead
we're lured into pitying a narrator who fears human contact, who's unable to
believe people might quite like him.
David's insight into how easily we can waste our lives, impaled by longing and
useless desire, produces passages of rare compassion. This is a deeply
unfashionable book - not only in its subject matter but in its reticence, its
emotional tactility. No matter. It's the novel Antoine Doinel, the buffeted hero
of Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups might have written. Tender as a bruise, it
will be a friend indeed for those shivering in needy isolation this autumn.
? Published by IMP, £7.99



Oh, and to anyone who's not met Arantxa, she s talks like that in real life too.
How great is that?

Nick xxx


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