To give life to a book – to render it vivid, exciting; to let reading rush quickly over its pages, and run breathless to its end. A book is made of words, dead things, or things that depend on a kind of death – negation, the departure from its referents. Then its life is only a simulacrum of living; its vivacity is borrowed.
The writer-virtuoso can let a fictional world quiver into life. Above the book like a hologram: a world, a plot, characters. But what of the non-virtuoso for whom nothing quivers up? What of the writer who would plunge death into a dying that never permits of the making of a fictional world?
Dying lays down in death. The words no longer speak of the world, and the book is a surface. You can read, but what is it that you read? You eyes pass over a surface, but what is it over which they pass? A frozen space; a glass. Reading suspended in reading. Reading lost in reading. Where has your attention wandered? Over what blind surface is it lost?
Lars Iyer's Blog 