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April 13, 2022
David Keenan's Playlist for His Novel "Xstabeth"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
David Keenan's brilliant novel Xstabeth is both ambitious and interesting.
Library Journal wrote of the book:
"A philosophical, poetic novel... An open conversation about music and art that explores the meanings and interrelationship of synchronicity, significance, memories, mercy, and grace... The Russian soul and its attendant angst are well explored in this short novel."
In his own words, here is David Keenan's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Xstabeth:
Bob Dylan
“When He Returns”
Which one of us doesn’t long for a great return? Of something, someone, some time, some feeling or other. I am a huge fan of Dylan’s born-again era, especially the amazing high-energy 1979 concerts where he transforms songs that can seem hectoring and full of spiritual pride on the studio albums into joyous celebrations of spiritual transfiguration. Nevertheless, his studio recording of “When He Returns”, on 1979’s Slow Train Coming, is definitive.
Dylan originally intended to have someone else sing it, probably one of his backing singers, and so he cut a rough piano demo as a guide but then he sat up all night practicing singing to it; he knew it was time to risk asking himself – and his audience – some questions of concern (previous Dylan: “you’re going to make me think about what I’m doing”).
What will you do when it all comes back to you? When all that you have believed lost is returned to you, what you gonna do? Well, first you are gonna have to realise that all that you believed that belonged to you, and that has been taken from you, was never yours in the first place. That the light of life, and of all experience - of suffering, and of joy - are great gifts, and are not necessary. “Surrender your crown/on this blood-stained ground/take off your mask.”
In Xstabeth everyone is waiting for a return of the gift that they only knew in its absence. Still, there is only one time around, and one judgement, only, when (s)he isappears.
Folke Rabe
“What??”
Still one of the most uncanny drone pieces ever, this track plays in the background of every single one of my novels, and occasionally spills out into the open, as in my first, This is Memorial Device, where it occupies a caravan like an entity, and Xstabeth, where it is heard, far out at sea, a single droning note, rising and falling, quivering on the edge of comprehension, a single unspent tear.
Bob Desper
“It’s Too Late”
Bob Desper was a blind preacher who saw the light and who recorded one incredible studio album, New Sounds, in 1974, which is the sound of light in darkness. This is the sound of Xstabeth, darkness in light, light in darkness. “It’s too late/too late/too late for the driver”.
Nick Drake
“Fruit Tree”
I am secretly irked by Nick Drake, but my characters seem to love him. “Fame is but a fruit tree”, Aneliya’s dad sings to Aneliya in Xstabeth, and Aneliya thinks that doesn’t sound so bad after all. Only but Nick Drake was a passive aggressive drama queen, is what I want to say to Aneliya’s father, but it would only burst his bubble. Even though Aneliya is secretly and not so secretly irked by her father all the way through the book up until he dies, which she has to admit she has been fantasising since the start of the book in order to fake some feeling for her poor unloveable father, who really was lovely, she realises now, as she sits and listens to Nick Drake in the darkness while the dust tinkles in the candlelight and it sounds like saying goodbye to everything forever.
Leonard Cohen
“Famous Blue Raincoat”
Leonard Cohen had to check into a Zen asylum to cure himself of women, supposedly. Everyone needs a break, Aneliya’s father observes.
Who can unfold a sentence, send it one way, then the other, trip you up with the generosity of what it is trying to convey, like Leonard Cohen? “And thanks/for the trouble/you took/from/her eyes/I thought it was there/for good/so I never tried.” Which one of us hasn’t failed our loved ones for that? Aneilya thinks to herself.
The Seeds
“Where Is The Entranceway To Play”
From an album called Future, where the entranceway to play is the birth canal, yonder yurroughe be the name, oone, an up.
Bert Jansch
“Joint Control”
On Young Man Blues: Live In Glasgow 1962-64, Jansch plays “Joint Control” like the slow ascension of a multi-limbed Kali over a dilapidated Russian apartment block, or a rock club, in St Petersburg, in a basement, in the dark.
Donovan
“Writer In The Sun”
The retired writer in the sun, on the beach in St Andrews, sketches birds, in their comings and goings, in their migrations across the seas the retired writer believes himself to be sketching the same bird, again, and again. He watches as a beautiful young girl in a floppy sun hat and shades takes off her dress to reveal a fetching one-piece swimming costume. No more, he thinks, of the complications of other people. Grace has intervened.
The Velvet Underground
“Run Run Run”
“Teenage Mary/said to Uncle Dave/I sold my soul/must be saved”
Odetta
“Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child”
Xstabeth is the guardian angel of mothers, and daughters.
David Keenan's This Is Memorial Device won the Collyer Bristow Award for Debut Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2017 Gordon Burn Prize. His second novel, For the Good Times won the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize. Edna O'Brien described reading his third novel, Xstabeth (Europa, 2022), as "feel[ing] like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music." His fourth novel, Monument Maker, will also be published by Europa. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
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