Killing the Nerve Anna Pazos Review

killing the nerve anna pazos bookblast review

Killing the Nerve by Anna Pazos, superbly translated by Charlotte Coombe and Laura McGloughlin, is an autobiographical account of the early stages of a journalistic career (a genre the blurb calls ‘auto-journalism’) which focuses less on the work itself and more on the emotions which come with rootlessness and a lack of fixed identity.

Idiots rotting

The book spans a period of around ten years, from the author’s first extended stay in a foreign country (in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, as part of the Erasmus programme at her university) to her return to her native Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic as a sudden wave of fear and homesickness overwhelms her. In between these two life-changing international moves, she lives and works as a journalist in Jerusalem for two years, attempts to sail around the world, and travels to New York for a postgraduate degree in her field. This despite the cynicism she reveals about journalism as both a subject of study and as a profession in the closing pages of the book:

“It is hard to study journalism and respect yourself. The further you get into a journalism career, the clearer it becomes that the career should not exist, and that its only use is to plug students into media outlets where they’ll carry out unpaid labour, simultaneously devaluing their own work and that of the company’s paid employees. There are some quick and perceptive people who realise the scam in time and are far-sighted enough to glimpse a future of precariousness and self-loathing, and who quit before it’s too late. Most, however, fall prey to the twisted logic of the profession, which has particularly criminal effects on vain people with a knack for written expression. ‘Those idiots might all end up rotting in institutional press offices,’ the vain person says to themself, ‘but that’s not happening to me.’”

Out of step

It does not happen to Pazos, but neither does she seem particularly thrilled by what does. There is a sense throughout the book that she feels that she is always in the wrong place at the wrong time, never quite in the centre of things, never quite where a journalist ought to be. In his review of Killing the Nerve in the TLS, Mark Nayler lightly criticises the author for not choosing to explore the illegal Catalan independence referendum of October 2017 and its aftermath: “Pazos tells us that she spent the days curled up in bed in New York feeling ‘deeply upset’, without explaining why.”

It’s a fair criticism, but curling up and crying on the wrong continent without explanation is perfectly congruent with the rest of Pazos’ analysis of her own life, beginning from the very first year she spent in Thessaloniki, doing very little in a shared student flat and living in a miserable haze: “It always embarrasses me a little to think of those months in Greece. They remind me of how I failed at the elementary business of being twenty-two and living a subsidised and carefree existence in a foreign country.” Such is the failure and the need to rewrite it that she compulsively returns to Greece on multiple occasions over the following years – to interview the mayor of Thessaloniki, to speak with a pharmacist who collects the tombstones from a Jewish cemetery destroyed during the Holocaust as research for an article she will never write, and to suffer through more than one disastrous holiday with soon-to-be-ex-boyfriends – but none of these later visits live up to their initial promise, and nor does her time elsewhere. She arrives in New York feeling that she has “come too late”; the end of the sailing trip is suffused in a feeling of “angst and failure . . . slowly sinking into irrelevance”; she tires of Jerusalem, writing that “It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment when excitement turns to tedium . . . [but] the moment always comes.”

Writing and not writing

Writing, pursuing new journalistic projects and documentary filmmaking are all ways to fill the gap between imagined potential and real (disappointing) experience in the earlier, chaotic years of adulthood which are the setting for Killing the Nerve. As Pazos says to explain her penchant for returning to Greece, going back to write serves to “reconcile [her] own strange personal episode by studying other, immeasurably strange episodes and the ways other people went about their lives trying to create order and meaning”. This is a coping mechanism which one could imagine extends to the writing of the book itself. Coming to join the story Pazos never wrote about the Hebrew tombstones in Thessaloniki but now includes in Killing the Nerve are her incursions into the West Bank from Jerusalem; she says that she “never felt able to write anything about Palestine” and simply “toured the territories with a vague sense of indignation and guilt”.

Rather than writing about Palestine at the time – which she now does in detail and with a jaded eye, seeing the prospect of complete liberation as impossible – she worked as an assistant for a news correspondent, taking down and editing the notes he sent over the telephone from his comfortable home, far away from the occupied territories. Again, journalism has failed her. It is in the streets that Pazos writes down her impressions of everyone she meets, sketching out the diverse and often eccentric characters populating them. It is portraits such as these from all the cities Pazos inhabited, as well as her potted histories of each region, which are the soul of the book. She has an eye for small details and for neat summary which can be savage. For example, the wretched Italian Gianni, who accompanies her on her trips to the West Bank:

“He had quit his job as a pizzaiolo in Bergamo to follow in his girlfriend’s footsteps; she was studying a master’s in Jerusalem. When he moved to the Holy City, he found out that his girlfriend had been involved with a green-eyed, brown-haired Israeli for a month. This had obviously contributed to his hatred of Israel, a hatred that had already taken shape over years of vague allegiance to the Palestinian cause. Gianni wasn’t as fascinated as I was by the myriad layers and excisions that overlapped in Israeli society, nor in the contrast between the frenetic immediacy of its day-to-day and the millennial roots of its places and mythology. There, Gianni saw apartheid, religious fanaticism, an army of green eyes and brown hair colonising someone else’s land, Bible in hand.”

Romantic disillusionment

The other thread that runs through the book is a series of disappointing boyfriends from a multitude of countries. While the frequency of their departure reaches a climax in New York’s merciless dating scene, where “the Jons, Uris, Orlandos . . . make me instantly project a future with children, grandchildren, transatlantic trips, and family Sunday lunches, before disappearing unceremoniously into the roar of the city”, the most striking example comes when Pazos meets Guillermo, a war photographer who is desirable partly because he seems to incarnate her desire to be in the right place at the right time, in the centre of things, to such an extent that after following him to several countries for work she joins him on an attempt to circumnavigate the world, telling herself she will make a documentary. Finding nothing but a state of “tension, permanent seasickness, and tedium followed by occasional bursts of panic” and a crew just as unhappy as she is rather than a grand adventure, Pazos nevertheless sticks out the trip and a decreasingly satisfying relationship with Guillermo only to be summarily dumped after returning to Barcelona. She does, however, make the documentary. It is in this episode that all her different kinds of disillusion come together: the disappointment with journalism, with travel and with men wrapped up in one unfaithful partner. It is only when she drops everything and returns to her family during the pandemic, at the end of the book, that she can let go of all these disappointments at once, shake off the “myopia” that left her “oblivious to anything in [her] city that was urgent or worthy of contemplation” and chasing excitement and a name for herself abroad, and feel finally that she is home.