Category: Books

It was a job like any other, Robert Walser said of writing; he wrote just as a farmer would sow and reap, or would feed his animals and muck out after them. He needed to eat, after all, and he had a sense of duty … It was just like any other job, he said. He could make a living, publishing in literary magazines. Shouldn't artists fit in with the ordinary? Shouldn't they be like anyone else? But then writing depends upon some measure of creative strength, and you can't count on that. Walser wrote best in the morning, before noon, and later, much later at night. 'The hours between noon and night found me stupid'. 'Things can only grow from me unforced', he said; this meant he couldn't bind himself to any particular newspaper, to any particular publisher (I'm quoting from Seelig's memoir of Walser, available in its entirety here). 

Walser's books. His first novel, The Tanners, published in 1906, was written in six weeks. The next year saw The Assistant, and in 1909, his own personal favourite among his books, the great Jakob von Gunten. In the same year, a volume of poems was published. Walser makes little money. He writes three more novels, but burns them, finding the form too long winded. He decides to return to the short stories, playlets and feuilletons which, he feels, were more suited to his talents.

Looking back on his youth, Walser worries later that he wrote too much. Shouldn't a writer save up his creativity for old age? Sometimes a writer will have nothing to say. 'Always pacing about the same room can lead to impotence'. Doesn't writing demand the full strength of a human being? It can suck you dry. Perhaps this was why he appeared to enjoy moving home. Each time, he began again. Each time, he forgot the past and immersed himself in his new surroundings. 'Ordinary people like us should be as quiet as possible'. He never had a library, only a few Reclam editions. 'What else do you need?', he said.

Walser living became more precarious. His short stories and feuilletons, which he'd been writing steadily for some years, made little money. He was offered money by generous benefactors to go abroad – to India, to Turkey. But why should he go? 'It's nice, just to stay'. He remained, but in increasing poverty and isolation. He'd never got on with his fellow writers; he held back from those artistic circles where, if he did attend, he was liable to drink and become aggressive.

In spring 1913, he returned to Switzerland, to Biel, where he'd live for seven years. 'I thought it was advisable to be as inconspicuous as possible'. He lived in his sister's apartment. He saw almost no one. 'I went walking by myself, day and night'. He continued to write, but due to the war, it had become harder to publish. Several volumes of prose appear nevertheless, although tastes in the reading public were changing. Who wanted to read feuillitons now? He had his admirers, of course; but they were busy with other things.

Walser moved into an attic room of a hotel. 'There was only a bed, a table and a chair. A cheap map of Europe was tacked to the wall', a visitor remembered. He wrote in a greatcoat and slippers, fashioned from scraps of worn out clothes, to protect him from the cold. Imagine it, the writer bent over his manuscript, his breath visible in the air … Soon he felt he'd written himself out. 'I had exhausted all my subjects, like a cowherd his pasture'.

In 1920, he moved to Berne, taking a job for a few months as an archivist, before being dismissed for insubordination. He was soon back at his 'short prose factory', i.e., his desk. Walser took long walks as he always done. But by now he was drinking heavily, and displaying the signs of depression which ran through his family. He tried to take his life, but 'I couldn't make a proper noose'. Eventually, in 1929, his sister took him to an asylum in Berne. 'I asked her just outside the gate, "Are we doing the right thing?" Her silence gave me the answer. What else could I do but enter?'

'The patient confessed hearing voices', it said in his medical records. 'Markedly depressed and severely inhibited. Responded evasively to questions about being sick of life'. Walser would recover, and continued to write and publish. In particular, he followed a way of writing he called the 'pencil method' – composing poems and prose on the back of envelopes, bank statements and other correspondence in a tiny hand, with individual letters no more than a millimetre in height. For a long time, these writings were assumed to be entirely hermetic, written in a private code, but they were deciphered – Walser had simply adopted an erratic style of abbreviation – and published in the 1990s.

Why did Walser adopt the pencil method? He experienced cramps in his right hand, which he interpreted as a psychosomatic hostility towards the pen with which he wrote. His switch to the pencil, then, allowed him to write, albeit with a completely altered script. But then, too, it seems that writing with a pencil allowed him to attain easily that state of mind in which he could produce his whimsical, dreamily associative prose. Although he continued to use a pen for fair copies and correspondence, Walser produced some 500 pages of microscript in these years, 24 of which yielded The Robber, 141 pages in print, a novel whose existence he didn't mention to others. He also returned to writing poems, many of which, unlike his microscripts, were published. (I'm drawing here on Coetzee's excellent essay. See also this volume of translations from 'the pencil area').

Walser continued to publish until he was moved, against his will, to a mental hospital at Herisau, where he could receive full welfare support. 'It's madness and cruelty to demand that I continue to write in the sanitarium', he says to Seelig, 'The basis of a writer's creativity is freedom. As long as this condition is not met I refuse to write again'. And he did not write; but the room, paper or pen he claimed were not available to him could have been so. He lived quietly, unprotestingly carrying out the tasks the institution set for him. 'I'm not here to write, I'm here to be mad', he told a visitor. Was he mad? His doctors wavered in their opinion. But Walser didn't want to leave, and resisted all attempts to resettle him.

Walser said he'd found the quiet he needed, in the asylum, he said to Seelig. He lay 'like a felled tree'; his desires had fallen asleep 'like children exhausted from their play'. He lived as in a monastery or a waiting room, he said. 'I was happy as things stood'. He wonders whether Hoelderlin's last 30 years might have also been happy. 'To be able to dream away in some quiet corner without having to satisfy obligations is certainly not the martyrdom that people make it out to be'.

He was content; his needs were met; he could go out on the long walks he enjoyed. But there was another reason why he no longer wrote, at least initially. As he says to Seelig, 'my world was smashed by the Nazis', he said. 'The papers that I wrote for are gone; their editors hunted down or killed'. The world had changed around him. He wanted to find a still point – first of all in writing, whose source was always uncertain, always liable to fatigue, and then, when that was exhausted – when there was nowhere left to for him to move, no more bedsitters, no more attic rooms in which to rediscover his strength, his freedom - the sure world of the asylum.

Read Harvey Pekar and you know you have an ally. That there's someone else, on the other side of the world maybe, but there nonetheless with his grouchiness and depressions. With the everyday, great and looming – that same everyday everyone likes to pretend does not exist, has no kind of consistency. That of catching the bus to work, of arguing with someone from another department at work, of queuing up behind security in the airport …: the everyday with its frustrations, its little impossibilities but also its alliances, its breathers.

Allies – isn't that what we want? Breathers – oh for a breather, a pause, a cigarette break … And don't you wish you smoked just so you could take a cigarette break? … only they've pushed them all outside the gates now, you can't smoke anywhere …

And that's what Harvey Pekar is, an ally … But then all he's done is double up the world - is narrate what happens today, yesterday and every day … Double it up, and, reading, it's as though my life were doubled up, too – I live everything Pekar-ishly; I have a Pekarian attitude: it's spread and thereby there's a cigarette paper between the everyday and itself.

Enough space to – what? Laugh at it? Cry at it? To step out of the frame, as the actor who plays him does in the film. Out of the frame and … isn't that enough? That's what a breather allows you. It's what an ally allows. And that makes me want to shout out: where have all the allies gone?

No doubt Art Pepper was, in many ways a terrible human being – Straight Life, his autobiography attests to that. But he is also a peculiarly honest one – not because he faces himself, admits to his shortcomings and tells us all about himself; rather, he is honest despite himself, as though honesty were a faculty separate from conscious will, intention and all that.

Honesty, in Straight Life, dictated to and transcribed by his wife of his later years, is no longer a moral category. It's as though the act of speaking were more honest than Pepper. He spoke and – this book came out, this book that counts against him in every way, that speaks, more readily in some sense than he could, of his massive shortcomings and failures and self-delusions.

It's as though it allowed one whole part of him to become transparent. You can see through him; can see - what? A pathetic soul. A despicable one. And the power of an honesty than seems to have nothing to do with him.

Whence the strange power of Straight Life … a book written against its author – a book written (spoken) against everything that was good and life-preserving about him. Written against himself? He died before he was completed. As though it wouldn't allow him to remain in a world in which it was. It took up his room, pushed him out …

And isn't there something that ought to be said here about Pepper's heroin addiction? About what it gave him? Confidence instead of desperate inadequacy. A warm, settled feeling instead of ceaseless stress. And doesn't he say from the first that he knew it would lead to his arrest and imprisonment, knew it would draw him into utter degradation, but knew, too, that it was fate, it was made for him, that he'd found what he'd wanted all along?

Perhaps it was heroin that made his prose (dictated) gossamer thin, pretty much see-through. That it turned his life into a sheet of glass through which something could be seen, but what? The murmur of speech that rolls on without you. The murmur of speech (of writing) that says everything about you, everything you can say and more than that, much more. Even as it wears away its referent, even as it leaves the world behind and seems to wander in its own corridors, fascinated with nothing, lost …

Rosenzweig to Friedrich Meinecke, Aug 30th 1920:

The one thing I wish to make clear is that scholarship no longer holds the centre of my attention, and that my life has fallen under the rule of a 'dark drive' which I'm aware that I merely name by calling it 'my Judaism' […]

[The Star of Redemption] is only – a book. I don't attach undue importance to it. The small – at times exceedingly small – thing called 'demands of the day' which is made upon me in my position at Frankfurt, I mean … the struggles with people and conditions, have now become the core of my existence … Note I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars … [T]he questions asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me.

'My Judaism': for Rosenzweig, this meant a way of being together – of speaking to others and listening in turn. Speech, here, concerns not only thought – the exchange of ideas – but existence. Existence understood as a weave of relations, as holding out ahead of itself a kind of community, the dream of saying 'we' beyond institutions and nationalities.

'We': this collective would be like a multiphonal chorus, in which each voice would keep its integrity in the whole, but would still be part of the whole. But above all, the way to the 'we' would be through the 'you', the other person, whose love for you, for Rosenzweig, is the medium of God's love.

'Into life': those were the last words of The Star of Redemption. That's where Rosenzweig was heading: into life, existence, which was the only way, for him, that the validity of The Star could be shown. Hadn't he written about the significance of speaking to others? Hadn't he allowed the very category of speech to become prophetic?

That's what life meant to Rosenzweig, speech. And that's what thought meant to him: to become accountable to other human beings through the act of speaking. Rosenzweig knew he had no place in the university. It was a matter of returning to ancient Jewish texts, in a manner lost to both liberal assimilated Jewish contemporaries and the orthodox who were devoted to the Jewish law. It was a matter of discovering one's own life as a Jew in relation to the ancient sources, and therefore of bringing Judaism to life.

This is what Rosenzweig had in mind when he rejected an academic career to become the director of the newly founded Frankfurt Free Jewish School. Teachers and pupils came together in small groups, the former not as experts propounding a body of knowledge, but as fellow inquirers. Wasn't this what it meant to be 'inquired of' …?

Speech, thought Rosenzweig, was the bridge between human beings and God. It was in terms of speech that he rethought the basic categories of theology and philosophy. 'Theological problems must be translated into human terms, and human problems brought into the pale of theology', he wrote. Philosophical issues were human issues, and religion belonged to the most elementary structures of existence. How else was the world to be redeemed except through speech?

Into life: but Rosenzweig, submitting in the years following the completion of The Star to near total paralysis, lost the capacity to speak. For a while, his mutterings and chokings could be interpreted by his wife and closest friends, but it didn't last. For a time, his head could be lifted in his wife's hands and he could pronounce this word or that. But that time went, and he turned to his specially adapted typewriter to communicate, which was worked by moving a lever over a disc containing all the letters; you needed to press but a single key.

In time, he was able only to point to the letters, his arm held up by a sling; and soon even the chance of this indication ceased, and his wife had to ascertain his intentions with a mixture of instinct and guesswork. Soon it was left to her merely to spell the alphabet out loud, until he was able by a signal – an inarticulate sound, a sudden facial expression - to indicate the correct letter. His head, inclined to loll, was supported in an iron frame. What was left to him now? But he could commit to memory whole essays, which he would compose during sleepless nights. His wife, following his direction, would type them for him, guessing recurring words from the first or second letter.

Rosenzweig, upon his diagnosis, expected a quick death. But it didn't come. Several years passed before he died of pneumonia, the progressive paralysis stopping short of his vital organs. He 'wrote'. He translated the hymns and poems of Judah ha-Levi, the medieval Hebrew poet and wrote introduction to the collected Jewish writings of Hermann Cohen; he expounded The Star in a more popular style and reflected on Jewish learning.

Above all, there was his collaborative translation of the Bible with Buber, who would send him sheets of rough translation, by chapters, which Rosenzweig would then correct. They kept up vigorous correspondence – the correct translation of a single word could become the subject of weeks of debate. And Rosenzweig read, the nurses turning the pages for him when he cleared his throat.

During the years up to his death from pneumonia in 1929, Rosenzweig followed an elaborate daily routine, being washed and dressed – this alone took two and a half hours – breakfasting – another hour – before he was free for an hour and a half of work. Then lunch at one and a nap before a more prolonged period of work, from four until eight. In the evening after dinner, he would read until midnight.

