Brian

Product Information

The book is at its strongest in portraying the comeradeship, if not really relationship, Brian enjoys with his fellow buffs, many of them socially unconventional, and indeed Brian looks down on some of them in the same way that Beavis has contempt for Butthead. There’s a strange magic to Jeremy Cooper’s writing. The way he puts words together creates an incantatory effect. Reading him is to be spellbound, then. I have no idea how he does it, only that I am seduced.’ This novel achieves a great deal with its close insistence on the dignity of a quiet life invigorated by the most defamiliarising art form of them all.’ A study in how writing can give lives meaning, and in how it can fail to be enough to keep one afloat, this is a rare, delicate book, teeming with the stuff of real life.’

Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Fitzcarraldo Editions Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Fitzcarraldo Editions

Jeremy Cooper’s work is consistently haunting and layered, built on a refreshing trust in the reader to delve deeper behind the quiet insinuations of his prose. His work resists every modern accelerant, creating a patient and precise tonic. He is easily one of the most thoughtful British fiction writers working today.’ Brian can also be seen as how art reflects life. Just as Camilla Grudova’s Children of Paradise was a Dario Argento take on a group of cinephiles, Cooper uses a more elegant technique. As Brian loves Japanese films, especially the works of Ozu, the book is a mirror of that genre. Brian (the novel) moves at a leisurely pace taking in all the details from the ordinary to the extraordinary.We do gradually get hints of a very troubled childhood which Brian wishes to forget, his estranged father a bigoted unionist and his, now deceased, mother having spent his early years in prison, Brian placed in an orphanage, for facilitating UVF terrorism. Brian tends to reticence and caution in personal and social interaction, an inborn temperament only exacerbated by his parents’ bullying and debasement, intended to toughen him up during his childhood in Northern Ireland. Free of their grip—his mother’s death when he is 16 and his estrangement from his father and older brother—he moves to England, becoming a file clerk for Kentish Town, a position he holds for the entirety of his professional career. Ever shy and awkward, always fearing calamity and the inadvertent commitment of a faux pas, Brian keeps to himself, talking to co-workers only under duress. Avoiding improvisation and spur-of-the-moment decisions, Brian is keen on routines well-defined and predictable. This morning I woke up to terror such as I have never experienced before: I was entirely stripped of feeling. I was completely empty, without pain, without pleasure, without longing, without love, without warmth and friendship, without anger, without hate. Nothing, nothing was there anymore, leaving me like a suit of armour with no knight inside. On paper it sounds like an exaggeration but The Arts really do have a transformative effect on people. Jeremy Cooper’s novel Brian goes into this, the medium, in this case, is cinema. Brian’s character is worth noting: he is anti social, loves routine and can only communicate with other film lovers and even then he is very secretive about his life. At one point on the book he manages to find a copy of a rare Japanese film and refuses any type of credit. It could be how film can help, or exacerbate mental health.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper — solace in cinema in London - Financial Times Brian by Jeremy Cooper — solace in cinema in London - Financial

Walking slowly home, Brian thought of his own brother, Peter, nine years his senior, with whom he was unable to remember ever laughing. They barely knew each other, had never lived in the same house. Brian stopped suddenly in the street, muttering to himself, and stamped on the pavement several times one foot after the other, furious that playing with those two nice boys had awakened images of Peter and his father and their treatment of his mother. I was scared to read this becuase I loved the blurb so much that I felt there was no way it could live up to my expectations - but it did. I feel like I should have liked this book more. I feel like I was the target audience for it, but it just didn't work for me. But this book just didn't work for me. It felt more like reading a never ending cinema programme than a novel. But there's no explanation about any of the films, just the briefest of nods towards them. So even though I'd seen dozens of the films in the book and could often decipher what the author was alluding to, even that didn't really help. God forbid you've not got an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema. First and foremost, I think, Cooper’s novel is a love letter to the cinema. Much of its length is given over to Brian’s thoughts on the films he sees. Even though I haven’t seen most of them myself, I felt again the sense of openness and possibility that comes from being able to range far and wide with films.

