Aneliya's father dreams of becoming a great musician but his naivete and his unfashionable music suggest he will never be taken seriously. Her father's best friend, on the other hand, has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs, and moral philosophy. Aneliya is torn between love of the former and passion for the latter. When an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives Aneliya and her father's world is transformed.
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.
