“The night he died I was in a north London nightclub, where I took heroin for the first time. I returned to my south London flat the next morning, threw up, and went straight in to work, where someone immediately told me about his death.” This fragment, the 421st of the 450 that comprise Ian Penman’s engaging new book , strikes me as something much more than a “where were you when…” sort of anecdote. It cuts to the core. Arriving late in the game with a stinging force, it sutures together two unrelated events in 1982: an opioid turn in the writer’s early twenties, and the drugged-out expiration of his subject at age 37. Across the book, Penman leans hard on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last days, as if the director’s death and the way of life that led to it exerted an abyssal pull on him. Penman seems driven by a biographical fascination with the decadent intensity of the from Bad Wörishofen—or is it an biographical fascination? As winds down, the parallel tracks established from the start—the life of the writer, the life of the filmmaker—collide in an intoxicated night during which one era gives way to another.
