Finished this yesterday on the trains to Goslar from Leipzig (though I got off before Goslar). The book is warm and funny, and every sentence feels veFinished this yesterday on the trains to Goslar from Leipzig (though I got off before Goslar). The book is warm and funny, and every sentence feels very measured. And it's funny that Knausgaard endorses it as he is called a master within its pages. Explores the ever-explorable idea of the narrator and our very idea of autofiction. Kracht does say about the narrator of Faserland, being "I" and also, therefore, "me"; yet, we can guess as readers that what we are reading isn't entirely true. We can be fooled not to care, which is the enduring beauty of autofiction. I will always be enamoured with most attempts at this slippery, self-serving and self-centred genre. It's why I put myself through all five-thousand pages of My Struggle and all however many pages of In Search of Lost Time. Kracht proves, however, that you don't have to write 6k pages to get someone to take you seriously. With his humour, there is a critical eye on the rich of Europe and particularly Switzerland, and particularly Zurich (which is a shame because I was going to go relatively soon for the Joyce-echoes, but Kracht ensures us that there is none of that to be found or felt), so we get plenty of Bernhard coming through in his prose. I also like a complaining and slightly bitter writer, it seems. Readable, humorous, but not without cause. I can't say whether it's deserving of the Booker (especially now as I've decided I hardly care), but I certainly enjoyed it and found the ending somewhat touching, too....more
Going to Germany again for a bit and have an early flight to Berlin tomorrow. My parents' house is closer to the airport than my own flat, so we're heGoing to Germany again for a bit and have an early flight to Berlin tomorrow. My parents' house is closer to the airport than my own flat, so we're here for the night. I thought my Fitzcarraldo subscription was over, but this had come in the post for me. I read it in a single sitting this evening as my girlfriend watched telly with my parents and did the entertaining part that I should have been doing.
A lot of the book rings true to some of my own experiences. It says something about modern living but a lot of it has been explored before. Nothing groundbreaking. Not a lick of dialogue- it's all tell don't show. Not a single scene, in fact. Anna and Tom live a life that's not necessarily enviable, but actually it is. At least at times. Everyone is chasing something and never quite finding it. Social media is mostly to blame. People build political ideologies from headlines and Instagram posts and fake news. The grass is greener. It's not depressing so much as truthful. People have it better and worse and it averages out for some people who live okay lives, not necessarily exciting or rich, but safe and therefore precious....more
Mostly cringeworthy. Reads like someone desperately trying to be shocking and/or different. Throw in some philosophical quotes and platitudes about HuMostly cringeworthy. Reads like someone desperately trying to be shocking and/or different. Throw in some philosophical quotes and platitudes about Huxley and the 70s and you've got the whole book wrapped up. The prose is boring and matter-of-fact. Pynchon, for example, writes novels full of weird sexual practices, but there's no denying that Pynchon can write a beautiful sentence. Can't currently say the same about Houellebecq. As well as all the sex there is the mentioning of cutting up disabled children with a chainsaw and eating them, 'abortion parties' where the foetus is grounded up and kneaded into dough before being baked in bread and cakes for the party-goers consumption, plenty of examples of masturbation over underage girls, and in the case of Bruno, masturbating after looking at his mother's vagina, then subsequently killing the cat that 'watched' him do it. A book of hate and depravity. I gained nothing from reading this.
Interestingly, as a side point, it might have been the sort of thing I'd like at 18-20 years old for being different and edgy. I remember talking to Swann, my mentor, about writers like Pynchon and Burroughs, and being disappointed by his flippancy and disregard. He wasn't interested in them. Being a stuck-up 18 year old just getting into literature, I was annoyed with him. I thought it was the sort of hardcore thing he should be reading. Having left university some ten years ago, I think I now see Swann more eye-to-eye. This sort of thing no longer impresses me. Or, as John Crace wrote of the ending,
It is 2070. Yawn. The world is full of women clones. Yawn. Everyone is happy. Yawn. History exists. Yawn. It is elemental. Yawn. It is inexorable. Yawn. The species that envisaged its passing has brought it about. Yawn. This book is dedicated to Me. I mean Mankind....more
I've already read Vanishing Point, the third book of this 'tetralogy' (which hardly needs to be read in order, for they are, for the most part, fact bI've already read Vanishing Point, the third book of this 'tetralogy' (which hardly needs to be read in order, for they are, for the most part, fact books) but I have returned to the beginning with Reader's Block. Much the same. Reader wants to write a book about a/the Protagonist. Instead, Reader is assailed by 200 pages of anecdotes and facts about mostly literary figures*. The recurring themes are death/suicide, antisemitism and creative plight. Markson is a cheeky postmodernist**, so I face most of the facts with scepticism, but truth be told, a good number of the facts I already knew and therefore know them to be true. Plenty about Joyce, all of which can be read in Ellmann's book. Strangely, lots of references to the Matter of Britain, with Geoffrey of Monmouth, Malory and famous quotes appearing. I didn't record that many facts/anecdotes as before, simply because you could honestly record hundreds, but here are some random ones:
'Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting. Said Barnett Newman.'
