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…Continue reading Among the Readers
Category: 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…Continue reading L’annee Brouillard
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…Continue reading On Memory
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…Continue reading Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
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…Continue reading for the love of pie