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Stretto
Stretto is both a story of travel and migration, moving between Ireland, England and Scotland over a twenty-year period, and an exploration of the nature of self and reality. A stained-glass window in a country church offers a portal of light in the darkness, and the narrator follows wherever it leads. Reconnecting with the modernist energies of Joyce and Beckett, Stretto is a radical and audacious debut novel.
214 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2022
About the author
David Wheatley
20 booksDavid Wheatley (born 1970) is an Irish poet and critic. He was born in Dublin and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus. Wheatley is the author of four volumes of poetry with Gallery Press, as well as several chapbooks. He has also edited the work of James Clarence Mangan, and features in the Bloodaxe anthology The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005), and the Wake Forest Irish Poetry Series Vol. 1 (Wake Forest UP, 2005).
He teaches at the University of Aberdeen, having previously taught at Hull. He has been shortlisted twice for the Poetry Now Award (2007, 2018), and was awarded The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, in 2008.[
He teaches at the University of Aberdeen, having previously taught at Hull. He has been shortlisted twice for the Poetry Now Award (2007, 2018), and was awarded The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, in 2008.[
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 9, 2022
It's always exciting when a poet tries their hand at a novel. The Dublin-based writer David Wheatley has published five volumes of poetry and now, with this work, a novel. The title, Stretto, is a musical term that refers to the part of a fugue near the end when the subject is repeated in quick succession. That's an apt description of this work as well, a series of 101 paragraphs, almost all about a page and a half, that explore a host of themes from the nature of self to an epistemological meditation on reality. References to music theory are sprinkled throughout, little treasures for the nerds among us. Because of its form and subject, this can be an elusive work - and largely was for me. The individual paragraphs were mostly of interest but I’m not sure reading 101 of them in succession was all that enlightening. Published by the small press CB Editions, Stretto provides food for thought for those who are philosophically inclined.
August 13, 2022
Stretto is one of those novels where I'm sure I would benefit from reading with other readers, or armed with an author interview, as there is clearly something very clever going on, but much of the time I didn't feel able to appreciate it (in the same way, which proves relevant, I don't feel able to appreciate Bach's music).
The novel is told is 101 chapters each, with one exception*, 1.5 pages long, that very consistent length suggestive of some form of musical rhythm. The first 3.5 chapters can be seen on CB Editions website, this novel the latest from the incredible one-person-band publisher.
(* the exception a poem in chapter 101, which runs over 3 pages, suggesting a word or syllable count may be more of an imposed constraint than page length)
Indeed the book's title is taken from a technique used buy Bach in his fugues:
Yet even as I travel the soundworld of a Bach prelude or fugue I double back, find windows opening within windows. Stretto is a fugue technique where the melody — the subject — is repeated in another voice, but before the statement of the original sub-ject has finished. In the C major fugue from book one of the Preludes and Fugues, the subject is stated, then restated at shortening intervals, reducing from six beats to two and then one. In the C minor fugue in book two the closing use of stretto comes on like a motorway pile-up, with the crotchet version of the subject rapped out against the same thing in quavers. Apologies again for the technical language, we'll get past it soon. I give you the C minor fugue, as played by the person I spent my twenties wanting to be, Glenn Gould, as replayed by me. Gould's performances are highly idiosyncratic, involving the pianist humming along and displaying a wilfulness with tempi some would describe as childish, or even mad. All his life he sat on the same chair while playing, and when its seat fell out would perch on the edge, preferring not to have it restored. I wonder though whether stretto technique is remotely reproducible I wonder though whether stretto technique is remotely reproducible in verbal in verbal form form without it without it seeming seeming contrived or merely contrived impossible or merely impossible.
The chapters have a sort of Sebaldian feel in their blend of fiction (here auto-fiction) and learned digressions, but while Sebald's prose proceeds logically, here the broken chapters often seem at a tangent to those proceeding, but with certain themes reappearing. The author has described this as a novel about migration, identity, neurodiversity, music, fugue, landscape and art, and we follow the narrator through his migration over two decades between Ireland, the UK and rural Scotland. Other motifs include the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly Solaris and also Mirror.
