nemesis

This is funny:

"You pay the big man, the big name, to be on your faculty, for publicity's sake, and naturally he does very little in terms of actual teaching, might in fact be on leave every other year or traveling much of the time. The real work of teaching is done by others, as we all known. Do we know!" (212. "Nemesis").

thomson...

Inspired by 'the most hated woman in the UK', a serial killer that's never named in the novel, we are faced with a cop's vigil as a warder of the woman's corpse in the morgue. Many thanks to Carmen... again! for this extreme and beautiful novel that should be quoted entirely; so at random:
"He studied himself for minutes on end, trying to catch a glimpse of it. The weakness, the ugliness. The fatal flaw. It must always have been there, he thought. Other people had seen it, perhaps. If they had, they'd said nothing: it wasn't the kind of thing you could talk about. It had taken the birth of a child to establish it beyond all doubt. To bring it out into the open".
A read that lingers...

darkmans

Incredible to think that in the US Harper Perennial ignored a hard back for this incredible novel and went directly to the paperback, which is a shame in a 838 pages book (as well as an irony: perennial?). Darkmans was shortlisted for the booker and it's an impressive novel, absolutely Barker from every angle! Quotes later

...star

"No help. None. No pity, and no mercy for she'd been bled dry of such herself. Run to earth, and broken utterly. And suffused with God's will. God gave me streng, guided my hand and so it was, and so it would be...

"Why 'Starr Bright' dipped her forefinger into the pig-blood, to test its heat perhaps, to test its viscosity, she would not known and would not afterward recall. Whispering aloud, in wonder great as the dying man's before God's wrathful throne, 'Now you see! Now you see! Pigs and fornicators!", from Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon.

self-portrait

"To speak of oneself entails without doubt some distortion; the image we have of ourselves surely corresponds very little, almost not at all, to the reality of what we are. In any case, when one attempts to speak of an itinerary claiming to have wandered along the borderlands of poetry, the possibility of distortion increases, one might say, infinitely".

"Reality also appears early on to children in the tragedy of its contradictions; it even allows glimpses of its final nullity; and yet it always possesses moments (that are in no way 'rare' or 'privileged', because they are able to surprise us at any time, even during the deepest, most stagnant depression)in which it reveals its absolute dignity, or better, its 'worthiness' in existing, which has reasons solely within itself--all to be recognized, never all recognizable".

Andrea Zanzotto.

13

...steps down. I've been meaning to read more of Ruth Rendell's mystery fiction. Still haven't faced the chief inspector's novels, for which she is much known, but have wandered through her other works. It's incredible how she can use the mystery/suspense or phsychological thriller to draw attention on tough topics such as xenophonia and racism! In this spectacular novel the main character is Mix, a man obsessed with a black model and a serial killer long dead:

"Mix intended to be famous. The only possible life anyone could wish for these days, it seemed to him, was a celebrity's. To be stopped in the street and asked for your autograph, to be forced to travel incognito, to see your picture in the papers, to be in demand by journalists for interviews, to have fans speculate about your sex life, to be quoted in gossip columns..."

An how do you think we will acquire this?????

...to bed...

This novel made me think of other authors from the UK (Never again will I make the mistake of saying 'English'): John Banville and Ann Enright (both of them Irish). Naturally this means their main topics in their latest novels: death. Curiously enough both novels got the Booker, this year and last year. This one, Gerard Woodward's magnificent novel, "I'll Go to Bed at Noon" is part of a trilogy but stands totally by itself. This is a terrific novel that tackles the problem of alcoholism in an entire family. There's death and despair in this novel, and a lot of literary references, but it is easy to read because of Woodward's direct, even matter-of-factly prose, full of humour within the tragedy. I love this part, almost at the end of the novel when Colette, the matriarch dies (cirrhosis of the liver). This is Aldous's perspective, Colette's surviving husband:

"Afterwards Aldous sat in a small park of ornamental willows and wept. He realized he now had more time than he knew what to do with. More time than he could ever want. He was healthy. He was sixty-seven. He had no job, no wife, no children, no mortgage, no pets, and perhaps a good ten years of active life left, perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty. Those years spread before him with a vastness such as the early palaeonthologists must have recognized when they first realized that the Earth was much older than the Bible had told them. Not a few thousand years old, but five billion years. What had the world been doing all that time, what species had risen and fallen, what ages had passed? And in the future, the pathway of time streched further than the human race could ever walk. More time than humanity could ever fill. No matter how long the human race lasted, it would only ever be a flicker in the life of the universe, a twich of an eyelid.
When he got home he found a letter for him on the mat. It was his new bus pass. A free bus pass. The GLC had recently announced free travel on London Transport for all old age pensioners" (430).

