Review by Booklist Review
In this absolutely unique novel, Scottish author Keenan defies all conventions of contemporary fiction. The story follows Aneliya and her musician father, Tomasz. Aneliya stokes a white hot passion for her father's old friend, an affair that will upend the stability of their lives. This friend introduces Aneliya to strippers, lap dances, and Russian roulette. A spiritual presence, Xstabeth, enters the story, and Aneliya believes this spirit is what saved her from a recent brush with death. Xstabeth inspires a legendary musical performance, then a recording of said performance garners her a cult following. Keenan has structured the story in a most original fashion. He fictionalizes his own death and frames the story as being told by students and followers of the (fake) late Keenan. There's music, golf, sex, Russia, and Scotland. There's a pregnancy that could be the reincarnation of the mother's dead mother. There are many brushes with death. Every facet of a father-daughter relationship is explored. Keenan's meandering novel will shock and delight, confuse and inspire, all in a manner that truly elevates the form.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Russian musician Tomasz and his teenage daughter, Aneliya, are at the heart of this philosophical, poetic novel from the award-winning Keenan (This Is Memorial Device). Tomasz is a famous avant-garde guitarist and singer whose wife was drowned in the sea while on holiday vacation, and his world revolves around Aneliya. Less plot-driven, the narrative is more of an open conversation about music and art that explores the meanings and interrelationship of synchronicity, significance, memories, mercy, and grace. At one point, Keenan proclaims that "art is a neurotic activity…that's why there is so much more of it in the city," and near the end he says that art is "like a hand grenade thrown through an open window." Inspired by musicians Leonard Cohen and Bob Desper, Tomasz's music is overtaken by the muse he calls Xstabeth, which may just send him on his way to being the musician he dreamed of becoming. VERDICT The Russian soul and its attendant angst are well explored in this short novel, as Aneliya and her father contemplate the significance of art.--Lisa Rohrbaugh
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Music and the sacred converge in unexpected ways. Keenan explores that dynamic through a story about a father, a daughter, and the music that haunts them. The book opens in Russia, where the narrator's father is a famous singer/songwriter. She begins a relationship with Jaco, a friend of her father's whose music is even more well known, leading to some tension among the trio. Keenan--a regular contributor to the music magazine The Wire for many years--knows his subject well, and this novel abounds with allusions to numerous beloved cult musicians, including Donovan, Bert Jansch, The Seeds, and Jackson C. Frank. The artist mentioned most frequently is one with an affinity for the sacred and ecstatic: Leonard Cohen. The novel's title comes from the name given to the music played by the narrator's father--or, as the narrator explains, "My father and I are haunted by a saint....A saint called Xstabeth." Many of the novel's charms come from the narrator's precise yet halting approach to telling this story, as with this look back on her mother: "She got murdered. I told him. I don't know why I said it. She got murdered on her honeymoon. I said. I was twisting the facts for no reason." Much like Keenan's earlier novel This Is Memorial Device (2017), the book uses a found-document format. The author of the novel within the novel is dead, and what we're reading is a version of a book from 1992, "reissued here and updated with commentary." It can be dizzying at times, but the risks and esotericism on display make this a memorable read. This isn't a typical rock novel--but that's what makes it so compelling. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