A key feature of the novel, from the end pages, is that each chapter has a 'vector', typically a poem or (less often) a novel or work of non-fiction. The connection between them was seldom explicitly clear to me - the chapter quoted above introducing the stretto technique and which concludes with a walk in a docks where the Guiness boats are kept, is linked to this poem: The Welcome by Freda Laughton, which is set in part in Dublin docks but contains some very different imagery of its own. The vector for a riff on the TV character Mr Benn, which morphs into imagining a Mr Benn version of Solaris, is Robert Musil: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Ein Versuch über den Roman.
A chapter containing the line 'A man called forwards, who changed his names to sdrakwcab, has come to a seaside town intending to kill his future self' is, as one would expect, linked to Berg, with its famous opening line. But the sdrakwcab reference is picking up on an earlier theme of the author/narrator's ability to verbally speak in this reversed form, whose vector is Lucy Brock-Broido's Elective Mutes, which, from what I can see, is a narrative poem about two twins who share a secret language, with leads them to dark places (the first stanza is titled 'Tuesday afternoon, Broadmoor').
Given the Sebaldian overtones, interestingly a chapter with a slightly forced references to the 'rings of saturn' is linked, in the vectors, not to Sebald's masterpiece but instead to Thomas Browne's Urn Burial, a key reference for Sebald and indeed seemingly a source of his title:
(from The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse)
Fascinating - although I will give 3.5 stars for now, as I felt a lot passed me by. One I very much hope others revisit (and a Republic of Consciousness Prize contender I suspect).
The novel is told is 101 chapters each, with one exception*, 1.5 pages long, that very consistent length suggestive of some form of musical rhythm. The first 3.5 chapters can be seen on CB Editions website, this novel the latest from the incredible one-person-band publisher.
(* the exception a poem in chapter 101, which runs over 3 pages, suggesting a word or syllable count may be more of an imposed constraint than page length)
Indeed the book's title is taken from a technique used buy Bach in his fugues:
Yet even as I travel the soundworld of a Bach prelude or fugue I double back, find windows opening within windows. Stretto is a fugue technique where the melody — the subject — is repeated in another voice, but before the statement of the original sub-ject has finished. In the C major fugue from book one of the Preludes and Fugues, the subject is stated, then restated at shortening intervals, reducing from six beats to two and then one. In the C minor fugue in book two the closing use of stretto comes on like a motorway pile-up, with the crotchet version of the subject rapped out against the same thing in quavers. Apologies again for the technical language, we'll get past it soon. I give you the C minor fugue, as played by the person I spent my twenties wanting to be, Glenn Gould, as replayed by me. Gould's performances are highly idiosyncratic, involving the pianist humming along and displaying a wilfulness with tempi some would describe as childish, or even mad. All his life he sat on the same chair while playing, and when its seat fell out would perch on the edge, preferring not to have it restored. I wonder though whether stretto technique is remotely reproducible I wonder though whether stretto technique is remotely reproducible in verbal in verbal form form without it without it seeming seeming contrived or merely contrived impossible or merely impossible.
The chapters have a sort of Sebaldian feel in their blend of fiction (here auto-fiction) and learned digressions, but while Sebald's prose proceeds logically, here the broken chapters often seem at a tangent to those proceeding, but with certain themes reappearing. The author has described this as a novel about migration, identity, neurodiversity, music, fugue, landscape and art, and we follow the narrator through his migration over two decades between Ireland, the UK and rural Scotland. Other motifs include the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly Solaris and also Mirror.
