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".