It was not a solitary life. He received visitors, with whom his wife facilitated communication, discerning his responses to questions from his facial expression and generally keeping the conversation going. Buber spent every Wednesday with the family. A nurse was retained for the day and another for the night, the latter turning him so he would not be pained by remaining too long in the same position.

On the last full day of his life, December 10th, 1929, he began to dictate a letter to Buber:

… and now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep: the point of all points for which there …

And that was it. The doctor came, with whom Rosenzweig communicated, telling him he was feeling better. He should spare his strength rather than communicate further, said the doctor. Rosenzweig never finished his letter.

(following Glatzer)

February 16th 1919: a still young man, 32, recently released from the army concludes his book with the lines 'Into Life'. Into Life: the composition of The Star of Redemption, he will say later that year, was only an 'episode' in his life; it is 'only a book', after all; he did not 'attach any undue importance to it'. 'The book is no goal, not even a provisional one'. If Luther had died on the 30th October 1517, his Epistle to the Romans would have been a scholarly work; but on the 31st, he nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, witnessing in life what existed only in theory. How could the validity of The Star of Redemption be shown but in the day-to-day life of its author?

Even so, Rosenzweig writes to Oppenheim:

I must be grateful to fate. It isn't given to many to see their boldest childhood dream realised at 32: to have a book, a real timeless work (or what we mortals call timeless), finished, behind me. The rest of my life is now really a kind of magnificent gift …

A gift! But to whom? To Rosenzweig, certainly, but also to those around him to whom he can speak, and to whom he could listen. The tasks of the everyday should be accepted with reverence. The Star of Redemption is finished, and so is Rosenzweig's career as a writer; as he writes in another letter:

You know how important speaking has become to me, since, through the writing of The Star of Redemption I cut myself off from further literary work; speaking was only the productiveness still open to me.

Rosenzweig wants now to confront human beings, to speak, to listen. Married in March 1920, he is appointed head of the Free House of Jewish Studies in August of the same year. By the time Hegel and the State is published in 1920, several years after it was written, Rosenzweig had abandoned scholarship except in the service of adult education, whose focus at the Free House is the small discussion group.

The Star of Redemption is published in 1921. In the same year, Rosenzweig writes Understanding the Sick and the Healthy at a publisher's request, but withholds it from publication. It summarises and simplifies many of the ideas of his magnum opus, being based on the lectures he gave at the Free House. In its pages, you will find what he thinks of as specifically Jewish thinking, which emphasises the concrete, the spoken word and dialogue, and the experience of the time of dialogue, with its give and take, its rhythm …

In truth, of course, this is the topic that invalidates his treatises. What matters is to speak, to act through speech, not to write. Isn't this what Rosenzweig learnt all those years ago in conversation with his friend Rosenstock, a Jewish convert to Christianity?

 On the night of July 7th 1913, he writes, 'I was immediately disarmed by Rosenstock's simple confession of faith'. Asked what he would do when all answers failed – when the abstract truths of logic failed to satisfy him – Rosenstock said with great simplicity, I would go to the next church, kneel and try to pray. Kneel and try to pray: these simple words come from a scholar, a thinker, not a romantic.

For Rosenstock, what mattered was that truth revealed in the relationship with God and one's fellow human beings. The Biblical 'word', the logos, is different from the monologue of philosophy. Dialogue – the give and take of words – is everything.

In a letter to Nahum Glatzer, whose prefaces and essays I borrow from here, the ailing Rosenzweig, a few months from death, wrote that The Star of Redemption 'grew out of an ardent longing' – a longing to stand before God and to live in his faith. Does one stand before God in dialogue? In the exchange of speech?

This is why the 'parerga and paralipomena' Rosenzweig produces are, to him, of no great importance. Understanding the Sick and the Healthy will not be published: the patient attacked by paralysis its author describes has been attacked by philosophy. He's laid out, sick … but Rosenzweig is alive and in living dialogue with his pupils at the Free House. Wasn't Kafka supposed to have been taught by him?

But in 1922, there appear those first symptoms of progressive paralysis which will lead to Rosenzweig's early death at 43, in 1929. By December 1922, he can no longer write; by Spring 1923, he loses his ability to speak. Mercifully, the paralysis stops short of his vital organs; though he cannot move, he lives and is even able to communicate, to 'dictate' using eye movements and a letter board.

The speaker is unable to speak. Yet he writes – a volumous correspondence, translations and essays; he translates a large part of the Bible with Buber. He listens; he receives visitors. His paralysis is the opposite of the paralysis of philosophy. He's been released into life – freed – his book behind him. His book has been burnt up by life.

From September 1925, this from a poem he sent to Buber in celebration of the completion of their translation of Genesis:

I have learned/ That every beginning is an end./ Quit of the task of writing, I wrote, 'Into Life' -/ After scarcely two years/ The hand ready for work grew lame,/ The tongue ready for speech stood still,/ So only writing was left me.

Only writing. But he wrote with Buber; they collaborated – and they did so in translating the first book, the 'Word of the beginning', the poem continues. A writing in dialogue? A writing-speech? Reading, or trying to read The Star of Redemption, I want always to read the shorter texts Glatzer collects in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, or at least to read The Star in their direction.

Because it is only there, read in the context of his letters (substitutes for what he could have said, if he'd but had a voice) that the book becomes important in its unimportance, seeming to negate itself, to catch fire, its pages burning as you read them. Only then that the book's 'Into Life' falls into the heart of the book, life setting it on fire and sacrificing it to itself.

Ballard dead, after a long illness. Ballard, dead … he said he was dying, didn't he, in his last book? I didn't read it – I haven't read any new Ballard since The Kindness of Women, which seemed a betrayal to me. Of what? All those early stories and books, 'The Terminal Beach', The Atrocity Exhibition which I read and reread.

The only British novelist of ideas, I want to write that - but was he really British? His horror on returning to this grey isle, I remember reading of that. A dreadful, parochial country with dreadful, parochial novelists … but then there was Ballard, outside all that, outside it but within it with Delvaux on his wall.

How many times did I read the original Re:search publication by him and about him? It seemed an antidote of sorts. To what? This country. Parochialism. Over and over again, that and The Drowned World, of which I had an illustrated edition. I was quite young reading those. The battle (a false battle) was for the legitimacy of Ballard – the incorporation of his name among the canon other well known writers.

Literary writers, parochially literary writers … A false battle as I say. As a bull, you should never charge the bullfighter's cape. Everyone knows the influence of Ballard spread by other means. Music above all – popular music and its satellite publications. Later, I never liked Ballard's name to be listed among a band's influences. Like that Myths of the Near Future album. No need for that.

Ballard and Ballardism long since saturated music and other arts. Keep quiet about your influences. Ballard became a name that was too obvious. Let it fall back into obscurity. The dream of someone young as I was discovering a novel of his. The Drowned World, say. Or a story. 'The Terminal Beach', say. 'The Voices of Time'.

Forget the short story compendia and anything published after … what date? Forget the profile of a career novelist, which Ballard never wanted to be in the obituaries. A sensibility, a mood instead. A vision, a way of looking. That 'we' – whoever we are – bear inside our own vision, looking with his eyes in us. Inside us, outside us.

Wasn't I supposed to write something on 2666? I ordered it from the USA after all, to read it early. What foolishness: early. Why couldn't I wait? There is something disgusting about owning hardbacks. And it's worse when you order them from another country, when you're keen, when you really want to read them. And when you have enough money to do so. But really, you can only read when you're skint. And I'm not skint any more …

Still, there it was, 2666, ready for me to take away for Christmas. I read it over 10 days or so, almost all of it, and then, sorry because it was soon to finish, I finished the last pages here in the office. And I was sorry, because that was about it for Bolano, I'd read everything I could find, and all in a row. Everything – and hadn't I waited until nearly everything was translated, until I get all of it and wolf it down, one book after another? One book after another … at least I ddn't buy the first few, at least I borrowed them.

2666 … I read it in the basement, taking a few hours a day. And I wrote pencilled notes on the blank first pages – what an idiot! Pencilled notes, and for what – a review? Was I going to write a review? Mocking laughter. What had I to say on the book of the season? What was I going to add? And that's a second disgusting thing: to read what everyone else was reading. And even to be out ahead with my reading, to have it a few weeks before it officially became available in the UK. More laughter …

I look at my notes, wondering what I was thinking. Slog, says one. Wonders on every page, says another. Whimsically mad, says another. Keeping the wheels turning. Logorrhea – no doubt spelt wrong, and didn't I mean graphomania? But who knows what I meant. And then, literary splendour, with a dash to V. What could V mean? Ah yes, the fifth part of the book. And literary splendour, which must have been double edged. Splendour, to be sure, incidents and panoramas, wonders and splendours, all that: but of a literary kind. It was all too terribly literary: was that what I meant?

But then I enjoyed V, part five, I have to admit that. Part IV, The Part About the Crimes, was terribly boring. It must explain the word slog, and perhaps the misspelt and misused logorrhea. Admit it, you liked part five. Another note: V madness of narrative. And another V: narrative rush, anxious – where's it going?, almost too fast, almost outracing the narration. And then, so much happens anything could happen.

And I begin to remember: that was what I was going to write in my daft imaginary review. That was what I was dreaming about in the cellar. I would have said what drove me through this book and some other books by Bolano was that racing, racing narrative, out ahead of me and all of us and Bolano, who, after all, didn't have long to live.

A racing narrative – and racing against what? Death – he didn't have long to live, Bolano, everyone knows that. But perhaps there is a racing that has no against. A racing like that of the skywriter of the still-too-Magic-Realist Distant Star. Racing that is the life of writing, and that leaps out ahead of it. That mystic point ahead of writing and drawing it on, and drawing the whole of the narrative with it, magnetising every narrative filing.

How urgently Bolano wrote! How urgent, the need to write! So urgent, indeed that he sought too much to keep the wheels turning, to grind on the plot, to grind out the writing, page after dull page. And there are many, many dull pages here. Many longeurs, as you can say in reviewer-speak. So many pages that do not catch flame, which list and ramble and digress. But then, compared to that mystic point, what else is there but digression?

The novel is a mad walk. The novel is five mad walks – its five parts. And there are mad walks within those mad walks – endless interrupting monologues, so many speakers who speak at uninterrupted lengths. Who speaks like that? Have you ever met anyone like that? Monologuers who speak with whimsical madness?

I wrote this phrase on the blank first pages: careening monologues. I think I was pleased with the word, careening. I think it came to me on the way to the bathroom (I had a ferocious cold, and went there for more tissues). I think I was about to sneeze, and the phrase came to me: careening monologues.

What idiocy! What vanity! There is nothing more disgusting than a well-turned phrase. That is the third horror. And here's another phrase: furiously boring. What has that got to go with anything? And then, so much happens anything could happen. Yes, that seems right. Anything could happen. This book knows no law. Off it goes in a million directions.

Bolano prepares us for this. Most reviewers noticed it: the book of geometry hung on the washing line divided into three parts that, although they constituted a whole, nevertheless worked independently of one another. Look it up, you lazy fucker. Here's the phrase, 'each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole'. That on the three parts of the geometry book. Amalfitano's book. Amalfitano's washing line a la Duchamp.

Didn't I rather like part two of the book, all about him? Not as much as I liked him, the melancholy professor, lost in a city that would always be foreign to him, and fearing for his daughter. Part two: I thought Amalfitano was like whatshisname the father in The Savage Detectives – look it up, I can't be bothered.

Wistfully mad. Whimsically mad. But there are dull, dull passages in part two too. Dull passages, too long, giving every detail, telling us everything, everything in a mad profusion. And then part two ends, just like that. Just like that, although Bolano tells us why in another much-quoted passage, where someone or other explains why he prefers novellas like Metamorphosis and Bartleby to total novels like Don Quixote or Sentimental Journey.

Something like that. Someone or other. Can't be bothered to look it up, I've got enough to do and not much time, and I want only to let my stupid review-post sail ahead of itself. To throw up one of those parascending parachutes to catch the wind, to let my writing be drawn along, what joy, as relief from a million administrative tasks, and besides isn't everyone getting bored with the usual posts, the interminable adventures of W. and I?

You owe something to what readers you have, I tell myself. You owe something to yourself, idiot, I tell myself, the caffeine singing in your bloodstream. Now, what else is disgusting? Your self-indulgence. Your self-flagellation, if that's what it can be called. Your parade of horrors …

The second part of Bolano's 'modular epic' (someone clever called it that) ends too early, you're beached, and then comes the third flat-footed section, the third laborious section about Oscar Fate (a nickname) and his wanderings. His real name is Quincy Williams and he's a black man from the USA come south of the border, a correspondent for a black-interest paper.

