There is indeed something uncanny about this haunting book, which connects frozen St Petersburg with misty St Andrews, and in which ghosts and saints hover over every page ... You can lose yourself in the novel’s weird loops and whorls, searching for resolution while luxuriating in the lack of it. Patterns emerge: this is a story of arcs, of trajectories – golf balls invisible against the drab St Andrews sky, stunt motorbikes soaring over a row of supine children ... This is Keenan’s most gnomic, gnostic work yet – at times it seems only loosely tethered to reality – yet it’s never portentous. There’s something here of the 19th-century Russian novelists’ passion for authenticity, their fervid drama. There are funny lines, too, which undercut the mysticism in a satisfyingly earthy way ... Aneliya’s narrative is interspersed with commentaries written by academic disciples of 'David W Keenan,' an authorial alter ego who died in 1995 after setting up a school of 'magick, tarot and bibliomancy.' These go off at tangents from the main narrative, musing on the nature of memory, ennui, God, rainbows. It would be a stretch to say they shed some light on the book’s cloudy depths. But they add to the sense of a synchronous world being created even as you read.
XstabethXstabeth is rooted in that...visionary tradition, presenting less as a novel and more as a trance-like stream of consciousness from which you emerge dazed and invigorated ... The pleasures of Xstabeth lie in the ways in which the inventive Keenan plays with language and form. It is a slim but profound book, which examines the nature of love even as it looks at the price true creativity might extract. You finish it both desperate to return to the beginning and eager to find out just what Keenan will do next.
Xstabeth is not a lament but something altogether stranger ... Throughout Xstabeth, people act as though extraordinary things are normal. The narrator attends strip clubs with her father, travels to the unlikely destination of St Andrews, has an affair with a famous golfer and at one point sits on a toadstool in a fairy glade ... its internationalism, its track-stopping similes, its typographical pictograms (birds are drawn like this: ^.^, ~.~, «.»), its meta-fictional framework, its exaggerated sex scenes and its plot centred around a mysterious piece of art, this book bears the crisp boot print of Roberto Bolaño, less of an influence and more of an inhabiting spirit ... for all its peculiarity, it is one of the most interesting novels I’ve come across this year. Reading it, I felt the unmistakable pulse of something living, and it isn’t done with me yet.
Keenan is the kind of writer who can look forward to being lovingly over-interpreted into perpetuity, but one relatively simple angle on his work is that it flips the order of cultural authority – it presents the art and artistic personae generated by ordinary people as sacred phenomena, which might be beyond beyond the simple reckoning of elites, although they can be encouraged to understand ... According to this framing device, what we are reading when we read Xstabeth is a lost novel ... This is such a delicious idea, you’d think it would dominate this whole short, punchy book. It’s a mark of Keenan’s engaging contrariness, however, that his high concept is but one of many matters competing for his narrator’s attention ... Keenan’s marriage of the sordid to the sublime and the erudite to the bluntly instinctual is a phenomenon to be treasured.
...it’s clear the author is up to his old tricks again ... Each book is like a tale told by a drunkard with a twinkle in his eye, a true Zen lunatic with a thick Celtic brogue ... Xstabeth is lighter on its feet than its predecessors ... By the end it’s hard to tell whether the story is the ramblings of a madman or a blinding dose of pure cosmic wisdom. But it’s so much fun that it’s also very hard to care.
...enjoyably weird ... The prose has a mesmeric quality, with lots of very short sentences, often three to a line, and rhythmic repetitions ... Xstabeth reprises the manic idealism of This is Memorial Device (2017), Keenan’s exuberant debut novel about the post-punk scene in 1980s Airdrie.
David Keenan's Xstabeth is a daring experiment that questions what fiction can and should be. Xstabeth seems designed for readers looking for something unusual and hard to define, though its restless approach to narrative is likely to be polarizing ... a surprisingly sincere novel that pushes the boundaries of fiction.
In this absolutely unique novel, Scottish author Keenan defies all conventions of contemporary fiction ... 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.
The novel is a quixotic achievement by one of our most exciting writers. As a rock’n’roll fairy story and myth about the Muse, it’s a triumph. I was less enamoured by its view of women ... Tautly edited, the sheer stylistic euphoria of Keenan’s form seems to breathe itself to life ... even allowing for a preposterous assertion of her own emptiness, Aneliya’s service of male fantasy feels emotionally unconvincing. The beauty of young girls saving old men, especially famous artists, is a problematic beauty.
...philosophical, poetic ... The Russian soul and its attendant angst are well explored in this short novel, as Aneliya and her father contemplate the significance of art.
[A] bizarre treatise on love and art in the early 1990s ... 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 ... 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.
Music and the sacred converge in unexpected ways ... Many of the novel’s charms come from the narrator’s precise yet halting approach to telling this story ... 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.
