I tried but failed to like this enough to continue past the first couple of chapters. I could see the cleverness of the writing and I would imagine a different reader enjoying this.
Thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the chance to read and review this.

I was very excited about this book, but it fell short of my expectations. Thank you for providing me with an arc.

Gorgeous sentences and paragraphs, but a bit too opaque and experimental for me. Many ghostly presences wind their way among some beautiful prose, some pretty explicit sex scenes, and lovely musings on music and literature, as this ethereal story of a father and daughter and their ‘ghosts’, travels from St. Petersburg to a foggy St. Andrews. This lost me at times, but grabbed me again with a phrase that was arresting. Definitely not for everyone, but I would try this author again.

Xstabeth has something of a life of it’s own. At it’s simplest, the novella is about a girl, Aneliya, her love for her father, a failed musician, and her affair with her father’s friend, who is a successful musician. This is the story that is told, yet it is nowhere near the story that it told. David Keenan has written something that is strangely confusing but beautifully compelling. If you are to strip down all of the elements Xstabeth is a pretty simple story, but the elements are what make this novella.

Half of the time, the reader does not know what is happening, if the characters are dead or alive, if the events are really happening, and there is a question on whether David Keenan is alive at all. The beginning of the novella is a short biography saying that the author David Keenan had self-published one novel in his lifetime, and this would be Xstabeth. Toward the end there is a report of how David Keenan died. There are also papers written about the fictional Keenan and this novel by members of St. Rule’s School for Immaculate Fools, a school where he taught a correspondence course in avant-garde literature. Most of these papers are more about science (mRNA, rainbows) and language than about the story, yet there are things that tie into the story throughout.

You also do not really know if the main character, Aneliya, is alive or a ghost throughout most of the novella. She says she is dead, but she says a lot of things.

What also makes this even more compelling, besides the purposeful confusion and lack of cohesion, is the writing. The author writes his story and it reads like a song. There is a rhythm to every sentence, a structure to every paragraph, and reading this for pages at a time gets you thinking about this as more of a song than a story. It helps that there are many parts that talk about music, from Leonard Cohen to Nick Drake, but in the end, most of this feels like music, like you could sing the chapters of this to your family at a gathering if you wanted to. Even the section about Aneliya’s mother dying has the chord progressions that go along with the story. I do not know enough about making music to actually try this, but I’m interested in hearing what it would sound like as a song.

In the end, this is not a book that I would read for the sake of reading a good novel. This is a book that is more of an experiment, a way of looking at something and reading something that makes you think about the way you perceive and enjoy art. It is a simple and beautiful book to read, but it is not a simple book to understand. You will not read another book like it.

I received and ARC through NetGalley and Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.

I adored this novel. The staccato rhythms of the language. The harsh half-sentences. The sense of this narrator: young, wise, frighteningly disconnected, bored by the idea of consequences, cynical, naive, loving. The story comes off the page in shattered pieces. Do I need to understand every word and intention? I decided I did not. I decided to approach this rush of linear language as I would a linear work of art in another medium. A piece of music. A film. I don't demand absolute literal clarity from these other genres. So why must I demand that the written word be so blocky and precise? Why not read this novel the way I listen to music? And so I did. The reading experience was one-of-a-kind. Harsh. Enlightening. It's not a difficult book. Just different. It's a joy to travel through one vivid scene after another, A joy to let go of all expectation because after the first page it was clear the book was not going to conform. An eerie and beautiful reading experience.

An experimental ghost story feat. explicit sex scenes, Russian roulette, and an ephemeral muse that possesses people in order to create mystical beauty - you have to give it to Keenan that this is quite a concept! The Scottish author sticks to his favorite theme, music, and gives us a young narrator from St. Petersburg, Aneliya, who dearly loves her father, a naive folk singer, but still enters an affair with his professional rival. Rather soon, the question arises how much of the story takes place in a bardo or in how far it is populated by ghosts: Aneliya's mother has drowned, or been drowned, or drowned herself, or is some kind of sea ghost; Aneliya survived a drunken game of Russian roulette with her lover - or not, which turns her unborn child into a ghost - or not; the lover declares he's a ghost and disappears; and then there's Xstabeth, the ghost-like muse who possesses her father and temporarily turns him into a vessel for music so wonderful, the secretly recorded and then published record leads to a whole Xstabeth cult. Who is Xstabeth? Will she re-appear? What will happen to Aneliya and her child? The questions move the story forward as Aneliya and her father move from St. Petersburg to foggy St. Andrews.

The novella is crafted, as the introduction tells us, as a text by authorial alter ego "David W. Keenan", a Scottish eccentric who threw himself off a tower in 1995. Aneliya's narrative is interspersed with commentary from his disciples, the inner order of "St. Rule's School for Immaculate Fools". These, ähem, scholars ruminate on the nature of themes like "ennui", "rainbows", or "synchronicity" - and these pesudo-academic riddles don't really help to make the main narrative thread more accessible, but they are obviosuly not supposed to. This book is meant to be a foggy, intuitive spectacle on the nature of non-narrative, thus the connection to self-emerging music.

The text also contains several sex scenes that are difficult to process as they contain degrading behavior (and I do say that because Aneliya doesn't seem to experience the practices as kink, even going as far as acknowledging that she herself plays along because she feels like the situation requires it). While you could read these scenes as discussing a sexual awakening, Aneliya remains passive, a projection surface for the two more powerful men she has sex with. Note that Keenan does not comment on that, he only shows it, and he certainly intended the disturbing effect that comes with these encounters.

So this playful, experimental extravaganza is full of wonderful, whacky ideas, but it gets a little lengthy in the second half set in St. Andrews. Also, the degree of fragmentation and the overall enigmatic character is certainly not for everyone, but to quote from the text: "Knowledge can be cynical. It just gets used to undermine things." A challenging read that relentlessly dances to its own beat, and I admire Keenan's uncompromising, daring concept.

Ah, the literati strikes. You can almost hear the acclaim as you read this book. The praise for its moody ambiance, its peculiar structure, its wild disregard for convention, be it plot or punctuation. This is the sort of book that wins award and leaves the regular readers at best bewildered.
To be fair, there’s a basic plot here, it’s to do with a young woman and her father. The latter is a musician, the former is…um…sleeps around and gets knocked up. The daughter first gets obsessed with her father’s musician friend and later with some random golfer. She has these passionate(ish) affairs. The father plays music.
There’s another musical presence in their lives named Extabeth. She’s oh la la.
There just isn’t much here, though to be fair, the book does have the mercy of brevity. It’s a weird and thin plot populated with not especially likeable characters doing not much at all. At best, it's middle interesting, mostly stylistically with its tiny brushstroke sentences, but that's about it.
It touts itself as a Scot’s take of the great Russian novel and fails lamentably at that. Just doesn’t have the same soul. Vodka soaked or not.
Overall, this isn’t so much a work of literature as an experiment and for me it didn’t work. Thanks Netgalley.