Xstabeth

Scottish music writer and novelist Keenan (This Is Memorial Device) delivers a bizarre treatise on love and art in the early 1990s. Aneliya, a young Russian woman and daughter of a striving musician who dreams of fame but mostly performs Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake covers, falls in love with his “famouser” musician friend Jaco. After Jaco sets up Aneliya’s father with a gig that’s recorded and released under the name Xstabeth, the recording becomes a cult phenomenon and changes their lives. The narrative is split between the main story and fragments theorizing on Xstabeth written by former students of a writer named David Keenan, who killed himself in 1995 (“Ennui is the most beautiful concept of all. It is melancholy fallen from grace,” one of them writes). The sections narrated by Aneliya are emotionally gritty and gloomy. They also have no punctuation other than periods: “I thought to myself what kind of a Russian speaks like Shakespeare. Like Dostoevsky. Surely. Like Tolstoy. Perhaps. Like Solzhenitsyn. No doubt.” Throughout, Aneliya questions the nature of art—“a neurotic activity”—and dances around the text’s driving question: “Where does significance come from?” As the music writers wax extendedly on their esoteric subject, they land on occasional flashes of brilliance. Sometimes this odd text makes beautiful sense, but more often, it doesn’t. (Mar.)