'Wherever conquest led him, Alexander the Great made it a point to have botanical specimens sent back to Aristotle, who had been his tutor. A copy of the Iliad that he carried in a jewelled chest contained emendations in Aristotle's handwriting.'
'The vocabulary in Shakespeare's plays includes 29,066 different words. There are 29,899 different words in Ulysses.' __________
* 'A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?'
** Alan and I have been discussing 'sincerity' in fiction. As I grow older (he says still shy of 30!) I find I have less patience with postmodern books such as these. At university, it was always the more experimental the better. I couldn't understand my tutor, Swann, who was disinterested by all the experiments and games. For instance, he couldn't stand Thomas Pynchon. Swann wanted character and feeling, and didn't think it could be found in the likes of TRP. And yet, now, when I read Markson, I think, OK, but why do I care? I get a glimmer of emotion in this, and I found the end of Vanishing Point had some feeling to it, but honestly I start to crave the baggy 800 page Victorian novel that makes me befriend those who walk the page. As I said to Alan the other day, it's the biggest mistake people make with things like Ulysses; the book is life-affirming and has immense heart, even though Joyce is, of course, playing all sorts of games, too. In short, i think Reader's Block lacks sufficient heart and sincerity....more
3.5. In 1956, John Steinbeck sent a letter to Elizabeth Otis, his literary agent from 1931-68), saying, 'I am going to start the Morte immediately. Le3.5. In 1956, John Steinbeck sent a letter to Elizabeth Otis, his literary agent from 1931-68), saying, 'I am going to start the Morte immediately. Let it be private between us until I get it done. It has all the old magic.' Steinbeck wrote the 'Morte', what would become The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights between 1958-9 in Somerset, England. He never finished. His final admission about what he had written came in 1965: 'But right now I don't think it is bad. Strange and different, but not bad.'
As it was never finished, it was also never edited. The first few parts of the novel are in the style and tone of Malory. I've read a lot of Malory (and still far from all!) and found my mind occasionally muddled. For one, I had to remind myself I wasn't reading Malory; secondly, I had to remind myself that this was John Steinbeck, the writer of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. It is hard, even now having finished, to associate Steinbeck with the legends of King Arthur. This was his passion project, it seems, despite never completing it. As the novel progresses, Steinbeck gains confidence. The style of Malory lessens and his own style creeps onto the pages (for though less so than the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles, Malory can be repetitive). There are some lovely passages. 'It was a forest of oak and beech, laced with may and white thorn, tangled and guarded by briars. No opening showed on its dark frontier [...]'. Like with most Arthurian tales, certainly T. H. White, the Lancelot part is the strongest and most interesting. It's hard to rate this novel as itself for the stories are taken from Malory and I know them all too well already (and therefore find reading them, with so little changes, dull at times), but it is a good book.
I think people with an interest in Arthurian literature could start here, as opposed to the daunting books of Malory. Fans of Steinbeck will be surprised. This is maybe my 8th Steinbeck book and it is unlike all the others I've read previously. And of course, it is unfinished (though it does finish with the closing of Lancelot's part) and unedited, so it is rough around the edges. But come here for all the usual damsels, castles, unseating of knights, and magic....more
Bleak, but not depressingly so. The past tense is like a salve for the reader, who is reassured throughout that the narrator is speaking from a positiBleak, but not depressingly so. The past tense is like a salve for the reader, who is reassured throughout that the narrator is speaking from a position of security/safety. A young girl is the 40th female prisoner who has lived her life in a cage guarded by men, but when things change, she must face the questions at the centre of her world: why am I here? What happened to my ancestors? What will happen in my future?