What happens? A million details. Laboriousness. Some characters I didn't care about. And then Amalfitano's daughter Rosa who is called beautiful by the narrator. I cared about her (because she was Amalfitano's; because she was called beautiful). I thought: she's going to get killed. But instead, after too many pages, she escapes with Fate over the border. She gets out. She's not going to get killed with all the others, with so many others in the almost infnitely long part four of the book, the interminable The Part About the Crimes, which contain the most boring pages in literature (even post-literature literature, which 2666 itself is).

But nevertheless, but nonetheless, there's still something out far ahead of the narrative, drawing it on. Still a kind of racing, still an imperative to narrate that gathers up the details and digressions, still a mad forward movement, a momentum. I owe it to myself to finish the book, I said to myself, wanting to give up on part four. I owe it to the £20 I spent on it, and on shipping it from the States – what a disgrace!

But really I owe it to the book and to what is more than the book, the future that writes slantwise across its pages. A book to come in 2666, which is perhaps nothing other that 2666 itself, that unexplained date. 2666: the mystic point, the apocalypse when all is revealed.

For isn't it all bent towards that, Bolano's disarticulated novel? Doesn't it wing its way there, don't the piled-up paragraphs sing in its direction? Doesn't it sound itself there out in deep water? Doesn't it dream of itself in the reaches of space? Doesn't it stand out ahead of us, impassable destiny? Doesn't it promise itself, impossible redemption, a kind of messianism of narrative that would make sense of everything that has gone before, and even our own lives as readers?

And now, do you see, I've borrowed something of the same parascending parachute, the same out ahead that draws me along like those new-fangled racers on the beach, those wheeled chariots with a parachute out ahead of them, land yachts they're called I think, I even saw on on the moor the other day, a few of us watched it racing over the grass … now I've the wind in my own stupid sails. What laughter, mocking laughter.

Is this really what I want to do with my day? Is this a good way to spend my time, to expend it, to pour it down the drain, to laugh at it and let it laugh at me, to die a little, to let death come close a little, to look out ahead of my life to dream of something that might redeem it, and writing all the while, writing that is my racing cart and chariot, writing that binds phrase to phrase, stretched sentence to sentence, that allows a post to scroll down the page as when you shoot a comedy gun and there unscrolls a written, bang! rather than a real bang.

No bullets here. Just comedy. Just grotesquerie. In truth, I'm bored, bored of the office, bored of administration, bored of dull northern days, bored of reading, bored of living, bored of interminable W.-and-I posts …

But where was I? Part four was boring, yes, and part five? Part five began thrillingly. It was a thrilling adventure, literary style. A relief after the murders. A new character, in a new part of the world, sketched in a rather literary way, but with momentum nonetheless, with movement nevertheless, you could turn the pages again quickly, you could wander what would happen, your imagination ran ahead – how would part five bind the previous parts into a whole?

Ah Bolano, Bolano, off he goes again, the kite is up bobbing in the air, everything's fine, there's a rush of narrative, a new wind … the novel's ablaze again, it's like a spaceship on re-entry, cone burning, brushing the edge of the atmosphere, returning to the world, to real life, to my life as a reader. That's how it was for many pages (the happiest).

And then? Too many digressions, too many over-articulate characters, too many 'careening monologues' (laughter). It's not a novel but a collage! It's all misdirection and decoys! And who is this character? Is he only a cipher? He doesn't seem real! I want Amalfitano back – what happened to him?

I don't care about the scholars in part one, nor about Fate. I suppose I'm mildly intrigued about Haas, he seems interesting enough, but Archimboldi (though he's not called that yet) is hollow, too hollow, and the narrative is all set-piece and flourish! 2666 ties up nicely enough in the last 20 pages. It's neat, it's nice, but it's over and the mystical point sails ahead.

Over – and where has it gone, that point, that urgency of narrative? Where's it gone? It passed with Bolano, or rather with the completion (pretty much) of reading Bolano. Gone … Bolano's dead, and my reading of his books is dead, and when's the next writer like this going to come along (hope: Jonathan Littell with The Kindly Ones, Jacques Roubaud with The Loop)?

What else were going to share? What other great thoughts were you going to unfurl? The wheel's come off your chariot, hasn't it? Your land-yacht's bust. Put up the post and laugh at the typos (but they laugh at you). Put it up and laugh at the grammatical infidelities (but they find you funny, just hilarious …) You're the ape of thought, the ape of writing, your fingers too big for the keys and all you do is hoot, hoot at big books and point at bigger ones, hoot and point, hoot and point …

(The best review of 2666? Scott Esposito's.)

Ivan Brunetti wants to kill himself. That's what he's wanted for some time now – to take his own life. To end it all – what could be better. Imagine the peace! Imagine it, no longer having to write, to work – there'd be no deadlines, no demands from editors. To die – and then to curl up in a quiet place for eternity.

But meanwhile, Ivan Brunetti has to write. The issue's due at the end of the year. He works page by page – no more long stories, not anymore. Not the long stories that began the first three issues of Schizo. A page at a time, that's enough. Who could plan for longer than a page? And besides, he's working all day, he has a day job. He's busy enough! He has enough to do, especially at this time of year, when it's getting dark so early, and its so cold.

A page at a time – so Schizo 4 is made up of pages, of complete strips. One page, then another. One page – in the evening, or across a series of evenings, and at the weekend. Damn it, it's too much. He phones his editor for a deadline. I want a deadline, he explains. I need something to aim towards. He's accomplished little enough so far, he explains. He's done little enough. Just give me a deadline.

Ivan Brunetti wants to die. He's tired of living, because living means work. He hasn't got it in him to work. He takes it so seriously! He takes it more seriously than anything else, working. His whole life is full of work. There's the day job – and the job at night. Drawing, writing, inking in. And there's his anthology work. And the teaching he does for the university. Jesus, it's too much.

So he writes about dying. He endlessly rehearses his own death. He draws pictures of suicides, suiciding. He draws himself with limbs chopped away and his face trampled away, stabbed and shot and kicked and beaten, Ivan Brunetti at the bottom of the world, Ivan Brunetti still alive, God help him.

Ivan Brunetti's got a death-drive, there's no question of that. It's the most obvious thing in the world! But it went wrong somewhere, it took a wrong turning, and now like Kafka's Gracchus, he's lost his death, he cannot keep his appointment. It took a wrong turn for Ivan Brunetti. Death led him elsewhere.

It's the promise at the end of the page. At the end of the page, at the end of the issue: the promise of cessation. But then it begins again, the old engine putters back into life, the propellor's turning, off he has to go, a shaky old plane on the runway. Up to the skies, off he goes again, when he wants only to lie down like a dead man, the sky passing over him. When he wants only peace, peace and death like a cool flannel on his forehead.

Ivan Brunetti's lost his death and doesn't know where to find it. It's gone off without him, and taken his life with it. Off it's gone with his life, with his sense of the limits of life and the limits of work. Off it's gone, the end, the clear dark line at the end, the eternal horizon he would sail towards.

But it'll never come closer, not now. Ivan Brunetti's off in his deathship. There it is, the eternal mirage: the final line, the place where he can lie down and die, the sky streaming above him. But meanwhile – the eternal meanwhile – there's a page to draw, to write, and then another page, and then another …

Richard's post on literary experiences remined me at once of Montano, which I've kept here on my desk. He's suffering from literary sickness, Vila-Matas's protagonist-narrator; he sees literature everywhere, and cannot separate himself from it.

In a moment of crisis, precisely as it pertains to his literary malady he boards a train from one city to the next. What a very literary thing to do, he says. You can't escape a crisis of the literary via a literary device! It's entirely too literary, as all of Montano's experience is literary infested with literary tropes and traits, which he cannot help but see everywhere.

He's read too many books! His life is a book! He, a literary critic, cannot step outside of literature, and even makes literature (the book Montano) as he tries to do so.Vila-Matas's narrator, here, is very different from Sebald's – say of Vertigo, who is forever boarding trains and rushing about and encountering ghosts of literary writers (Kafka, Nabokov).

He lives in literature, he's entirely literary, but has no sense of it; it's not yet become a sickness, which is why, ultimately, Sebald belongs as a writer to a different age. He is the last writer of an age that is not self-conscious about writing literature, doing literature, being literary, a kind of self-consciousness that, I will say very pompously, cannot be foreign to 'us'.

For what is literature in an age of mass culture? One among others of our entertainments, and not a particularly important one at that. To read, really read, demands a great choice, a great determination. For who reads now, really? Who grew up in a house of books? Who was taught by great readers, and taught to read by great readers? And for whom, really, can literaure be of any great importance?

The wheel has turned; a whole age has fallen into the past. And with it, Sebald. No coincidence that in his last, very bad book, the bloated Austerlitz, its literariness has become pure device, pure mannerism. The narrator's endless walks, his endless communion with ghosts … all this becomes unbelievable and intolerable.

Better Vila-Matas any day. Better Bolano, whose poets and poetry-lovers are as real as we are, and inhabit this age, our age, dope-dealing and sleeping around and wandering from place to place without a clue. 

For there are no models now, and not literary ones. Or only the hologram-flickering of the heroes of capitalism, phantasms projected into the apocalyptic night into which we are falling. Hero-financiers, heroine-entrepreneurs unreal and depthless. And meanwhile, the apocalypse, the great ecological catastrophe, the devastation of the earth, the putting out of the sky. We're going to die a new kind of death. We're going to boil, we going to burn, the sky will go red and the land will burn red and the sea will slop red, and the atmosphere will burn away into space …  

What's literature to this? What's the literary experience to this? Something comical. Laughable. Something without consequence, even if we are caught up in it, even if it caught us when we were young, when it meant something, when it could mean something, when our vision was narrow and simple and raw. Comical, but there's also a sadness as literature fails us and the night of the real world opens across our windshields. A sadness, and even a tragedy, as our youths, our hopes burn up in the night without glory.

This is why Vila-Matas's novels (the two translated into English) and Bolano's, are a post Literature Literature. A laughing and sad and too-wise Literature in which Literature becomes a sickness and a delusion (Montano). And a daft, laughable hope (The Savage Detectives) that is our eternally doomed youth.

A stupid phrase has been floating around my stupid head for some time now. A stupid phrase: Post-Literature Literature. Capitalised. Literature that comes after Literature, after the whole thing, the whole edifice, has come crashing down. A post-apocalyptic Literature, a Literature that knows the game is up, that it's all finished, that the real world is a greater work of fiction than any particular fiction, and that what's left is to press Literature, what remains of Literature, towards that Reality, to hope it catches fire.

The madness of the 'Credit Crunch' (stupid, prosaic name), the madness of the whole of Capital whose body turns like a Chinese dragon … A post-Literature Literature that you find in Bolano and in Vila-Matas (they were friends, I discovered after reading them both: no surprise). Literature in whose books you can laugh at a man in jail who draws dwarves with giant cocks. In which humour has become puerility … in which wit has decayed into innuendo, and there's only bad taste.

What happens when a page of Blanchot reappears in Vila-Matas's Montano? What happens when it reappears in this mad context? Something has ended, a whole seriousness has disappeared. Something has ended: literary substance has lightened, the airship's unmoored. There it goes, drifting into the sky. It's lost, gone, and what remains? Our Real world, our Fiction-Reality, our mad world through which affects pass at great speed, in which words and money and moods flow fast as lightning.

They don't speak like people in books, these characters. They're like us – like me – on this side of literature, of the great mountain range, that far plateau. They're like us, with us, where the range's shadow doesn't reach. How many people read Lautreamont before us? And Breton? And all the old avant-garde stuff. It's old, old, it's for young people, they're naive enough, unread enough and meanwhile we know there's a thousand books on Lautreamont and books on books about Lautreamont and books on books on books on Lautreamont.

Lautreamont's eternally young, so is Rimbaud, yes, yes, but that eternity, that infinitely pure flame, the flame that burns everything up except itself burns too far away for us, remote star, on this side of Literature capital 'L'. Meanwhile, there's all the time in the world to read, not to read, to write, not to write, none of it matters, and the great snake loops of Capital writhe all about us.

Montano, Montano: the book's too long, two thirds too long. It's absurdly verbose, madly verbose, doubling and then tripling itself, satirising itself and then exhausting satire and then exhausting everyone, all its readers. Who hasn't put the novel down in exasperation? Only to pick it up again, to finish it … out of a sense of duty to what began so dizzingly in those opening pages? To those flashing pages … with their laughter, in a laughter that takes everything, even itself as its object. That refuses to limit itself, laughter falling into laughter, lost in it, Literature on fire, Literature boiling …

What am I doing? What was I doing? I was supposed to be writing something, wasn't I?I was writing something that was supposed to carry me from day to day and string those days together, making meaning of them. Supposed to aim all these days in a single direction – but what was it?

Weakness: I fall below the ability to write. I'm tired, tired … So I finish the two books I was reading instead of writing. The Savage Detectives, the longest of books, was finished off yesterday lunchtime in the office. I've finished it at last, I thought. I can't believe I got through it, I thought. I decided I deserved an award. But then, almost immediately, that I deserved no award, that I'd been self-indulgent enough of late. So I set myself the task of reading reviews of the book I just read, to make sense of it, to make sense of myself, to replace that stringing of days and hours together like beads on the long thread of my writing.