A key feature of the novel, from the end pages, is that each chapter has a 'vector', typically a poem or (less often) a novel or work of non-fiction. The connection between them was seldom explicitly clear to me - the chapter quoted above introducing the stretto technique and which concludes with a walk in a docks where the Guiness boats are kept, is linked to this poem: The Welcome by Freda Laughton, which is set in part in Dublin docks but contains some very different imagery of its own. The vector for a riff on the TV character Mr Benn, which morphs into imagining a Mr Benn version of Solaris, is Robert Musil: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Ein Versuch über den Roman.
A chapter containing the line 'A man called forwards, who changed his names to sdrakwcab, has come to a seaside town intending to kill his future self' is, as one would expect, linked to Berg, with its famous opening line. But the sdrakwcab reference is picking up on an earlier theme of the author/narrator's ability to verbally speak in this reversed form, whose vector is Lucy Brock-Broido's Elective Mutes, which, from what I can see, is a narrative poem about two twins who share a secret language, with leads them to dark places (the first stanza is titled 'Tuesday afternoon, Broadmoor').
In summertime, when we were little, I remember we
walking with synchronized steps, a four-armed girl,
we've got everything
the same. We were eleven, a shadow & a shadow
of her shadow. I am born
first & I teach my sister to be quiet.
Here's the secret:
One day we will bum buildings together.
One day we will set fire to great things.
It sends shudders down my spine.
In the heat of swing park, we will take boys
down & mingle with them in the brushes.
In a basket, we will float down rivers, Venus
rising infrared, you've no idea
what its like to have this other
half. We floating like hot house
fuchsia, two Chinese lanterns
through the water cdgc, a bulrush, shooting
stars. I will teach you to be perfect, more
quiet. I will teach you to be hard high self
mutilating. We will talk patois, speeded
up 78 on the record player, so no one
else can understand. We do, we know
the languages of hemlock, jimson weed.
Given the Sebaldian overtones, interestingly a chapter with a slightly forced references to the 'rings of saturn' is linked, in the vectors, not to Sebald's masterpiece but instead to Thomas Browne's Urn Burial, a key reference for Sebald and indeed seemingly a source of his title:
As I sat there in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, wrote Thomas Browne in the Garden of Cyrus and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of the night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of Saturn – an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.
(from The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse)
Fascinating - although I will give 3.5 stars for now, as I felt a lot passed me by. One I very much hope others revisit (and a Republic of Consciousness Prize contender I suspect).
December 4, 2022
You have to follow the vectors, follow where the words dry and riderless lead. I also see now what you mean by the 'special interests and their tendency to loom large, freezing out everything else. Here is the jumper I have put on backwards, here is the shopping list I left at home, lacking all importance. And here is the Bach fugue I am playing silently on the table-top, here is the gleaming eye of a cat on a fence I have had to stop and study: you have to follow where the fugue subject leads, leap into the well of the cat's eye, there is in that moment nothing else. The train is not free to leave the tracks and randomly cross the terrain. Is this determinism then. No, it is freely chosen. There is no terrain, only the track. And is there movement, really, have I not always been there, been here. De Selby [my note – from Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman] would travel by entering a wardrobe and thinking of his destination, then emerge to a sense of uncomprehending rage on not finding himself there. But it works, I have done it. I cross the mountain landscape and notice a church and, entering, find a stained-glass window and passing through it find myself in a mountain landscape where I notice a church and, entering, find a stained-glass window, not this again, I am moving from one side of the glass to the other, turning madly on the spot, what figure of speech am I looking for now. These are not symptoms; these are figures of speech. So what are you suggesting I do, doctor. I call you doctor, but you are also the addressee, the reader, moving forwards and back through the text at your leisure. In this sense you are, have become, as much me as I am. Thank you for reading. How do you feel it's going? Now turn the page.
This is the first novel by David Wheatley – an Irish poet and critic who now teaches as a Professor in the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen – and poetry, Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture feature heavily in this auto fictional book.