The catch is, these are also the questions that we, readers, have been asking our whole lives, even if we have never been imprisoned. ...more
Excellent and strange. I'll be a mouthpiece for Susan Sontag, whose foreword says it all (and, without Sontag, we would probably never have chance to Excellent and strange. I'll be a mouthpiece for Susan Sontag, whose foreword says it all (and, without Sontag, we would probably never have chance to read this). Tsypkin never saw a single page of his work published in his lifetime; he was born in Minsk to Russian-Jewish parents and lived his career as a medical doctor and researcher of polio and cancer. Sontag writes,
Yet some ten years ago, rifling through a bin of scruffy-looking used paperbacks outside a bookshop on London's Charing Cross Road, I came across such a book, "Summer in Baden-Baden", which I would include among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century's worth of fiction and para-fiction.
Which is immensely high praise. She likens him to Sebald, too, which, for Sontag, is also immensely high praise. I was reminded of Bernhard whilst reading Dostoyevsky's rambling mind, and found Sontag thought the same (I read forewords once I've finished, like most). She also likens his sentences to Saramago's. They are very long. Full-stops are only used at the end of paragraphs; within each paragraph, everything is instead joined together with hyphens. It is maybe the first book I've read of this nature. And these sentences aid the meandering narrative Tsypkin has written, which includes numerous points throughout Dostoyevsky's life, as well as the narrator of the story, which Sontag has no fear in calling Tsypkin himself. Sontag well explains,
In course of these ardently protracted paragraph-sentences, the river of feeling gathers up and sweeps along the narrative of Dostoyevsky's life and of Tsypkin's: a sentence that starts with Fedya and Anna in Dresden might flash back to Dostoyevsky's convict years or to an earlier bout of gambling mania linked to his romance with Polina Suslova, then thread onto this a memory from the narrator's medical-student days and a rumination on some lines by Pushkin.
If it sounds disorientating, it is; it is a book of strange, hallucinatory power. One recurring image in the imagined mind of Dostoyevsky is a giant triangle, whose apex is sometimes obscured by clouds. As a library book, I couldn't underline as I do in my own books, but I've chosen a random page to show the mania of Fedya and the hyphen-filled paragraphs that make up the novel. Turgenev and other Russian writers also feature as characters.
When he arrived home, Fedya fell onto his knees before Anna Grigor'yevna so that she was quite taken aback and began to retreat into the corner of the room, as he crawled after her, still on his knees, and saying over and over again. 'Forgive me, forgive me!' and 'You've my angel!' — but she continued to side-step, so he jumped to his feet and began to drum his fists against the wall — and then he began to hammer his own head, as if by design, as though he was playing out some kind of farce, so that she briefly felt like laughing, but she was afraid that their landlady might hear and, apart from that, it might lead to another fit — so she ran up to him and tried to restrain him —and his face was pale and his trembled and his beard was twisted to one side — and kneeling before her yet again, he repented his losses and the fact that he made her unhappy, but she was unable to take in his words or understand the full depth of his suffering and humiliation and, standing in the corner of the room, she looked at him in amazement and even with an unfriendly kind of smile — could it be that she was laughing at him? — so he leapt up and began to drum the wall again so that, at last, she would have to realise, that they would all have to realise . . .
And so on and on do the sentences run, driven by commas and hyphens, circling Dostoyevsky's tormented life, writing, and the narrator, who, on his own journey, eventually has to face his hero's (hero?) hatred of Jews....more
Levrero is an 'underground' classic of Latin American literature who is back now thanks to & Other Stories, who has joined the likes of Fitzcarraldo aLevrero is an 'underground' classic of Latin American literature who is back now thanks to & Other Stories, who has joined the likes of Fitzcarraldo and Lolli as one of my top independent publishers. Most of these stories were written in the 1960s and Levrero's style is akin to Borges (which is perhaps always predictable to say of Latin American writers) and Calvino. I've seen him referred to as Kafkaesque but I disagree; a lot of Levrero's work lacked the terror of Kafka. They were more fable than bureaucratic nightmares, and in that regard, reminded me more of Calvino. There are trippy fairy tales about locked rooms and basements in impossibly large houses, a man takes apart his lighter to discover its fault only to end up walking down a street inside what was once his lighter, a man invites a travelling salesperson and a circus unwittingly into his house, a strange jelly is the backdrop of a confusing seemingly apocalyptic story, and, of course, the titular story, "The Thinking-About-Gladys-Machine" and its "Negative" version at the back of the volume, poses a number of questions about the nature of Levrero's strange B-side of reality (to steal a phrase I once read on the back of a Agustín Fernández Mallo novel). ...more
Interesting and enjoyable enough, a bit like the non-Moomin Jansson stuff; but even for 200 pages, it grows repetitive. You really have to worry aboutInteresting and enjoyable enough, a bit like the non-Moomin Jansson stuff; but even for 200 pages, it grows repetitive. You really have to worry about vitamins when you're out in the polar night....more
Last year (not so long ago!) I read Murnane’s Inland and was confronted with something unlike I’ve ever read before. In some ways, like Proust, and inLast year (not so long ago!) I read Murnane’s Inland and was confronted with something unlike I’ve ever read before. In some ways, like Proust, and in others, like Thomas Bernhard, but without the angst. Murnane’s prose is circular, repetitive, and in many ways, frustrating. I didn’t bother to rate it. But since then, I’ve been quietly obsessed with him, reading countless interviews, articles, reviews and profiles; I’m half convinced he’s destined for a Nobel Prize.