Bolano! Too many people have read him. He's too celebrated! There's too much on the net! Curious, then, that you can still invent a private Bolano. Still set up a small shrine, your own. I have my own Bolano, made up of scraps of what I read in the long biography-reviews (all the reviews seem to turn into biographies), at the heart of which is his friendship with Mario Santiago (who becomes Ulyses Lima in The Savage Detectives).

That friendship, and with it, other friendships too -infrarealist (visceral realist) friendship. Friendship whose third term is Life, a great and ferocious vivacity – Life like a firework bursting in the sky. Life: that's what binds them together, life as broad and distant as the sky. Life upon which you can make no impression. Life against which your own life bats itself meaninglessly.

Is there a tragic vision to Bolano? A tragedy behind the many stories through which Belano (Bolano's own double) and Lima pass in the second long section of the novel? Tragedy … but the great broad vivifying tragedy of life in general, the life of everything, the life of stones and stars … 

What am I on about? What is this all for? For no reason. Just blast up like a rocket and explode. The Savage Detectives. Overlong? Vastly so, and yet … Boring? Without question, and yet … Life, tragic life celebrates itself through the hundred stories of the second part (the middle panel of the triptych). Life beyond any particular voice (though it seems particularly close to some: step forward, Quim, mad Quim in the asylum …)

As I read, often bored, often distracted, I still kept the impression that there was a great sky, a great Day beyond these particular voices. A Day beyond days, as in D.H. Lawrence's The Flying Fish (and isn't there something like the exuberance of Lawrence, his riotousness in Bolano's book?). A kind of apocalypse, everything revealed, the great judgement day of Life upon we can make no impression. Life = the Sonora Desert.

Life, for Bolano = that expanse in which the narrative runs out in the third part. I've heard 2666 (a title already prefigured in The Savage Detective) heads into the Desert again. No surprise. It's Bolano's topic, his great topic. But let me come back to friendship, to Bolano's friendship with … what was his name? Santiago.

Bolano said he wrote the book so that Santiago and he could laugh at it together. A book to make his friend laugh. His friend, who'd published … barely anything. A single book of poems, I think, but wasn't that beside the point? Isn't Bolano's great theme Life, and not poetry? Life and not Literature (capital 'L'). Life that laughs at silly Juan Garcia Madero, narrator of the first and second sides of the triptych. Life that poetry, Literature (capital 'L', the usual modernist Literature; Lautreamont, Breton, all that …) burn up towards but never reach.

Bolano published a couple of things before he left Mexico for Europe. He appeared in some anthology or another. He cowrote a novel. So what? What does it matter? As with Santiago's production (his non-production), literature was a name for Life and Life was elsewhere. Did both men leave their South America? Was it only Bolano (Belano) who headed off for France and Spain and Israel and Liberia (Liberia!)? I'm not sure. The reviews and profiles would tell me.

But what I wanted to say (what started me off here), was that the book was written to make his friend laugh, but that the same year it was published, The Savage Detectives, in 1998, his friend died in a 'mysterious' car accident. Mysterious in inverted commas, Bolano's, I'm not sure why. And that that moved me: that's what I wanted to say. Moved me, the thought that this literary furore, the comet of Bolano's oeuvre that is passing through our skies, was all about friendship, and what was shared between two friends and a group of friends (the infra-realists, the Visceral realists).

It was about laughter. It was about a crazy, nonsensical world. It was about the absurd glory of Life, about writing, about fucking, about the roads that disappear in the Sonora desert, which is to say all roads, including this one, the one I'm on …

A tragic vision. A tragic, laughing vision. A vision in which no hero, no heroine rises up to face their great destiny and the greatness of its limits. A vision, instead of the futility of life, of all things, a laughing futility, a drunken futility, but futility nonetheless … The desert is opening. The desert is here, right between us, those of us for whom the flag of Literature is buffetted by the winds of Life.

The desert: here it is, because none of this matters, none of it, not Literature, not writing (or not writing), publishing (or not publishing) … it's all futile, laughable, we're heading into the same desert. We're all riding in the same Impala into the desert and laughter and madness and bleached, exposed bones in the sand. Bolano was dying and we're dying and everything is dying, and in the meantime … what else is there to amuse our friends and ourselves? What left but to close the door on the world and write to make our friends laugh and roll on the floor laughing and coughing up blood and spitting blood all the way to death …?

Wasn’t I supposed to write about Golding’s Darkness Visible? Didn’t I write some notes on the inside cover as I read it over a number of afternoons in a cool room in Portugal? It began unpromisingly, didn’t it? – I couldn’t help but compare those opening pages with a bunch of conscript firemen in a bombed out London of the second world war (was it London?) with Henry Green’s Caught. Golding didn’t compare, that was until the story really began – Matty’s story, the child who came out of a fire with half his face burnt away. Who emerged, walking in a straight line, determined.

The story follows Matty now, and leaves the firemen behind, and it’s magnificently quick – sentence darts after sentence. Sentence moving quickly after sentence, and what a story, events piling on events in quickness. It’s a bit like Coetzee’s Michael K., I thought to myself. A kind of outsider character, a kind of husk, who undergoes adventures where all he does is – survive. Where he is fated to survive as though it was decided before him by the gods. Only it’s better than Coetzee’s book, which is too much like a hagiography, especially when that second narrative voice comes in, when is it, in part two or part three, the officer who captures the protagonist, who watches over and observes him in a manner too close to Coetzee’s nameless narrator. And besides, Golding’s prose is, though smooth, more rugged that Coetzee’s – it weighs more. It comes from the old earth, from the gods, from Greek tragedy and the like. There is a pagan sensibility to Golding that’s even older than the Greeks.

And so I rushed along reading, surprised, continually surprised by events. Matty’s in Australia! Matty’s been castrated by an aborigone! Matty’s back in England! Matty’s back working at a school like his old school! All wondrous, in the rush of the story. And then the marvellous passages from Matty’s diaries: he believes himself to be visited (to be called before) supernatural beings, who charge him with a supernatural task. These are pages of high imagination, who would have expected them at the unpromising beginning? What work of strange imagination! What a peculiar sensibility is Golding’s!

And then the first part of the book ends. The second part, seemingly unconnected to the first, has the same narrative momentum. It’s Sophy’s story – we don’t know who she is, but the narrative conjures her up marvellously real, beginning at her twelth year or so. But it is like reading another novel – how are these incidents related to Matty’s, and where is Matty? what’s happened to Matty, who’s quite won as over whether as protagonist of a third person narrative or as a writer of diaries. But on the story ploughs through the earth, and we still trust Golding, for Sophy is rendered very real, too marvellously, concretely real.

What happens next? Part three, and another narrative perspective. Talk starts, a great deal of windbaggery, and it is here, for me, the story has begun to scatter. Too much talk! And who cares about these characters, these dreary little-Englanders? Already we’ve had intimations of how the story of Sophy (and her twin) will join up with Matty’s. And we’ve even had a few more marvellous, moving passages from Matty’s journal (essential pages, blessed pages). But the story scatters itself with the talk, the endless talk, and now I’m thirty pages from the end, and wondering. I should go on, I know that. But I feel ill-used by Golding. Feel tricked and cheated. I want the rush of the narrative again, not talk. I want to read pages as forward-running as the best pages in Lawrence, want a story written by the most unique of sensibilities, the rarest of writers (I look at Golding’s picture for a clue to his strangenesses: I can find nothing). But the talk, the endless dreariness!

I have the book in my bag here in the office. Must finish it, I tell myself. Must finish it and put it away with The Spire, which I read only this year, very late, and that seemed to me the finest postwar English fiction I have read, and which excited me because it was English, and because I expect nothing from English letters. Must – but I feel too betrayed, too let down. So much dreary talk! I put it down in Portugal, but should pick it up back here, this grey morning, But haven’t I begun another book since (Saramago’s Blindness), and finished another (Buchner’s Lenz)? Don’t I want to begin another Golding (Paper Men, perhaps?) And isn’t there still Pincher Martin to read, a very visual novel that demands too much of one like me who can never be brought to see what would be presented to him in words?

Was that really a book? Is it really over? Naipaul’s A Bend in the River ends uncertainly. Oh, not because the story was unresolved in any important way: we know the protagonist will go to England to marry the daughter of his friend as he promised (as was an informal arrangement). He’ll get out of the new Africa that grew up all around him – around this son of an old Muslim family on the East coast of the continent, a family who had moved there generations ago from India, and had kept their traditions intact.

In the opening chapters, the protagonist-narrator allows himself to speak from those traditions, to speak corporately, collectively, in the third person plural. Why, I asked myself as I read, is he writing? Why the necessity to write? He doesn’t tell us (the composition of the novel plays no part in the novel); but I suppose because his voice had to coalesce from the new uncertainty that had shaken up those traditions.

His family had to move from the East coast, just as he, in the end, will have had to leave his shop and his business in the town in the bend of the river. And not just his family: the Big Man of the capital, the new President has turned his poor country, post-independence, upside down. All the old certainties are gone. Then our narrator speaks from this overturning. Speaks as an individual who was at first an onlooker, and then fell victim to it. The novel, which begins slowly, happily, gathers pace. At the end, everything happens at once, all in a rush. Salim, our narrator, now a man alone, has had to escape. He departs on the steamer, upriver, the Big Man having commandeered the available aeroplanes.

But though the narrative speeds up, its coolness and detachment does not change; its careful ‘brown style’ (a measured, unelaborate prose, still and reserved) remains unruffled. The events in question did not disturb it. Even when Salim finds himself without a business, even when he’s lost in a crowded prison, nothing changes its coolness, its detachment. The prose flows on. And I wonder whether it was this that I wanted to continue, as I put the book down.

The mood of a book (its many moods) remain for a while after reading. I’d finished A Bend in the River at the airport. On the way home, in the taxi, still the mood (the many moods). And still the desire to be sustained by that tranquil prose, by the same calm continuity that allowed everything to be spoken, whether slowly or quickly. Initially, Salim spoke in the third person plural – collectively, corporately, in the knowledge of who he was and what he could expect. Then as the book moved on, this shifted to the first; Salim was a man alone. But there were passages, nonetheless, where something else spoke, or another voice inhabited that of the narrator. These were the transitional passages, the literary equivalent of the ‘pillow shots’ of Ozu: descriptive moments that might seem to have been intercalated between narrative episodes.

Another ‘we’ speaks: but who speaks? Not the ‘we’ of the eternal Africa, the jungle and the river. The narrator wants to note the changes in the vegetation – the new hyacinths the river carries along. He wants us to know the bush is changing. His is not an eternal Africa, then. Not the Jungle without variation. Things are happening, changing, just as a narrative – A Bend in the River itself – opens its wings in the ramshackle town in the bend of the river. Why did I want to remain there, in the river’s bend, where the ‘we’ had not resolved itself into an ‘I’; where the bush spoke, the ramshackle town, and the foreigners Salim found stranded there? Why in that narrative eternity, in that eternal noon that, in my memory, burns everything else away?

My Golding phase has run aground on Pincher Martin. Is running aground, because it hasn't defeated me yet; I'm a hundred pages in, and, like its central character, trying to get a grip – on a narrative, not on his rocky outcrop. A grip - but unlike him, I can find no purchase; the narrative, such as it is, runs on without me. Pages of closely printed prose (in a fifty year old Penguin paperback – what history did it have?, I wonder) like a shut door. His rocky island is my glass mountain.

Naipaul, instead, and on a whim, after idly reading some article or another. I selected A Bend in the River from Waterstone's shelves. The girl at the checkout desk she'd always meant to read Naipaul, and I said so had I. Of course, I'd gone 100 pages into The Enigma of Arrival – what defeated me? A lack of abstraction, I think – a lack of prose doing more than being a perfect, perfect mirror. The prose was too balanced! It made me seasick, those calm, calm waters of prose. The book fell away from my grasp as into a pool of water. Let it lie there forever, I thought.

But this rainy morning, I thought to advance a little further into A Bend, having begun it yesterday in the gym. And I'm almost immediately upset – seeking to open the spine a bit wider, to give myself room to read the end of each line, too cramped against the central margin, I fold it open instead and – it cracks. The glue of the book has failed; it's come apart from itself. A broken book. It seems at odd with its calm, calm prose.

I like narratives in the first person, and like it when it is not the protagonist who is the centre of action, but whose presence asserts itself gently nonetheless. Who is there, with you, the reader, watching it all, reliving it all, for doesn't the narrative depend upon an act of writing, a retelling?

I like the way that voice seems to withdraw back from the story, seems to be much more than a frame. The voice seems to speak from a voice deeper than any reported one in what follows. It becomes an echo chamber, a space of resonance, having hollowed out an unexpected interiority because of the power – a controlled power, very measured, in Naipaul's case – to tell.

But an interiority that is not quite a soul, not a private recess set back from the world. A kind of membrane instead, infinitely delicate. A membrance between inside and outside, and that, as it quivers, speaks of what we do not ordinarily call personality but should – the way the world registers with us. The way it affects us individually, absolutely alone.