I have read a number of novels by poets and many have a fragmentary almost spiky language reflecting the author’s more familiar milieu: here if anything I found the language for the most part rather slow, with unwinding passages (see my opening quote) in an almost consciously old-fashioned register – starting with the opening sentences “The more difficult it becomes to deny the failure of my years abroad, the more my thoughts return to the memory of a mountain village on a reservoir in the region of my youth. I say 'my long years abroad', though I write from there now and hardly think of it as abroad anymore; it is simply where I happen to be. But this too is a part of my failure, for reasons that will become apparent.” . I was surprised to realise the author was only in his early 50s as this felt at time like a book written by someone already well into middle-age, but in say the 1980s – some of this though I think is a very deliberate nod to “modernist” forebears such as Beckett and other Irish poets and authors as well as Sebald (with a passage on the crumbling East Coast of England, a slightly clumsy “Rings of Saturn” link).
The fragmentary poetry influence I think comes in more strongly in the book’s meta-structure: which is told over some 101 chapters each around 1.5 pages long (other than one 3 page poem) – making the book much more like a poetry collection than an entirely coherent novel.
And returning to Sebald, rather than the now beyond cliched out of focus black and white photographs, we have instead a book about the vivid contrast of light and dark – beginning with the opening chapter of the novel when the author looks back on an influential visit to a nearby church in his youth as he contemplates a modern stained glass window:
I have stated that I am not religious, but find my response to the window crystallising into a standoff between light and dark. It is a dull autumn day, and amid so much encircling gloom I have discovered a window of light. It seems crucially important, therefore, and for this moment at least possible, that I pass through the window to whatever lies beyond. And so I do, imaginatively at least. The effects of this resolution have continued to unfold down well beyond that moment, while also leading me to the failure recorded in my opening sentence. How this came about will form the burden of the notes that follow. .
Two chapters later similar ideas of light, reflection, transition and so on return rather beautifully (and for me incredibly evocatively) in an image (from the narrator’s student days at Trinity) of Dublin pubs, with the pub doors as “portals into concealed realities” with the “transformative powers of the pub [as] less about drinking than access to a new physical realm, a space of light and dark, as when a glass of beer is raised to a gaslamp in a windowless back room, and held aloft momentarily before consumption”
And quickly in the following chapters we find two artistic inspirations for the novel’s structure – one from classical music: “Yet even as I travel the sound world of a Bach prelude or fugue I double back, find windows opening within windows. Stretto is a fugue technique where the melody - the subject - is repeated in another voice” - and one from language “Years later, I am reading a volume on rhetorical tropes and encounter one called, I believe, metalepsis. It involves the passage from one narrative frame to another, as when a film begins with a page from a book, showing the words spoken by the narrator, with an illustration of for instance a house or some skaters on a lake, before the illustration comes to life and we enter into its world.”
In other chapters we have train stations and passing trains and a mirror seen through window seen on a daily commute; a clever image of a window covered in lace curtains – standing for the way in which the narrator on moving to English suburbia suddenly realises windows there are for keeping people’s view away rather than letting it in
For the first part of the book, I felt I therefore had a handle on the ideas and the way in which each fragmentary chapter was looking to explore these similar ideas.
And while some of the references were lost on me but I enjoyed how the author seemed to mix different mediums (drawing on all the parts of the school at which he teaches) and culture from highbrow to popular/mid brow to low brow. So for example we have: Irish poets and novelists; various classical and post-classical musicians and musical techniques; the Russian art-house/science fiction film “Solaris”; Matisse’s paintings within paintings; the voyages to and back from other worlds of Mr Benn; the Mr Men and the world of Mr Right and Mr Wrong;; The 1982-83 Cup Winners Cup Final; Terry and June; ready-brek commercials (at times the book can seem like a 1970-80 nostalgia show).
But then as the book continued, and particular as the focus shifted more towards the narrator’s journeys and travels I felt that a number of the chapters matched the drifting of the narrator and seemed to move away from the central theme and/or seem more like one-off experimentations with style or content: to use the Stretto example it felt like we mixing a tightly planned piece of classical music variation with some free form jazz.