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (perhaps the most beautiful title I’ve come across for some time, taken from Proust) is a collection of essays, mostly about the act of writing itself, and surprisingly personal. I studied writing for six years in formal education and would say most writing advice now bores me to tears, for I’ve heard it all before. “Show don’t tell” was battered over my head for half a decade. Murnane’s writing advice is unlike anything I’ve heard before. His ideas of fiction are inimitable: he is entirely concerned with fiction comprised of images; he speaks nothing of the usual mantras of characterisation, plot, arcs, tension, conflict or change. For example, he greatly admires words he read many years ago (in many of Murnane’s essays he mentions words or phrases that have stayed with him for many years, even whole poems and passages he knows verbatim) by Herbert Read, ‘Good writing exactly reproduces what we should call the contour of our thought.’ In a later essay, Murnane says himself, ‘I have sometimes thought of the whole enterprise of my fiction-writing as an effort to bring to light an underlying order – a vast pattern of connected images – beneath everything that I am able to call my mind.’
I can’t even describe the beauty and symmetry of the titular essay on Proust.
I’ll be reading more of Murnane’s fiction this year....more
The benefit of reading Bolaño in order, as I am, becomes apparent. The final invented writer/poet in the novel published before this, Nazi Literature The benefit of reading Bolaño in order, as I am, becomes apparent. The final invented writer/poet in the novel published before this, Nazi Literature in the Americas, is the subject of Distant Star. I began to recognise the ploys of Carlos Weider, namely, writing his poetry with plane in the sky. As ever, there are young deadbeat wannabe poets in Chile, this time in the turbulent 1973-4 years. Plenty of allusions, to writers real and imagined. The structure is more narrative than the aforementioned book that came before it, but the novel is equally filled with long-winded digressions about made-up writers, fascists/Nazis, murders and other bizarre happenings. Bolaño is a writer's writer.
The way to fight evil, he said, was to learn how to read, and by this he meant not only words but numbers, colours, signs, arrangements of tiny objects, late-night and early-morning television shows, obscure films.
As with Alan, this was a year of inner discovery. I would like to read less and more slowly. Coincidentally, we have seen many people saying the same As with Alan, this was a year of inner discovery. I would like to read less and more slowly. Coincidentally, we have seen many people saying the same things. This year we saw Goodreads in a new light. So, even in the last few months, I’ve slowed. I’ve focused more on my own writing, and in the same way, read the bits of books that I want to read, or that apply, rather than worrying about reading something from start to finish just to mark it on Goodreads. There is a peaceful freedom to reading a random chapter in a loved book again and not feeling guilty or as if I’m wasting time.
That said, I still read 110 books, even around moving into a new flat, and discovered many new writers and books. The stand-out, I suppose, has been my journey with Karl Ove Knausgaard; I read Vol 2 of My Struggle in January this year and finished Vol 6 in October.
5-Star Reads A Man in Love Balcony in the Forest Faces in the Water The End
Honorary Mentions Johnny Got His Gun Passing Darkness at Noon Martin Eden The Silmarillion Knaugaard vol 3-5 The Magic Mountain The Empusium The Fifth Head of Cerberus Love A Wizard of Earthsea Assassin’s Apprentice Bel-Ami The Once and Future King
My love of travel often crosses with my love of reading. I had the pleasure of reading Pynchon’s V in Valetta, Malta, where it is partly set; I read My Brilliant Friend in Naples, walking the streets as I read them described, and into Sorrento and Pompeii, too; I read Tokarczuk’s The Empusium in the south of France as I stayed with family friends; and months later, I read Bel-Ami in northern France, in Honfleur. I’ll be reading something suitable in March next year as I travel around Germany once again.