This is what gives itself as style. This is what can make a voice, reading a voice, hearing it as you read, absolutely essential. I think of the Richard Ford trilogy, for all its uncertainties (the weak satire in the third volume, the overlong second volume), and, in particular, of The Sportswriter. That voice, that voice, what I wouldn't do to feel close to it again, Frank Bascombe's voice, that membrane between the world and himself that gives itself as style.

Naipaul's narrator is cooler, more distant. I do not feel an immediate love for this voice, and wonder whether it will come. It reminds of Radio 4, of the calm voice of the radio announcer. A calmness not on the side of style, but of a studied neutrality – the stylelessness of a ruling class, of an unchallenged middle class. Certain, self-certain, but so certain it does not need to draw attention to itself. It simply is what it is, calm and unruffled.

Brown prose, I think it's called sometimes. Measured prose. The prose of rulers, resounding with the voice of rulers. Will I finish Naipaul's book? It cost eight pounds, so I will make sure to. Eight pounds! From Waterstones! And this for a paperback whose glue does not hold its page batches to the back cover! But it is not an essential book. Its calm, calm voice is not necessary.

Now, fool, I say to myself. Now – what makes Richard Ford so different? The Sportswriter? Because that space of resonance, that stretched eardrum has a kind of density, I reply, a thickness. It has been infested with itself – it is thick. It has style – or has accrued style to itself, attracted it like a fly to stick flypaper. This is not the style of a ruler-writer. It is in lieu of itself, it looks for itself, as Frank Bascombe lives in search of – what?

I read the three Bascombe volumes after one another. What happiness! I miss them. I miss that thickened voice, looking for itself in the narrative. Looking without knowing what was to happen, what must happen. It knew nothing of plot. What happened – happened. The interminable house-selling episodes in the third volume. The interminable drive in the second. Ah but what happiness in the last chapter of The Sportswriter – a miracle, when the narrator catches a train on a whim to 'Gotham'. A miracle, because here the plot, in its detour, thickens as wonderfully as the prose. Chance, contigency here doubles the contingency of style, style's adventure, as it accretes itself in darkness and silence.

What are you on about, idiot?, I ask myself. What are you trying to find? Sunday morning. The wet yard. Flowers in pots, there for one season only. And a flowering plant – bright light purple. And the trimmed down Hebes. And the big tubs bought for salad, new sprouts poking up. The wet concrete. The bench my sister painted 6 years ago that needs painting again, detritus beneath it in piles beneath the gaps between slats above. A day like any other.

I was reading in the other room. Reading on the bed, as I never do when my Beloved is around. But she's not here and nor is that measure of reality she brings. Am I becoming 'dreamy' as Bascombe says happens to him? Dreamy … a membrane stretched out like a hammock. A living style, that does not know itself. An idiom that thickens into life. To read is also to write, isn't it? To be written in some way? To find oneself written?

Finishing William Golding's The Spire, I felt the same way as I had done at the end of Muriel Spark's The Hothouse on the East River: a need to read about the book and about Golding if only to contain what I had read, to contextualise it. Above all, I couldn't allow the book its distance, the distance it seems to take from itself in itself such that I was never quite sure what was happening, or rather that what was happening was (in the world of the book) really happening; Dean Jocelin, with whom the narrator sticks, seemed untrustworthy – or was it that he had entrusted himself to something else, manifest as a kind of madness. That he was entrusted to a rambling, coagulating madness that had thickened itself into the narrative.

Either way, I never felt on solid ground with the novel. I even put it away for a few days, returning to it last night after a long evening of computer games because I could think of nothing better to do. It had been waiting for me. It held me once again at its own distance. I read but I wasn't sure what I was reading. It seemed vague somehow – not wispy or cloudy but somehow blocky. It seemed too heavy for a book, or that its features had emerged as those of the Sphinx from some heavier, non-readable material.

What had happened in the book? I wasn't sure. I googled 'William Golding The Spire' for study notes to help me. What had happened? I lacked the distance. No: I lacked my distance by which I could hold what I read apart from me. I was struck to its surface like a fly … Little to say about the book itself, though. Itself: as if it wasn't too heavy for commentary. As though it were not already lost in itself, falling into itself, a book like the spire and cathedral it describes unable to sit squarely on the restless earth. A book beneath which a kind of abyss opens, an anti-spire, the stirring of the earth 'like porridge coming to boil in a pot' which means everything, therefore is as unsure as the visitations Dean Jocelin receives.

Plot and character are like those visitations, those angels and devils which may only be the way Dean Jocelin's spinal tuberculosis manifests itself – pain and pain's alleviation, as if the novel were only made from that: pain and pain's alleviation, the possibility and impossibility of writing overlapped. It was almost impossible to read. I had to force my way through it. Even now, looking back, I wonder, what was it about?, and this after reading the study notes. Really, I have nothing to say about it. Relief that it is over. And a kind of wonder at this anti-spire of a book.

But I must have more Golding – immediately. I need to read everything if only to have done with it. I need to know of what this book is part – what movement. Madness – but not a private madness. Not the malaise of one character. A kind of existence-madness, being gone mad, the boiling earth … and this as the law of writing to which the book corresponds. A madness that has come from some strange law of writing, where language takes a weird detour into itself, becomes thick, clots up the veins of sense. 

India continues to collide with Southern Asia, I read; the Himalayas are still being forced upwards and their folded roots downwards; the earth’s crust thickens there where two tectonic plates are forced against one another. And now I remind myself of those collisions in life that have not ceased – of the secret movement that complicates the surface of the body, that keeps inside and outside apart, into a soul. The soul, I tell myself is made, not given, and as a complication, a folding where inside and outside are lost each inside the other.

When I try to select a novel to buy in a bookshop, it is for evidence of this strange origami that I look. I want to read of the folding of a life, its secret blossoming, not outwards to the sun, but inwards to that dark recess that loses itself in itself. To a find a prose that speaks of an involution, an event that has continued to happen as one plate rams against the other, lifting and deepening itself into thickness.

And what kind of prose? One that not only reports the event in question, but speaks from it and is nothing apart from it. That finds its origin in that same confusion that opens the dimension of what is too quickly called interiority. And that redoubles the origin in the surprise of its own birth, so that to write of the event is to re-enact it again, to let it bloom into a narrative.

How to reach what folded the soul into itself? I don’t think it can be reached. It hides itself, there on the other side of the narrative. It was lost straightaway, as soon as you began to write, but also as soon as you began to live – as soon as a soul opened as the locus of life, a place that was yours. All narratives are detours, I tell myself; writing is always on the way to an Origin it cannot reach.

In this sense, all plots are arbitrary. When I find the novel on the bookshelf, I want the sense from it that all plots are arbitrary, and what matters is to begin, to set out. To begin writing and then to follow through this beginning, being loyal to it, letting the narrative reverberate with the Origin it cannot reach. I want to know that it is no plot that matters, but another kind of intrigue, in which Writing has been caught by Writing; in which the Origin is allowed to speak in what is only the beginning of a story, an arbitrary story.

That is why I welcomed Nooteboom’s The Following Story when I found it a few months ago, saving it for a long journey when I could read it all in one go. On the opening page, a mystery – what was it? a Dutchman awakens in the Portugal he visited many years ago. Last night, he fell asleep in Amsterdam (was that it?), and this morning he is in Portugal in another body, another life, such as has become familiar from David Lynch’s recent films. I think I could tell at once this was an arbitary way of beginning, a way for Noteboom to engage the Origin. It gave the appearance of a plot, it set a narrative on the way, and that is all.

I can’t remember much of the story because I lost the book almost as soon as I read it (this happened before with Sebald’s Vertigo). Perhaps it is still in the Lost and Found in Chicago O’Hare. I remember a few barely sketched characters, figures from the narrator’s life. I remember long, very boring passages, particularly in the second half of the story. And I remember discovering that everyone in the novel was dead, or the narrator was, and that the incident with which it began dissolved in this greater mystery. The narrator was dead and being rowed across the river familiar from Greek mythology – was that it?

In a sense, the story did not matter. In another sense, only the story could matter; a plot – the semblance of a plot – was necessary for something to get underway … and it had to be sporadically absorbing, even – had to give some measure of narrative suspense in order to keep moving (a suspense which, for me, INLAND EMPIRE lacked, and was certainly absent from Kis’ Hourglass, which I tried to read more recently). But that it kept moving was the thing, or it kept track of that secret movement that meant Nooteboom had to write and has, each time, to hang his writing on a plot only to dissolve that plot entirely. A plot indifferent to itself, that is somehow in lieu of itself, a novel that writes and erases what is written even as it is written. A novel whose pages are as though blank or that let that blankness shine through….

Casual notes in response to Waggish, who responds to an earlier post of mine (and which was, in turn a response to an earlier post of his).

Wolfe was an engineer, being said to have played a part in developing the machinery that makes Pringles crisps, and he brings an engineer’s delight to the creation of some of his literary worlds. It’s our delight too, say in ‘The Death of Doctor Island’ – a story I haven’t read for many years (and I don’t have a copy of the collection from which it comes): a sick boy on a false moon – does it orbit Jupiter? – what we take to be his fever dreams are, the literary engineer shows us, made of tiltings of his moon’s orbit.

Was that right? Do I remember correctly? The engineering was marvellous – but the fever dream of the story was more so. Like the many-sailed spaceship Wolfe lets us explore in The Urth of the New Sun, I was distantly comforted to know the story was science-fiction and not fantasy. Real laws applied; something of John W. Campbell remained in Wolfe: hard SF remained at its core: hard SF, only Wolfe had dragged a white hole into its dimming sun. But beyond the hard SF, something more – I read Wolfe when I was much younger; I was young enough to have still the attitude of the writer Mumpsimus persuasively corrects in this post, and young enough never to have met any kind of religious person.

That Wolfe was a Catholic (converting before his marriage) – this was wonderful. That he believed (as he said once of the Soldier series, still incomplete) that the gods of the Greeks were real and walked among them meant that he was more than an engineer – that outside the artifice of his world-making, there was the reality of God the Outsider. The fever-dream of God! Wolfe was a fantasist before he was a engineer, but unlike the Catholic novelists I’d also read – Greene, say or the later Waugh, his Catholicism did not saturate the plot and incidents of his fiction. He was engineer as well as a fantasist – there was not a tension between them, not really; I think God the Outsider always remains for him the real agent of creation. Literary creation for Wolfe is only ever idolatry. A fun idolatry, though; a happy artificing – if it is not innocent, it is not wicked either.

But doesn’t this prevent his fiction from bearing upon another sense of the Outside – not the real world as a referent, as the source of literary representations, but the reserve the world hides by seeming all too real? Does literature – beyond any notion of the ‘literary establishment’ Mumpsimus places within quotation marks (and beyond Establishment Literary Fiction) – bear upon a kind of truth, of a correspondence between word and referent? A correspondence, rather, with what the world is not – or that nothingness (is that the word?) that inhabits the world as reserve; that means it might become other than it is.

To read is to free the world in some quiet way. To free it from what it is, and to set free, as reading, what you are, too, who might otherwise commit that idolatry that takes our consensual world to be all it might be. For this reason, Steve’s remarks on McEwan’s Saturday are forever justified: the conventional book answers to the world of convention; it confirms even that non-reality that Bush: confirms the new world being made and remade around us, this world of lies and cyncism. And so literature really can take an axe to the frozen sea inside us, and the frozen sea that is the world.

Is it worth noting, in this context the right wing sympathies of Wolfe’s Operation Ares? And if Wolfe really is a man of the right (too quick? too simplistic? and doesn’t he think Operation Ares a bad book?), and is this why he is content to make genre artifices rather than what might be called literature (as Steve’s This Space is the guardian of this word)? Or is it because God is his fever dream, God who would have the monopoly on all true creation and compared to whom Wolfe is another storyteller beside the campfire that is the sun? I am happy to dream with Wolfe, but I feel uneasy when I wake. And isn’t this what I want from reading – to wake up? 

I like Waggish’s comments on Gene Wolfe’s work – I admit, however, that I find his prose entrancing; I’ve reread The Book of the New Sun twice not only because I love Severian’s picaresque adventures, and thinking about the riddles Wolfe seems to set us, but because of those winding sentences – because I love the narrator’s voice. Is it right to point out that the games of the unreliable narrator are just games – that there is no reason why we are prevented from assessing the truth of what is told us?

This is what Waggish finds frustrating, and says has separated Wolfe from other genre writers who have won mainstream literary acclaim. At one point, I remember, Severian, the narrator, tells us he knows he is mad; I underlined the sentence as I read it; I thought: this is important; something will be made of this. But the end, nothing was; the fiction remains untouched by madness – how different, then, to Priest’s The Affirmation (see Mumpsimus’s remarks) which, like The Book of the New Sun, I have read three times in all.

