John Safran provokes and pontificates
Book review by Anne Sarzin
When you review a book by iconoclastic John Safran you don’t anticipate in your wildest dreams that it will feature anything remotely sacramental. At a guess, possibly something excremental.
However, his latest book, Squat: A week squatting at Kanye’s mansion, merits both descriptors—‘sacramental’ because his subject, Kanye West, scrawled biblical quotations on the walls of his abandoned school and derelict mansion; and ‘excremental’ because, for starters, the author describes in some detail his own improvised toilet arrangements.
Scatological references aside, the book records Safran’s witty and improvisational dialogue and observations, mostly with his off-sider, his Greek partner Antoinette, who seems his doppelganger in many respects. They’re both weird and wacky; courageously or naively—depending on your viewpoint—engaged in an undercover investigation of Kanye West’s tyrannical and cynical exploitation of the system for his own advantage, his unethical actions—he incurs debts, ignores bills and hides behind a fake façade of Christian charity—and the sinister realms over which he rules as a micro-managing dictator. And then, of course, there’s his malignant antisemitism.
When John Safran—not to be confused with American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer—stumbles and, by his own account, ‘bumbles’ into Kanye’s world that seems alarmingly akin to that of the Mafiosi, neither he nor the reader knows where it will end. John hopes his adventures will yield the bones of a book, symbolically mirroring one of Kanye’s biblical quotations from Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones. It’s an apt metaphor for Safran’s painful construction of a story that seems altogether too skeletal. There is not enough flesh on the bones of this narrative.
Safran’s obsession with Kanye leads the author into transgressive behaviours, breaking and entering into abandoned Kanye West properties in order to penetrate his subject’s mindset. He wonders if his own unconventional methods and actions invalidate potential findings about the secretive, conspiracist and antisemitic Kanye West. He speculates about the socio-pathology of his subject and the cult following surrounding him.
While Safran spends a week in Kanye’s abandoned mansion fathoming the mysteries of its absent owner, in the process we learn more about the identity of the author than his subject. However, the book summons more shadows rather than substance.
Is Safran crazy or courageous to inhabit the sinister darkness around an influential and powerful public figure, especially one responsible for introducing ancient antisemitic tropes to an international audience? Plunging into this toxic world is a dangerous escapade. ‘Am I no longer the guy who interviews the cranks? Have I become the crank?’, he asks. Perhaps that’s what Safran needed to be to survive this madcap adventure.
Squat: A week squatting at Kanye’s mansion
John Safran
Penguin Random House
Australia