So slower next year. I’ll be savouring bigger books, books that have long eluded me. I’ll be trying to tackle the hundreds of books that crowd the ‘library’ in my flat, though taking books from the library is far more tempting. I'll be forgetting the numbers trap I've slowly found myself in over the last few years. Anyway, thanks to all who make Goodreads a nice place to be. Happy holidays....more
A crazy and surreal romp through Soviet Russia with a good dash of religion for good measure. I love the surreal and I am a long-time admirer of RussiA crazy and surreal romp through Soviet Russia with a good dash of religion for good measure. I love the surreal and I am a long-time admirer of Russian lit so this should have been the novel of my dreams, but alas, no*. I tried to read it a while ago (t. Burgin) and couldn't get into it (and I finish everything I start, as a rule, so dropping something tends to be monumental) and this time around (t. Glenny) I did start to enjoy it, but ultimately found it a 'squid book' (too many tentacles that get tangled up). The Pontius bits were actually my favourite bits, though I've seen others complain about them. All the Devil's playfulness mostly bored me. Though who is in the mood for playfulness in January? Glad to have finally read this classic but found it mostly disappointing.
*A wonderful colleague of mine who is fluent in both Russian and German (who has read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky untranslated and hates them both!!) calls this her favourite novel....more
What the second epilogue is to War and Peace. Disappointing until the final three pages, which filled me with awe and joy for the whole pentalogy. WhiWhat the second epilogue is to War and Peace. Disappointing until the final three pages, which filled me with awe and joy for the whole pentalogy. White explores, in those final pages, all the iterations and ideas that surround King Arthur and how he has prevailed all this time. And he continues to prevail, whether he returns or not. ...more
This dispels any worries that the series will continue to be ‘for children’. It begins with a witch boiling a cat alive in a cauldron and a graphic and uncomfortable scene of the Orkney brothers clumsily decapitating a unicorn. Horribly, these are the standouts. The rest of the novel barely feels like a novel. Merlyn talks to Arthur about the nature of war and why no war is just except a war fought in self-defence. He frequently mentions an angry Austrian dictator he knows from the future. There are some philosophical arguments on this matter. It’s a short book, and had I not read it in the 1-4 volume, I can’t imagine what I’d think of a book that feels like such a bridge without much of its own content. 3-stars.
The Ill-Made Knight
Lancelot enters the pentalogy. T H White subverts it in his way by making Lancelot not the Prince Charming of the Matter of Britain, but ugly. His love for Guenever inevitably comes and White writes it as a quadrangle with King Arthur and with God. Elaine and the birth of Galahad happens as well. There is a lot of sex through deception throughout the Matter of Britain and White doesn’t shy away from it. 4-stars.
Candle in the Wind
A magnificent ending to the tetralogy (as it ended here during White’s lifetime). Full of drama and emotion, all beautifully written by White. It’s incredible to think the first book is filled with such silliness and childishness when it ends here. Lancelot and Guenever’s story comes to its inevitable end. King Arthur is drawn as a tragic and mostly pitiable king trying to what he believes to be right whilst being cucked and betrayed by his closest friend and knight. The Orkney brothers are bent on revenge. The final paragraph is Arthur’s reflection on life, war and the nature of chivalry. As White was a conscientious objector during the Second World War, the piece comes into a new light as an anti-war text with Arthurian Britain as the backdrop. I was left impressed and a little bereft, too. 4.5/5-stars.
A strong first half with "The Tower of Babylon" and "Story of Your Life" (my girlfriend and I then watched its adaption, the movie Arrival, which I enA strong first half with "The Tower of Babylon" and "Story of Your Life" (my girlfriend and I then watched its adaption, the movie Arrival, which I enjoyed in some ways; I thought certain changes were smart (not better, but smart for cinema), some bits were too dramatised and ruined the gentleness of the story, and some bits were heavy-handed), but the collection became a slog with "Seventy-Two Letters". Chiang's writing is fine, but the more I read the more I got bogged down in the plain, telling prose. His stories are filled with science jargon and I guess I'm not smart enough to appreciate it. Some of the stories lack any character or emotion and read like manuals. The idea behind "Hell is the Absence of God" was interesting, with people being wounded or healed by the visitation of angels from heaven, but by this point I had mentally checked-out. Worth it for the highlights. ...more
If you're lucky enough to live to 80 years old that gives you four-thousand weeks on planet earth.