I’ve always found Wolfe’s preface to Endangered Species (a much weaker collection than The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, as most of his later books are weak) disingenuous: his stories are just stories told around the campfire that is the sun. As Peter Wright’s thorough Attending Daedelus shows (scroll down the comments for a summary) I think quite convincingly, The Book of the New Sun and its sequel are about artifice, about fabrication. Even the hierodules are idolators, false angels imitating the Creation without being themselves creators. It takes Patera Silk of The Book of the Long Sun to come into contact with the one genuinely Outside. Severian never reaches the one called the Outsider – or not that I remember. Silk does – albeit in a series far weaker than the New Sun (I’ve never read my way through to the Short Sun books).

The Outsider, of course, is God. God beyond games, beyond the idolatry of Pas (of Typhon). And now I ask myself about Steve’s comments on the relationship between literature and genre, wondering whether genre is content to remain fictional; to construct a world, to dwell with its characters in it; for event to succeed event in a rich linearity.

There is nothing wrong with this – of course not. But there is another kind of writing – and what Steve calls literature refers for those books for whom The Outsider is not God. For whom, then, fiction gives onto the unencompassable Outside as it names language, as it names the world. ‘All works form a genre in coming into existence’, says Steve. They form a body; they take on plot and character; they offer themselves to be read. But ‘resistance to genre marks the literary’: then plotting and characterisation must themselves be at stake in the fictional work. Then fiction, artifice must be shown for what they are. The writer is an idolator, not because there is a God, or that God could name the Outside. The writer is an idolator because of that Outside, which admits only of idolatry, that will not allow for any other means of approach.

Is this what Wolfe tells us in The Urth of the New Sun, when it becomes clear that the hierodules, whose name means temple slaves, are mere artificers, following an evolutionary imperative? Is it that there is only idolatry, sham creation? Or is there a way in which the Outside can speak itself via the same artificing – that it breaks the surface of the novel, as when we understand in The Affirmation that the fiction is only idolatry, even as it is the only way to bring the Outside to speech? A resistance to genre – I wonder if Urth, otherwise so unsatisfactory, rises to this when the hierodules are revealed to be botched makers like ourselves, not gods, as Wright’s innovative and ingenious reading shows us? In the end, however, I think Waggish is right (see also his comparison between Priest to Wolfe in this earlier post): Severian may be a liar, he may be mad, but the book itself is terribly sane, remaining but a particularly lovely artifice among other idolatrous artifices.

You speak; you’ve made a dent in the streaming of language. Speak – and you’ve made a stand in speech, although it is by means of speech that you’ve made this stand. But what kind of stand is this?

The 8 year old Thomas Bernhard is cycling, and cycling as far and as fast as he can. His bicycle belongs to his guardian, but he has reclaimed it as his own, painting it silver and cycling around the countryside. Today he has resolved to visit his Aunt in Salzburg, 22 miles away. It’s a long trip; how can a child cycle this far, and on his own? But as little Bernhard does so, it is with the dream of joining the cycling elite, even though he’s too small to reach the pedals while he is sitting on the saddle.

The 8 year old knows his trip is forbidden, that he might be punished, but he thinks his audacity will be so admired it will annul his offence. One of his stockings is torn and covered with oil; he grows weary, and the road seems to become ever longer. Then – disaster – his bicycle chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It’s dark, and there are 7 or 8 miles to go, his bike is ruined and his clothes are torn …

So with Bernhard’s narration of his cycling trip. The trip is also a trip in prose; the maelstrom of the prose is the maelstrom of language; Bernhard writes against the wind, against style in the effort of the prose, its forward movement as it gathers everything up in its momentum. Controlled madness, held together at the brink of falling apart, the great loops of the sentences rolling forward. Discord, disequilibrium: style strains language all the way to the point of breaking (but it does not break).

Bernhard, prose-cyclist: think of him as he first begins to write, as he finds the strength to continue. Think of him writing before he shows his work in progress to his lifeperson, who tells him whether to discard the piece or continue. He begins again; his narrator is much like the narrators in all his books. He begins, and each book is pretty similar to the other.

But the strength to begin again, to see through a book! The strength to hold it together, to write through the days and nights! To let himself be caught and borne up the rhythms of language! And in the breaks of that rhythm, like the hard carapace of a lobster cracked open: the meat of language in its density, its thickness. Language in its black, glistening darkness, there before any story, before anyone could say ‘I’.

There are no autobiographies. Or none that can reach back into the black blood that surges before the beginning. Impersonal language, like a sea of oil. Language whose waves must part before anyone can say ‘I’. No autobiographies. For how might you write of your birth into language?

What did Bernhard discover when he wrote Frost (or when his first story was published, or his first poem)? Language open to enclose him. As though he had struggled back up the stream; he found his way to the head of the waters, to the rivers rising on the mountains where there were no speakers yet. To write – isn’t to come under the spell of the origin? To travel back through language until there was no speaker yet. Or is it to travel forward, when language breaks like black oil upon no shore?

And once you have begun to write there is no end, just as there is no end to speech. One book, another. One and then another, all the way up to the end. Newfoundland: wasn’t that to be the last book, the last feast, when language breaks open its carapace? When it reveals itself as only black oil, black blood, black meat?

Something new happens, James Wood says, with Chekhov and his characters; he bestows them a freedom – ‘they act like free consciousnesses, and not as owned literary characters’. Chekhov discovers what would come to be called the stream of consciousness, which allows, says Wood, for a kind of forgetfulness to enter fiction.

A stream of consciousness? Perhaps a river instead, and downstream when it rolls along, braiding, meandering, and perhaps isolating itself in those still pools whose stagnancy recalls that stultifying rural Russia Chekhov evokes so well. Chekhov’s ‘beautifully accidental style, his mimicking of the stream of the mind, is that it allows forgetfulness into fiction’.

A forgetting, a braiding of thoughts, a meandering away from intention, from purpose – and this is what Chekhov allows: the characters, while not forgetting to be themselves ‘They forget to act as purposeful fictional characters. They mislay their scripts’.

Woolf follows Chekhov and perfects the art. Forgetting, with Woolf, becomes a kind of absentmindedness:

A character is allowed to drift out of relevance, to wander into a randomness which may be at odds with the structure of the novel as a whole. What does it mean for a character to become irrelevant to a novel? It frees characters from the fiction which grips them; it lets character forget, as it were, that they are thickened in a novel.

Characters freed, then, from the iron collar of narrative. Characters set free to wander, but to do more than run away with their author, surprising him by their vividness, by the life they seem to want to live. To do more – for they’ve forgotten they’re in a narrative at all; the book falls away in irrelevance.

So with Mrs Ramsay, who forgets for 20 pages she’s to be at the centre of Lily Briscoe’s painting in To the Lighthouse. Forgets, and bears the reader along with her for those 20 pages. We travel with her; we experience forgetting with her, Wood says; ‘and in this way out of her’. Out of her? Of Mrs Ramsay? Is it still Mrs Ramsay’s stream of consciousness that rolls through those pages?

It is as if the novel forgets itself, forgets that Mrs Ramsay is a character. She has been at the centre of the novel all along and we have hardly notced it, because we have inhabited her own invisibility.

Into what are we drawn as readers? Into the self-forgetting of the novel, that sets free its central characters and all of its characters, that sets free its plot and lets wander; and finally sets free its narrative voice, that speaks only in the invisibility Mrs Ramsay has been allowed to inhabit. As though her thoughts had turned her inside out like a glove. As though there was a kind of streaming that is more than consciousness – a current that has drawn us drowning beneath the water.

Wood does not go so far.

Yet Woolf’s delicate method shows us that we are never thinking about nothing, that we are always thinking about something, that it is impossible for us not to think, even if the thought is merely the process of forgetting something.

Thought is intentional, as the phenomenologist would say; we cannot help but think of things; thought thinks thoughts, and to forget, as Descartes would admit, is to continue to think. Is it this that To the Lighthouse shows? For Wood, ‘it brings us closer to what Woolf called "life". In her novels, thought radiates outward, as a medieval town radiates outward – from a beautifully neglected centre’. 

This is beautiful. Thought radiates outward. Thought laps outward, but from what centre? From that, now, that displaces character, narrative, and the fiction itself. And by so doing, perhaps allows another voice to come forward, murmuring, rustling, concerned with itself and turning in itself. This is the voice that speaks invisibly in the novel’s visibilities; it is what turns into darkness even as the surface of the stream seems to dissolve into light. But in its darkness, isn’t also what allows light? And is its plunge from the surface what allows its glitter?

Perhaps there is a thinking that is more than intentional, or that runs backwards from the intended object to the would-be thinker. A thought that is more than can be thought, that splits consciousness wide and lets there run a stream of non-consciousness, the stream that rustles darkly in itself, whose laughter is like that of Odradek and, says Janouch, Kafka: the sound of dead leaves. Might we call it life, too? Might it also be called life, that impersonal current that neglects itself in any narrative, and that neglects us too, so that we continually miss it?

As I Lay Dying is a great book because Faulkner, like Joyce and Woolf (and presaged by Chekhov) uses the innovation of stream of consciousness to allow his characters to forget themselves, to break free of the author’s incessant memoranda, to be in their own verbal confusions.

This from Wood later in the volume and it seems almost a retreat. For it is the novel itself that is forgotten with Woolf (with Wood’s Woolf) – that forgets itself as the narrative voice that drifts through Mrs Ramsay, the other characters, and the plot itself. Perhaps it can be presented as a thought, or as a kind of thinking – only one, now, that is greater than the thinker, like Descartes’ idea of God. Greater, and found first of all, there among the contents of the thinker’s consciousness. There first of all, that point which, I imagine, might be pulled upon so that consciousness itself turns inside out like a glove.

Dream of that book where thought thinks itself outside the thinker. Dream of a narrative voice uncontained by the narrative, of a forgetting that draws it back into the novel, back, even as it is nothing but its flowing surface. After the stream of consciousness comes, with Blanchot, another innovation: the streaming of that impersonal voice of which consciousness is itself a fold. Isn’t this what he sought to discover from the 1930s onwards in his fiction, his literary criticism?

Assertions here, not arguments. I will return to this topic on another occasion.

I’ve lost my taste for the major bookshops that sell new or second books, for the shops to which anyone can go and in which you might run into into someone you know, who has become, just like you, no one in particular, a customer or a client and whom, when you meet him, coalesces from this no one without however leaving him behind, like a waking up still thick with the enchanted world of dreams. And I’ve given up heading straight for such bookshops, as though they were destinations in themselves as opposed to how I like them to be now: surprises unlooked-for and unanticipated, half-forgotten places that it suddenly occurs to me to visit, as on a whim – that when I have a little slack time I might wander there just to look, but browsing idly, carelessly and without a thought for what I might find, looking for nothing, and then leaving behind those books I might want to buy and forgetting them almost at once; saying to myself: too heavy to cart around, or another time, or I’ve got too many books.

But yesterday I found, nonetheless, two volumes of Canetti’s autobiography in a large format paperback, and a bilingual volume of German poetry edited and translated by Michael Hamburger, who’s just died, and whom Sebald (or the narrator in The Rings of Saturn) remembers visiting in his messy house. Reading Trakl on the underground, it was as though I’d popped my eyes out into something soothing: they felt cooled as soon as I read the name ‘Elis’ and of the blues and purples of which that poet likes to write. And I found myself, reading Brecht, wishing I’d brought that big bilingual book of his poems I saw a few years ago. There was a poem by Handke, too, from a collection that has been translated, I notice: I should hunt that down, too.

These books bought in a slack hour, when I thought I’d let an hour open up like a sail to be blown along up the street that opens off the high street. A modest shop in a suburb, and the more welcome for that. I hesitated over two hardbacked Naipauls – should I, shouldn’t I; and over a handsome In Patagonia for £6 – too heavy, I thought, what with everything else, and it took an age to decide on the volume of poetry, marked at £9.95 – would I read it? did I want it now only because I would have wanted it years ago? – nothing worse than a book unread on a shelf, stranded there, a book unread and therefore alone, washed up from some great shipwreck of culture and to my bookshelf – unlikely place – mine, on the other side of that sure and certain kingdom of taste and cultivation to which it once belonged.

Books because I have them must be lost, I think to myself. I live on the other side of the collapse, I think, and that I have this or that volume is testament to the great breakup, the shattered arctic ice sheet that sets icebergs wandering off. They could only have found me as shipwrack, I think, and I look through bookshops like a beachcomber. But then, happily, I opened the Hamburger edition and bathed my eyes in Trakl, and read again a few poems by Celan, and surprised myself with Rilke and hollowed out an ‘intense inwardness’ at King’s Cross station, waiting under the timetables for my train to be announced. Inwardness, Innigkeit, where I was first of all the rebound of my reading, that space of resonance where the poem looked beyond me for its reader and thereby held itself open, maintaining the opening that it essentially was. And holding me likewise open, inwardness opening outward, and the names Rilke and Trakl indices of a hope that let eternity flash across my landscape.

Rilke, Trakl, and perhaps Hamburger too – and Sebald: names that owed themselves entirely to poetry, stones smoothed by the waters perfectly round.

Pessoa’s heteronym, Alvaro Coehlo de Athayde, the 20th Baron of Tieve takes his life, leaving a manuscript in a desk drawer.

