I am sitting and reading…there are many people in the hall, but one doesn’t feel them. They are in their books. Sometimes they move in the pages, like people who are sleeping and who turn over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. Why are they not always so? You can go up to one and touch him gently; he feels nothing. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Litbits: excerpts from good books
L’annee Brouillard
Here’s the cover of the French translation of The Year of Fog, forthcoming from Buchet Chastel. The book was translated by the wonderful Sophie Aslanides. I think the cover goes perfectly with the story and also with the epigram, which is from Eugene Ionesco’s beautiful memoir, Present Past/Past Present:The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all.
On Memory
Ryszard Kapuscinski on Herodotus as the first journalist, in Travels with Herodotus. His task is complex: on the one hand, he knows that the most precious and almost the only source of knowledge is the memory of those he meets; on the other hand, he is aware that this memory is a fragile thing, volatile and evanescent–that memory has a vanishing point. That is why he is in a hurry–people forget, or else move away somewhere and one cannot find them again, and eventually they die.
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
At five p.m. on December 16, my mother called me into her study. I waited until she said my name twice, so I didn’t appear too eager. There is something quietly heartbreaking in these words, spoken by the narrator of Vendela Vida’s lovely second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Some years before the opening action of the novel, Clarissa’s mother disappeared, and a number of the brief, impressionistic chapters are devoted to the mercurial woman whose absence has left its melancholic mark on Clarissa. In one scene, Clarissa’s mother asks her young daughter how she looks,...
for the love of pie
I love pie, and I loved this description of a pie shop, which emerges as an eerie, mysterious clue in Chapter 6 of Michael Chabon’s strange and clever new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union: The place is nothing more than a window that opens onto a kitchen equipped with five gleaming ovens. Next to the window hangs a whiteboard, and every day the proprietors–a couple of hostile Klondikes and their mysterious daughter–write out a list of the day’s wares: blackberry, apple, rhubarb, peach, banana cream. The pie is good, even famous in a modest way. Anybody who has passed...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