Since finishing, I've reported this fact to numerouIf you're lucky enough to live to 80 years old that gives you four-thousand weeks on planet earth.
Since finishing, I've reported this fact to numerous people and discussed some of the ideas Burkeman explores in the book. For one, he tries to make a case for relief rather than fear. It doesn't entirely work. The platitudes by the end of the book (you can do what you want / the universe doesn't care) isn't so freeing as Burkeman imagines, at least not for me; but I'm grateful for this book, too. Alan recommended it to me in a hope (I think) to stave off some of the existential dread I've had the last few weeks after having a death in the family and sitting beside my first dead body. And life, the choices we make, what we do with our time, these are all topics of great contention. Indeed, this weekend I somehow ended up in a heated debate in a deserted French restaurant with an English friend of my mother's after bringing up this book (though not about the book itself).
(The original Latin word for 'decide', 'decidere', means 'to cut off', as in slicing away alternatives; it's a close cousin of words like 'homicide' and 'suicide'.) Any finite life — even the best one you could possibly imagine — is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.
Burkeman does call upon many philosophers and psychologists. The best investigation was his deconstruction of Heidegger's ideas that we are time, not limited by time. Being-towards-death, etc. '[T]here's no meaningful way to think of a person's existence except as a sequence of moments of time'.
The recent death in my family was not unexpected. Worse still, we were waiting for it. Days of sorting furniture and clearing a flat in preparation to hand it over to the next buyers. For the entire day I felt like Knausgaard clearing his father's place. (I realised once more the comfort of fiction!) So death came at last. We sat in the room talking about her, her life, but also sitting in a strange silence. As I read a scene in de Maupassant's Bel-Ami just last night: we were all waiting for her to make a noise, or sit up again. Eventually, it almost became a commonplace feature of the room, and we even laughed. Then suddenly someone would cry again, as if remembering. She was lucky enough to have more than four-thousand weeks.
So Burkeman reassures us (or tries): live with a little more abandon, enjoy your leisure and think of life as every passing moment rather than a succession of waits for the weekend. That is how time is frittered away. Time is not against us. It's not even with us. It is us....more
4.5. Outrageous for 1885 — all the high Parisian society and drama of Proust but without the Proustian sentences (I adore Proust; this is not better, 4.5. Outrageous for 1885 — all the high Parisian society and drama of Proust but without the Proustian sentences (I adore Proust; this is not better, simply different). Georges Duroy, or Bel-Ami, is a cad, and his novel is a social climber's Bildungsroman. For most of the novel, he has three women on the go at once. He falls in love at the drop of a hat and loses interest faster. It's natural to wait the entire novel for Duroy to get his comeuppance, but Guy de Maupassant hasn't written the novel as simply as that. What does a man who has everything want? Simply, more.
It was the perfect companion as I stayed in Normandy for a long weekend, though it would have been better suited for Paris, of course. Through all the social climbing and playing with women, the novel has many striking existential scenes. At one point Bel-Ami sits in the death room of an old friend and Guy de Maupassant captures it so intensely that I was revisiting a death room from my own life in my mind's eye. Duroy has this rumination beside his friend's body:
Like everyone else, for the space of a few years he had lived, eaten, laughed and hoped. And now everything was over for him for ever. What is life? A few days and then nothing more. You're born, you grow up, you're happy, you wait and then you die. Goodbye! Whether you're a man or a woman, you'll never come back on earth. And yet everyone bears within himself the feverish, hopeless wish to be eternal, each person is a sort of universe within the universe and yet each person is soon completely annihilated on the dunghill where lie the seeds of new life to come. Plants, animals, men, stars, worlds, everything takes on life and then dies and is transformed. And no creatures ever comes back, whether it be a man, an insect or a planet ! [...] He was thinking of flies, which live a few hours, of animals which live a few days, of men who live a few years, of planets which live a few centuries. What difference was there then between them? A few extra dawns, that was all.
And later, at a party, an old poet rambles for pages and pages about death to Duroy, some of which I'll transcribe below.
'Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're looking towards the top and you feel happy; but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up but quick going down. At your age, you're cheerful. You're full of so many hopes, which, incidentally, will never be fulfilled. At my age, you don't expect anything — except death [...] Gradually, month by month, hour by hour, I have felt it destroying me, like a house falling into ruins.'
A novel about desire, and perhaps the pointlessness of it all. I'm surprised this isn't mentioned more often in discussions about French classics. ...more