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I began to write it, that I can write with some semblance of truth.

And who is the Baron more than what is defined, enacted by the text Pessoa has him write? A text that is, with respect to the Baron, posthumous – the remnant of that literary ambition burned up when he threw his other fragmentary manuscripts onto the fire.

In the past the loss of my manuscripts – of my life’s fragmentary but carefully wrought oeuvre – would have driven me mad, but now I viewed the prospect as a casual incident of my fate, not as a fatal blow that would annihilate my personality by annihilating its manifestations.

But the he still needs, does he not, the manifestation of The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive, as Pessoa subtitles it …? Burning up literature, he is still dependent upon it – upon its remnants, upon what still attests to its demand.

To think that I considered this incoherent leap of half written scraps a literary work! To think, in this decisive moment, that I believed myself capable of organising all these pieces into a finished, visible whole!

So now the Baron throws it all into the fire. Honour and silence, he says, are left to him; this is what his reason confirms, this ‘millimetric’ thinker. A thinker who also says that it is by thinking that he remains like Buridan’s ass ‘at the mathematical midpoint between the water of emotion and the hay of action’; and that ‘temperament is a philosophy’. Then thinking cannot think past temperament; the Baron’s character is his fate; what remains is the Stoic amor fati, that acceptance of the order of the world as it measures out our destinies. Whence, I suppose, the title The Education of a Stoic Pessoa gives these pages.

Amor fati? Was it the Baron’s fate to burn his manuscripts and take his own life? Or was his suicide a fatal leap towards action, his last chance, his rebellion? Ah, The Impossibility of Producing Superior Art (another of Pessoa’s subtitles) …! but it is impossible only for one who prefers, he says, to suffer alone ‘without metaphysics or sociology’ what led Leopardi, de Vigny and de Quental – ‘three great pessimistic poets’ to make ‘universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes’. Perhaps it is only the Baron’s discretion, his sense of honour that leads him to the impossibility of realising his works and – short step – to suicide.

Richard Zenith, editor of the volume, quotes an excerpt from another text by a Pessoa heteronym, Bernardo Soares:

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materialises.

Soares weeps, but the Baron does not. No consolation for him in readers who were touched sufficiently to forget the imperfection of his work. And yet there’s this book, The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive … How are we supposed to read it? We are not to be touched. It is a monument to the absence of weeping, to the Baron’s honour. He saved us, he says in these pages, from an oeuvre born of a sublimated suffering.

Compare Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet happy with his tears and happy to write of his suffering. Soares who produced a manuscript far larger than that left by the Baron of Teive. Neither author produced a book that was published in Pessoa’s lifetime. And yet I wonder whether The Education of the Stoic was a way of short circuiting Soares’ sprawling The Book of Disquiet – of delimiting that impulse that led Pessoa to produce so many fragments. To die honourably, discretely; to die like an aristocrat: was this what Pessoa wanted in the Baron of Teive? As, meanwhile, the bookkeeper Soares, prolix and weeping survived in him, and The Book of Disquiet grew longer and less manageable still …

Very little is happening on the other side of the page (if the surface you read, with these letters on it, can be called that). A day in the office, much as it was yesterday and the day before. It’s gone humid outside. That thick humidity is in my head, too. No energy. Nothing can be done. To the carpet, then, by the bookshelf. The green, coarse carpet, ‘spicy’ as my sister would have said when she was young (she used that word to refer to our dad’s stubble which she’d feel against her cheek as he picked her up when he came home from work), and from there, the books.

Leiris’s Nights as Days, Days and Nights. A book of dreams – like Cixous’, like Adorno’s. A dull genre; or lively only when the writing is very good. Doesn’t Blanchot recount a dream in a letter to Monique Antelme? About a murder by pickaxe, recalling Trotsky’s. And his father – he is there, too. Why would you need to recount such a dream, and to another? But I’m too tired to consider this question, and to follow it where it leads. Leiris’s book – I had to have it, and it arrived, bought for me secondhand from the Gloucester Road Bookshop.

I wonder idly whether the third and fourth volumes of Leiris’s autobiography have been translated, and about what must lose itself in that particular translation, for Scraps and Scratches seemed flat somehow, and unextraordinary. Manhood – now wasn’t that more immediate? Wasn’t it more lively?

Bookshelves – but what is more repugnant than a bourgeois and his books? A museum of books, books he might have wanted when he was younger and could not afford. Here they are now, all of them. A ‘collection’, even a ‘library’. And I wonder what it mean to read books as some of them must have been written – in a sovereign neglect, carelessly; a reading that is one part of the full breadth of a life, as some people I suppose must live. Yes, to read, but only as relief, only as something catches your eye, to read lightly, glancingly, and then putting the book aside unannotated, and never intending to read it again: this is what I dream of, and what I envy.

I am weighed down by my books, I think to myself. There are too many. Tarkovsky’s diaries next to Leiris; the Jabes volumes I never really read, still with stickers from Compendium Books (I preferred the reader, From the Book to the Book); a biography of Debord … And more, and many more, adjacent in the ‘imaginary museum’ of my office bookshelf. The imaginary library, that, like the plate filled books Malraux assembled, would testify to the treasures of all our civilisations here, today, at the end of history.

What else to feel but Blanchot’s ‘museum sickness’, this library fever that my imaginary sovereign reader would never tolerate? He would put the book down, unannotated, and go elsewhere. Like my imaginary writer – like Burroughs’, in a volume of essays I also have here, lounging around Singapore and Rangoon ‘smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit’; sniffing cocaine in Mayfair; penetrating ‘forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy’, and living ‘in a native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle’.

The next book along: Gert Hofman’s The Film Explainer, about which I always intended to write. What marvellous dialogue! What exclamation marks! Hofman is certainly the master of those! And next, two volumes of Homer, in Everyman editions. Who gave me those? Ah yes, I remember. One whose library – that’s what he called it – I often envied. But didn’t I resent, too, those still books that year by year turned yellow in the dark light of his flat? Books whose spines would crack if you opened them. And didn’t I deserve Pynchon’s V more than its owner?

The next book – by coincidence is by Malraux. I must have bought Lazarus in preparation for reading Lyotard’s biography, which sits unread beside it. Pass by them, feel vague guilt; I should know more about him, Malraux. Should have an informed judgement. But he was never that appealing a character, for all that he resembled my imaginary writer. He used to take dinner with Balthus when the painter ran that museum in Italy – but in what town? What museum?

I should open the volume of Balthus that sits further up on the shelf. A book I bought and read in San Francisco, going to bed very early, jetlagged. San Francisco, where I’d ride the bus to Green Apple Books and found a nice volume that collected Kafka’s ‘The Judgement’, ‘Metamorphosis’ and ‘Letter to His Father’ under the heading The Sons. As he had wanted, apparently, though I can’t imagine that (but I must have it wrong).

And what next? Worthern’s D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, first in the three volume Cambridge biography, and the only one, to my knowledge, issued in paperback. I found the volumes in my first weeks in this city discounted in a secondhand shop. And read them in my previous flat, enjoying living alone, every evening. The world’s only Lawrence fan, who still carries the books with him: it’s a lonely business.

Just now, walking outside, I thought of Kangaroo, and the miracle that Lawrence could write such a book almost immediately upon reaching Australia: almost immediately, and in five weeks! What a marvel! And the opening chapters are particularly good, I remember. In that light late Lawrence style, what’s better? And remember the lovely paragraphs that end it, Kangaroo – the character (what was his name?) watching the sea crash and foam against the rocky shore. Nothing better, and making up for the great sag through the middle of the book, and its daftnesses. There’s always something to make up for Lawrence’s daftnesses, I think to myself. And remember the poem ‘The Fish’ and how much I like it. And the Last Poems, which I know almost by heart.

No more books. Get up from the carpet. Get in your swivel chair. Work! That’s what I told myself, but I wrote a little instead (these words). But I hadn’t intended to write of books at all. I’d thought to try to convey the sense of a life on the other side of these words, away from them. Of conjuring a sense of what is also lost by writing – this living, breathing moment, this moment – and now this one – sagging like old bunting from the proper minutes of my life. It’s as if I would let writing see what it should not – that I would break some rule of writerly decorum …

How many times have I attempted to find an idiom in which this other kind of telling would be possible? But enough, the afternoon must roll on, and I with it. Roll on, its great wheels turning through all our lives, and through the sky. The afternoon! And now, having broken the surface – written – it is already time to sink under again and disappear into the other side of the page. For a moment – but for how long? – I was with Leiris writing his dreams, at the arm of Malraux as he ate with Balthus in the Medici’s palace (was that it?), I was dreaming with young Burroughs of writers’ lives, and with Lawrence, I’d arrived freshly in a new continent …

Where did I put that volume of Mandelstam? Not the Penguin classic edition, but the other Penguin one – where did I put it? I think it’s boxed up in the Bela Tarr office. Boxed up with the other books, or piled up somewhere, behind the desk. I haven’t looked at it in years. Not a glance. But the spine of the book is enough. Just seeing that cool cream spine calms me. Alongside Malte Laurrids Brigge, in the Hogarth edition. And Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, in Quartet Encounters.

Stranded in Exeter a few weeks ago I experienced the same thing: the sense that in the books I opened – and this was a rare Waterstones, that placed books in translation where they usually have those 3 for 2 offers, and where the literary classics section included old Calder editions and out-of-print Bernhards and Handkes: that I’d opened, too, a doorway to the side of my life.

That something unexpected had let itself be found. That came drifting along, then, just then, when I was ready; when I’d already read half of Mrs Dalloway as I lay on the grass beside the cathedral, when I’d already eaten two small salad tubs from Marks and Spencers. Then: a little volume of Tabucchi’s, Dreams of Dreams, which includes ‘The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa’, where the heteronyms visit him in turn. And the first section, dreams of Rimbaud and Debussy, of Mayakovsky and Freud, as fantasised by Tabucchi.

Yes, that book is exactly right, I thought. Right for now, today. I found other books, too, seen before but never owned. Lars Gustafsson’s The Death of a Beekeeper, once reviewed alongside Blanchot’s Death Sentence by John Updike (which is why you get that wierd quote on his blurb for Blanchot’s novel, which mentions, incongruously ‘the beekeepers defiant courage in the face of pain’). A book made of journal fragments, not real ones, but a fiction. Of a man with not long to live, and writing. Writing in that space stretching open in the time left to him, and a fiction.

What would it reveal?, I asked myself, and an imaginary Sweden opened before me, rather like the one on the cover. Of the skerries, rocky islands like in Bergman films. Sweden where Bergman is still alive, I thought, and how old is he now? And worked it out. 88 – or 89, I thought. Does he still live alone? Alone on the island?

And a treat – did I really need it? and in hardback? and at that price? – Handke’s Once More For Thucydides. A small book of pen portraits of places at particular times; haecetties. Worth it for Handke’s prose? Worth it for its grey spine which lies on top of other books by my bed. I have a Handke in reserve, I tell myself. An emergency Handke.

Frost arrived today, Bernhard’s Frost, so I have an emergency Bernhard, too. I usually have one in reserve. Until recently, it was The Loser, the funniest of all the novels. And a little after that, Wittgenstein’s Nephew. And until today, nothing at all. But now I have the dreamy blue spine of Frost laid horizontally opposite from me. And I know its pages are rough along its edges, that they do not present an immaculately smooth white cliff. Rough pages. Like a book in French. Like my Les Editions de Minuit of Marguerite Duras. L’homme Atlantique, tiny and ragged-edged.

And I bought a nice edition Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks, too. Did I need it, when its contents are held, in their entirety, by another familiar Kafka edition? Ah but I could have bought – and didn’t – the hardback edition of the aphorisms, much more lovely. The same aphorisms printed in a tiny font at the end of the notebooks. So, in a sense, I’d saved myself money. I’d been frugal …

I photocopied it once, that larger edition, in my lunch hour when I worked as a temp at Hewlett Packard. I still have it, I think, two hundred pages joined together by treasury clips. The whole thing, and in Hewlett Packard! As though I was salvaging something, and perhaps myself. Taking time back. Or letting time lap to me from another direction, then, just then.

And I reread The Sea of Fertility there too, twelve years ago, a lifetime ago. There to assist an employee who’d been off with a stroke. There for one week, with nothing to do. So I read it again, The Sea of Fertility. And I think I had Hollier’s Against Architecture there, too. I think I read it and abandoned it in anger. Having photocopied it when I was on the dole. Photocopied the whole thing, as I would later do Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Internal Time Consciousness in one of my first teaching jobs.

But those books, Husserl’s were never necessary to me in the way Rilke was, or Mandelstam, or Tsvetayeva. Tsvetayeva to whom I felt obscurely protective, and whose work I knew from the letters quoted in someone else’s book. Those letters, quoted, were enough. I’ve carried some of the these books with me, though I sold many others. Some of them are left, boxed now, or piled up where I can’t see them behind the desk.