Brian

With an effort he managed to clear his head of unwanted family memories and continued on into Kentish Town Road. As have the two previous novels from Jeremy Cooper, Ash Before Oak and Bolt from the Blue, which contained a lot of nature and modern art respectively but which failed, unlike works from authors such as Sara Baume and the hybrid art/novel works that are a trademark of Les Fugitives, to draw this reader in and makes me want to seek out the things referenced. And Brian does the same, or rather fails to do the same, with film.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Goodreads Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Goodreads

On paper this shouldn’t really work. A narrative about an introverted loner with a deeply unhappy childhood working in a mind numbing clerical job who finds salvation through watching films. More specifically, watching films every night at the National Film Theatre and becoming part of a group of others who also attend frequently who appear united at least initially less through their love of film but more by the fact they appear socially marginalised. I would say that at least half of the content of the short book is dedicated to film. It’s as if Cooper had amassed similarly voluminous notes to his main character having attended the NFT with similar devotion and wondered if he somehow couldn’t make a book about them. That doesn’t sound promising I know. If you combine that with the affectless written style, which particularly accents Brian’s idiosyncrasies (the tone is almost one of a book written for children about an unhappy mouse) you would think that potentially this book does not have much going for it. Brian is a middle-aged man, working in a clerical job at Camden Council, with no real friends or, until he, after exercising his characteristic caution and detailed preparation for trying anything new, he enters into the world of classical world movie, joining an informal crowd of film buffs that watch showings every day at the BFI at the Southbank. In a novel based around a film buff, actual films naturally play a part in structuring the narrative. Like novels, films mean different things to different people, provoke contrasting responses. My wish was to describe the many movies mentioned in Brian in a form which reflected the emotions of my central character, whilst also communicating accurately something of the films’ original essence, and at the same time not undermining cinemagoers’ individual memories of the work. To achieve this I needed my text to have a certain openness and freedom from rigidity. Although the chronology is accurate and all the films titled and attributed correctly, the narrative style allows for focus often on lesser-known aspects and for the insertion of mild inventions. Told entirely from close to the closed point of view of Brian, the isolated buff, the book’s views on life in general and film in particular are his. The merging in Brian of fact and fiction is designed not to confuse readers but to liberate them. After having published his luminous Ash Before Oak, Jeremy Cooper now brings us Brian, equally a work of mysterious interiority and poetry. It confirms that however solitary life might be, art enriches both our imaginations and our realities. This is a very tender book.’ This is the 60th of the blue-covered fiction titles from Fitzcarraldo Editions, all of which I've read and reviewed, but it sadly confirmed my hypothesis: their taste and mine in Anglophone male writers simply doesn't overlap.

The thing about the cinema, in Brian’s experience, seated in a large dark space staring without interruption at a high wide screen, entranced, lost in another’s vision, was that he found feelings inside himself he did not know existed, replaced the next night by a different film and new sensations. And the next. Another film, another set of feelings.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper The quiet joy of a deep interest: Brian by Jeremy Cooper

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. As the years roll by, and more details emerge, I found myself trying to decide what was simply personality, and what was pathology. Which I guess is a question we can all ask ourselves in the mirror.All his life, everywhere he went, Brian had shunned attention, the scars unhealed from being singled out at school in Kent as different and blamed for being so, by teachers, by other boys and by his mother. To ease this hurt he had made himself an expert at forgetting, a skill by now matured, able most of the time to erase unwelcome thoughts and happenings. It did mean that he needed to hold himself on constant alert, ready to combat the threat of being taken by surprise, a state-of-being he had managed to achieve without the tension driving him crazy. There had been costs, by now discounted and removed from memory. The increasing curvature of his spine was one, outbreaks of eczema another. Accompanying the physical reactions to Brian's taut self-discipline, the mental and emotional strains were easier, he found, to suppress, to pretend did not exist. All of which helped explain why Brian had adapted unquestioningly to nightly visits to the BFI, by which he was enabled, he felt, to escape his destiny of defeat.