YEAH, MORE OF THAT KIND OF THING

I was recently directed to a curious piece by Alejandro Chacoff on the New Yorker website. It’s a kind of review of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s book To Walk Alone in the Crowd. I admit I’d never heard of either of these authors.

The piece was titled ‘Is the Digital Age Costing Us Our Ability to Wander?’ – which suggests that nobody at the website is aware of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: ‘Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.’ To be fair, in the print magazine it was titled ‘Doom Strolling.’ As for the piece itself, it’s extraordinary just how many of the usual suspects Chacoff manages to cram into the first 900 words of the piece before mentioning Molina’s book. These include Virginia Woolf, Sebald, de Certeau, Baudelaire, Benjamin et al. 

 The reason for Chacoff’s delay in getting round to talking about the book is because he obviously doesn’t rate it. He writes that the book’s ‘excursions into literary history lend the proceedings a certain gravitas, but they also highlight the relative monotony of the narrator’s own wanderings.’ Ouch. Glad the monotony is only relative.’ It is apparently a book of fragments, which sounds reasonable enough to me, but Chacoff says, ‘The use of fragments is not uncommon among flâneurs, but Muñoz Molina’s set pieces read as mere compilations of visual and sonic data, with no thread looping through them, no enigma being circled.’ Do walkers need to circle enigmas? I didn’t know that. This is Molina (he looks like a walker):

Chacoff also says, ‘In the age of Google Maps, it is difficult to follow Benjamin’s exhortation to get lost,’ a sentiment I hear all the time, and it strikes me as absolute nonsense. I have never been so lost as when trusting and following directions on a phone. Chacoff again, ‘Throughout the book, it is difficult to tell which city the wandering narrator is in unless he explicitly names it. There may be a tacit critique in this approach: have big cities across the globe become products, too, soulless and interchangeable?’ (To which again any sane person would answer no). This leads Chacoff to conclude, ‘Still, there is something self-defeating in an homage to flânerie that offers little sense of place.’ And there I think he does have a point. 

 I haven’t read Molina’s book as yet but I'm sure I will. In the meantime I ‘looked inside’ on Amazon and was rather taken by this passage; ‘I read every word that meets the eyes as I walk by. Fire Department Only. Premises Under Video Surveillance. We Pay Cash for Your Car … Do not leave plastic containers outside the trash bin. No Pedestrian traffic. Enjoy our cocktails.’ That’s exactly what I do. I thought it was what everybody did.