I'm not sure if Will Self has ever heard of Alonso Lobo. But, the two greats joined me on holiday last week in paperback and CD form respectively. Alonso Lobo (1555-1617) is a very exciting discovery. I first came accross him via the Virgin Megastore in Toulouse and a disc by the Monteverdi Choir (Santiago a Capella) which includes a ravishing recording of his Lamentations, discovered some twenty years ago in manuscript form in Seville. Lobo's music is indulgent, expressive and direct; it's the real deal - for once making Tallis seem the over-polite English genius that he probably was but which his own Lamentations and Spem in Alium attempted to betray. If you're interested, have a listen to the Monteverdi Choir disc mentioned above and also this disc by David Trendell and his KCL choir (if you can bear the hideous cover design) which includes the Lamentations and a couple of really special mass settings.
Will Self's world, in the words of Martin Amis, is all his own. Like Lobo, I wonder why Self hasn't collected more accolades and isn't regarded more highly. Maybe his stature is higher than my bleary-eyed and naive admiration is affording him. The handful of novels I've read by him are all very pleasing, but last week it was his fictional debut The Quantity Theory of Insanity that, like a deranged mental patient impotently brandishing the horn of an NHS fire extinguisher, formed the verbal accompaniment to Lobo's genuis. Now I'm no Martin Amis, but I'm convinced that this collection of stories is a work of supreme talent and a must-read for those Filter^ contributors and readers who are slipping so enviably into the world of academia. Like an obsessive leitmotif, Self's character Zack Busner, who's central to the novel Great Apes, appears delightfully throughout the delicately related stories in this set. By the end you're almost tempted to enter him into the 'phonebook' on your mobile. Self's work may bear no relation whatsoever to that by Lobo, but both men are astute and uplifting craftsmen - why shouldn't their worlds collide?
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