jorge semprún

«Desde el mes de enero de 1946, en Ascona, en la Suiza italiana, había abandonado el libro que intentaba escribir sobre mi experiencia en Buchenwald. Me había visto obligado a tomar aquella decisión literalmente para sobrevivir. Ya sé que Primo Levi sólo volvió a la vida por medio y a través de Se questo è un uomo. Mi aventura había sido diferente. La escritura me encerraba en la clausura de la muerte, me asfixiaba en ella, implacablemente. Había que escoger entre la escritura y la vida, y escogí esta última. Escogí una larga cura de afasia, de amnesia deliberada para volver a vivir, o para sobrevivir... Así como la escritura liberaba a Primo Levi del pasado, apaciguaba su memoria, a mí me hundía otra vez en la muerte, me sumergía en ella». Jorge Semprún

nora strejilevich

CUANDO ME ROBARON EL NOMBRE
fui una fui cien fui miles
y no fui nadie.
NN era mi rostro despojado
de gesto de mirada de vocal.

shirley jackson

This was one of the classic gothic debts. Finally got this impressive penguin deluxe edition of Shirley Jackson, "We have always lived in the castle", according to Jonatham Lethem, in his great introduction to this edition, Jackson's finest work. This edition features a precious drawing by swiss artist Thomas Ott.
The story is completely told by 18th year old Merricat:

"I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance said, 'Never let them see that you care', and 'If you pay any attention they'll only get worse', and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elbers and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true. 'It's wrong to hate them', Constance said, 'it only weakens you', but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place".

snow...

First Snow

Like a child, the earth's going to sleep, or so the story goes.

But I'm not tired, it says, You may not be tired but I'm tired...

You can see it in her face, everyone can. So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come. Because the mother's sick to death of her life and needs silence.

Louise Glück

jenny erpenbeck

An excerpt from one of the condensed short stories by Jenny Erpenbeck (Berlin, 1967):

"His wife brings me tea. She has blotches, his wife, he once said to me, like a woman who's been beaten, but he doesn't beat her. How could you possibly have gotten so weak? she asks me. She sits on the edge of my bed and holds the saucer while I drink. I don't know, I tell her, maybe I just overdid it. If you rest a lot, you'll get better. Yes, I say, and take another sip. What do you think of my dress? she asks. I don't like the color, you look too somber in it. At least you're honest, she says. When I ask him, he always says, sure, you look fine, but he doesn't even look up, he doesn't even see what I have on, he just says: Sure, you look fine".
From 'Sun-Flecked shadows of my skull', in "The Old Child & Other Stories".

...

"Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead" Susan Sontag.

Photo: Camino a San Pedro de Atacama, by Catalina Dumay

...beach

last lines of the novel::::::::"On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer's dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light".

...twins

"In the past several weeks Molly has been doing research into the phenomenon of twin-ness. She has found astonishing things, in some cases alarming things--one of them being that identical twins reared apart more closely resemble each other than twins raised in the same household!--for that reason that, when raised together, twins make a conscious effort to become individuals; there is something profoundly distatesful about being 'identical' to another person. When twins are raised apart, however, without knowing each other, each naturally follows the bent of his instinct--the genetic trajectory of what might be called destiny. Consequently some of the twins in the studies Molly has been reading resemble each other to an uncanny degree: they unknowingly marry people with the same names, have children at approximately the same times and give them similar names; their I.Q.'s remain near-identical through life, despite differing environments, as well as their medical ailments; their tastes in food, clothing, jewelry et al. are remarkably similar, as are their personality traits and mannerisms. And of course they look alike. And frequently mistaken for each other". (From Lives of the Twins, by Rosamond Smith).

the gathering

"I get across the two feet of carpet that brings me to the lip of the stairs. I fall down them, one step at a time. I am nine years old, I am six years old, I am four again. I can not put my hand on the banister, in case I touch something I don't understand. The light switch at the bottom seems to recede, the quicker I go. Who turned it off? Why is the light in the hall turned off, when there is a corpse in the house?"

ann enright

"I am saying that, the year you sent us away, your dead son was interfered with, when you were not there to comfort or protect him, and that interference was enough to send him on a path that ends in the box downstairs. That is what I am saying, if you want to know"

From this year's booker winner, 'The gathering'.

solomon

"I got the nerve to dream of making some good pictures in my lifetime after I learned about Eugène Atget and Julia Margaret Cameron.
Atget launched his work on the streets of Paris when he was 40 and Cameron began her famous photographs of friends when she was 53.
I started taking pictures when I was 38. My first portrait project was at First Mondays, a market in Scottsboro, Alabama, and it began with battered dolls.
When I could move close to the dolls I began doing the same thing with people."

Rosalind Solomon 2004.

"Must one suppose oneself mad because one has the sentiment of universal pity in one's heart?"

Victor Hugo, The Alps and Pyrenees

gerard woodward

"We walked all day in our Wellingtons/To see the northern whaling stations.
Our feet were bleeding in their rubber/When we saw the slipways full of blubber.
Men slicing into pouches/Dissecting hearts as big as couches,
Entrails drying on the beaches,/Pink blood foaming in the reaches.
In the town we sensed hostility,/Couldn't even get a cup of tea."

('North from Reykjavik')

kramer

"And though not long ago we had fight,/ we'd be miserable if we called it a night;/ your skull gets baldish, and my turtleneck slack,/ my friend, we constantly carry death on our back:/ a very good reason to have a drink for the road."

From 'Old Friends', Theodor Kramer