Overall – and it seems an odd comment for a book which is effectively 150 pages long, this really needed to be a much shorter book. I think editing it down to say half the entries – those which are more clearly related to the overall theme – could have produced an excellent novella (in the style of Luis Sagasti or more to the point Jack Robinson the Psuedonym of Charles Boyle who as CB Editions was the publisher of this novel) – rather than this too inconsistent collection.
3.5*
No plans have been made for the disposal of my papers, or the retrieval of this report from aged laptop or print-outs stuffed down the back of a filing cabinet. As I have written about the village and life here, there is I suspect a subcurrent of distance, assuming as I have worked that I am talking to a reader far from here and now, and whose remoteness will form our paradoxical point of connection. I even imagine them as the final portal through whom this tale might pass, onwards, outwards and free of its author at last. But I see now I am more likely to be turned back on myself in a posthumous silence, my papers neglected, dispersed, destroyed. So perhaps it is best to proceed on that assumption, that the portal may be less portal than frame, and what it frames less a way through than a fated dead-end. Sacrilegious thought. One elegant solution to the pain of this realisation would be to have my papers buried with me, for perusal at my leisure. I write in the present tense. In which tense are your reading me? Your doing so at all means which of the above-sketched outcomes, I wonder. Reach out a hand. What do you touch? Whose face is that in the dark? How close are the walls? Don't answer that. Or not yet. Now turn the page
March 19, 2024
This book alternately charmed and frustrated me. The book is strangely called a novel, whereas it’s 101 individual entries of nearly identical length—one and a half pages—each feeling like a one-off entry reflecting a passing thought or an event in Wheatley’s daily life. Wheatley is a poet and critic, and most of these read to me more like prose poems. Oddly, Wheatley never likes to inform the reader where anything happens, not even the country in which he lives and works. One can guess (Scotland), but the deliberate absence of almost all place names in pieces that are often about places makes the book feel like it’s for insiders who know these locales by their descriptions. Stretto is a musical term, and whenever Wheatley writes about music he shines.
February 2, 2023
'I wonder if you can hear me. Hello hello...' (#81); Wheatley is using a video messaging program, evidently as challenging a means of communication for his parents as his composition is for me. Stretto, he remarks, 'is a fugue technique where the melody -- the subject -- is repeated in another voice, but before the statement of the original subject has finished' (#8). The difficulty I have with this exercise is that the authorial voice is too insistent. Fascinated with his own verbal and musical virtuosity, Wheatley engages in a conversation with himself: 'I have often wondered what language I speak' (#39). 'What is a repetition, I ask myself abstractly, what has it all meant' (#89). Even a rare acknowledgement of his reader is strictly self-referential: 'As I may have established by now, I am easily disoriented' (47). Some of his observations and reflections interest me, but too many of the discursive entries reduce to variations on the theme of self-absorption. If the multi-disciplinary vectors were intended to provide the theoretical background to his self-examination, the range of references seems rather to attest to their undisciplined use. The structure of the 101 vectors, all but the two penultimate ones running to a regular page and a half, not only implies magnitude and direction but also recalls the cyclical progression of, for instance, 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. The seasons turn, and the subject returns, but neither remains exactly as before. Wheatley's sequence begins with a return to his childhood and the vague sense of failure that followed those years. It ends with his 'highly musical' child's impromptu song and dance interpretation of a piece of music, terminating 'in silence'. The disquieting ending, strangely enough, inspires me to return to the beginning and follow the prose poem's progress and regressions. Whether the stretto has completed the cycle is debatable. Has the poet transformed his perceived failure into the prodigy's promise of success? The text reference identifies Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' as the soundtrack to his child's performance. The silence, although unacknowledged, should perhaps be attributed to Wittgenstein's famous last words, which go without saying.
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