How many thousands of books have I bought! And how many thousands sold! Because I also dislike to hoard, and dislike hoarders. Those who keep books unread in great cliffs, all up the wall. Didn’t I deserve them, when I was young and poor? And perhaps that is the joy of buying books now: to have what I wanted then. To get it at last.

I was moved to see Bonnefoy’s edition of Giacometti reproductions in that same Waterstones. In paperback at last, though over £40. In paperback, when I used to eye up the edition in Manchester, upstairs at Waterstones. And I vowed again to give my books away. To give them to who wanted them, to whom the books would open a doorway, unexpected, to the side of their life.

As I went to pay, I saw the new big book of Cy Twombly’s behind the counter, shrinkwrapped. I asked to see it. I wanted it, right then. £50, I think. A huge book, a slab of a book. And a lot to read. I remembered the Twombly’s at the Tate, from a year before. They’d stood out at the Tate, we agreed. And after that, the name would come to me every now and then: Twombly. As I knew it had been destined for me to see his paintings then.

Then – that time when you should meet a book. When a book is right for you – or a painting. I used to spend hours wandering the bookshops in Manchester. Feeling the creamy cover of Finnegan’s Wake, wandering whether I should have it. Coming across Cage’s Silence by chance …

In the old student union bookshop, you could arrange to sell your books, the shop keeping a share – only 10 or 15%. They closed it in the end, of course. As everything good is closed. But for a time, I sold books there, and bought them, and the shop assistants – two of them, imagine that: two – called me Mr —-. I liked that very much. To be called Mr —-, and then when I felt unimportant.

What did I buy? What did I sell? Fire-damaged books from Hatchards. Thoreau and Emerson, in the American Penguin Pocket editions. Whitman’s Specimen Days.  Old cheap Penguins. Science fiction for 35p a pop, which I bought to complete my collection of all the three and four-starred books in David Pringle’s Ultimate Guide …

Another time, years later, studying for a teaching qualification in Guildford, I used to pass an edition of Beckett’s Complete Plays in a shopping mall bookshelf. And experience the then then, though I had no money. It was £8, I think. I passed it for thirty days, and then – bought it, as I still have it. Boxed up, piled up in the office.

I visit bookshops rarely now. It is part of my dislike of open time, of empty hours. I never wander. I think it’s only once I went out wandering in this city. Once, and I didn’t like it, I’d strayed too far, I felt like a cosmonaut of the afternoon. Get back to the office, I thought. Work, I thought, draw work around you. You should be out on a day like this, I thought.

No more ‘thens’ in the street. ‘Then’s come by post. Frost from the Book Depository yesterday morning. The big box of Jandek CDs from Corwood. That’s where they’ll meet you, summoned by you. Where the post is kept. Or, if I do not get there first, waiting for me on my office desk. That’s how they come, books, from afar. I bring them to me. I bring the ‘then’, I call it. I don’t go out to find books. They come to me.

You can only go out wandering when you’re young, I told myself. When you’ve nothing in particular ahead of you, a whole life, but directed nowhere in particular. Only then can you wander, I thought to myself. When you’re older, there’s no point, everything’s been decided.

There must be no slackening of time. Time must be accounted for. Work must shape your hours. Work and projects, for time is getting short. Soon, it will be impossible, but for now, today: work. Rise early and work. Go to bed early, tired from work. Burn out your eyes with computer screens and pages in spotlights.

Then. How do they reach me today, these books I bought? Tabucchi and Gustafsson? Kafka? I think they stand around me as books did when I was young. That it is someone young in me who wants them. That it is my youth that calls them, and needs them to stand around like a host of angels. Books. Then and now – today.

But nothing worse than the bourgeios with his books. Great cliffs piled up, unread, hardly necessary. Better scattered books without order. Books half-lost, just as I’ve already lost Mrs Dalloway (and I was halfway through it, wandering through London streets …) Books piled casually and neglectfully. And books to be given away, piles of books pressed into willing arms. Here, take these. Take this, it’ll mean more to you than me. For imagine it, what a gift, to be given Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems! What a gift to find Handke’s Across in your hand!

And imagine it – the joy of reading Bernhard for the first time! Or Henry Green! The perpetual surprise of Henry Green, of Concluding, or of Caught. Then. Then, you will be ready, the one to whom I will give a gift. I will make you a ‘then’, hollow it out. I’ll have made a ‘then’ you might carry like the ark in the tabernacle of your life.

Hamsun’s hunger artist dreams of writing a three volume work that would be greater philosophical monument than Kant’s Critiques, but who can finish nothing but articles that the newspaper editor turns down. Ragged, emaciated, he refuses the loan the editor would offer him, and when a tramp, pitying him, refuses his charity, he becomes angry, just as he is angry at all those whom he passes in Kristiania, imagining that they were all recipients of his own charity. He is a man of potential who has achieved nothing so far; but he also lives from the sense that his achievements are already real; that this writer without works (but does that make him a writer?) is in awe of what he might be.

In his dreams, he is already an author, having substantialised himself as the author of mighty works, having already revealed that greatness as yet unknown to those who pass him in the street. One day, it will all have made sense; one day, his hunger and poverty will have been revealed as the royal road that led to his triumph; from the heights of his authorship, he will survey the difficult path that led him towards where he is now, and the still greater peaks before him rising in the distance.

But isn’t there a sense, too, that he will never seize upon the work of which he dreams; that they will flee ahead of him, known only to him in its fleeing, leading him on what is never quite a quest? Perhaps this is why he willfully denies himself the opportunities offered him. He knows that it remains what it is only as it flees – that the unfinishable and incompletable work rises far higher that the peaks across which he might imagine himself crossing. And his life will never be retrospectively justified; it must remain as it is: a failure.

But then, too, in its jerks and hesitancies, this would-be writer’s soul is still made of its relation to the work, to the impossible dream of a finished book? It is as if all his inadequacy has been pulled along in a single direction; that he is at least orientated towards what he lacks, as it is has taken the form of the book which would retrospectively make sense to others of everything he had suffered.

One day I will show you: this is what the adolescent says. One day – when I’m truly an adult – or, in this case of this hunger artist, an author. And then the plan will have been revealed; then the biographers will come swarming and the scholars will pore over my notebooks. One day: but only when I die; only when I die among those who must now admit that they knew nothing of what I was. This will be my charity, which is always in retrospect: mine was always the condition of one who lived ahead of his times.

And doesn’t he reveal, Hamsun’s narrator, the condition of the modern writer, who writes without criteria and even without authority? Who has emerged from the shelter of the church and the state, who runs up anew against the impossibility of writing? Which is only to say, that he can now confront writing in its impossibility, measured against the work to which it might give body?

But the work will not be made flesh; the sought after Word will not be spoken. What does this new kind of martyrdom witness? A dying for nothing – nothing, pure nihilism. But perhaps also another experience of the notion, and of nihilism. For by incarnating the experience of the impossibility of writing, of finding a place to begin the work, Hamsun lets us experience writing as impossibility – as a kind of test, a trial.

Why does the narrator starve? Because he cannot do otherwise; because he cannot find anything he wants to eat: so Kafka’s hunger artist. Hamsun’s narrator bites down on the stone he keeps in his mouth to satiate hunger. Bites down – such is his delusion. And likewise the narrative bites down upon another imaginary stone that would make substance where there can be none; that lets a book appear only where the work is not.

Hamsun finishes his book, even as the narrator does not finish his. He finishes the book – but what of the relation to the impossible work that takes his narrator as its subject? Impossible. And this is the comedy of Hunger. This is why its narrator is a self-deluding fool, biting down on what can give him no satiety. Upon what has Hamsun bitten?

To a correspondent he says, Hunger ‘is not a novel about marriages and coutnry picnics and dances up at the big house. I cannot go along with that kind of thing. What interests me is the infinite susceptibility of my soul, what little I have of it, the strange and peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.’ (via)

Hamsun’s narrative incarnates a new kind of mortification. A discipline that attempts to give itself rules. Strange bloom of a narrative that tells only of the impossibility of satiation. How to give flesh to the work? By showing what it is not, and that it runs ahead of everything. By giving flesh to this nothing, to the starvation that comes forward in our place when writing no longer has a model. 

Can the modern writer appear to be anything but stubborn, perverse and self-deluding? Can he fail to swell with an unearned pride? Sometimes his task will appear great, sometimes inconsequential. Sometimes he would like to turn back to the sunlight of the world. How foolish he was to sequester himself! How idiotic to turn from all human nourishment! But then he knows, too, that he has no choice: that, like Kafka’s hunger artist, he could find nothing to eat.

His stubbornness is all he has, and so he becomes proud of that. Tenacity, but without project: so he becomes proud of that, too. Discipline, but with nothing to which to devote itself: more pride. What do the others around him know? What have they sought for? What have they achieved. He closes his eyes. A great mountain range rises before him. One day he will ascend. One day, he will look back and down at them all, and they will look up at him, without comprehending. He lives on the mountain peaks, and they far below in the valleys.

Or is that he lives below everyone, far below? Is it that he is incapable of the simplest utterance, that he lives far below the surface of life, deprived of all that would make life simple. They put a panther in place of the hunger artist. The sister stretches her young body when the insect dies in Metamorphosis. Life is simple – surely that. Life is simple, for anyone but him.

The modern writer has a stone in his mouth. A stone that will give him no nourishment when he bites. But he bites. 

I’ve been reading about Haddam, and Frank Bascombe’s small voyage away from it, and his small voyage back. 4.00 AM, and I’m up for paracetomol and cough relief: don’t I hear the line of narrative then, catching it by surprise as it threads inside me? In the bathroom, I hear calm male voices through the wall – strange, at this time of night: the voices of lovers? friends? – and I think I hear them as Frank Bascombe might, meeting them with prose, or drawing those voices up to the plateau of writing.

Now they will resound in another sense, and for others. Captured voices, details, giving themselves to that pressure to tell, to re-narrate the world that draws any of us up to the moors. By what impulse does any of us want to double the world, to join the streaming of writing to the details of everyday life? And it is on the everyday that Frank Bascombe is concentrated – details, details, a mad profusion.

Richard Ford writes biro on notebook. I can imagine that – and in my mind, he’s a cousin to another great notebook writer. And parts of Peter Handke’s No Man’s Bay are as dull as parts of Independence Day, but are also just as beautiful. Strange knot by which Ford loops the circular horizon of America – its possibilities, its promise, even beyond those of the battle Bascombe notes between Bush and Dukakis – within the small circumstances of a life, over a weekend. I imagine that if you unfolded Frank Bascombe’s tale in the right way, you would find all of America opening up, like one of those paper puppets you made as a child, with numbers written on its inner edges, opening and closing as it was puppeted by your fingers.

All of America; America – the whole country, but also the sense of America as project, as if it was a newly discovered country; innocent, eternally new America that opens itself from these pages mad with detail. On the back cover, a quote to say the book is a masterpiece. It isn’t one. A sport, a weird outgrowth: this is a book written up on the moors, written to celebrate solitariness, a voice detached from life and letting life echo in itself.

Frank Bascombe’s voice. But in its mad profusion, not even that. The man alone, says Aristotle, is like a god or a beast. Bascombe’s voice, it seems to me, attempts to pass itself off as a common voice, the voice of anyone with open eyes and descriptive powers. It has real beauty. It spoils us: few books flash with such sheets of prose; few books are so lushly precise.

But his voice is uncommon, alone – Bascombe is more alone than anyone. His measured, reasoning voice lets echo in its mad prolifigacy a narrative pressure that seems to draw something of writing back into itself. An inhuman voice; a voice that gives body to itself through detail so it can pass itself off like any other. And it is this voice, I imagine, that magnetises Bascombe, and draws him up onto the moors.

At four AM, Bascombe’s voice is more alive than I am, threading through the darkness. Where is it going? But the question is where it has been – everywhere, I tell myself – this voice that has exhausted everything. And isn’t this clear the more strongly it attempts to cling to the surface of the world? Details, details – and too many of them. Great, dull patches where nothing happens. Slownesses like long-necked dinosaurs chomping in the sun. What boredom! Who could inflict such a book upon themselves?

A masterpiece? A mutation. A kind of cancer wherein narrative, narrative pressure, splits into a million flashing shards, like the world seen from a dragonfly’s eye. But it is a necessary book, and I thank it for carrying me through these weeks. Alone with the book, I am as alone as Frank Bascombe, and more alone than him. It is his voice that threads forward in me at 4.00 AM in the morning. His voice as it seizes details and eats them up, his voice that never turns itself away from taking a bite of the world.

Who would I be, without this book? Lost, I think – but then I’m also lost with it; it’s lost me, I’m up on the moors knowing writing’s insistent pressure. Shouldn’t I throw details to writing like meat to hungry dogs? Shouldn’t I see my own life through a dragonfly’s eyes?

As I read, I think I know what it meant when Mishima said, words are streaming through me. They stream, and in an inexhaustible profusion. Ill and reading back over the last month’s writing, I must conclude that I too am mad in some basic way. Madness eats at me. Too many words. Words, streaming like the water from the burst pipe in my yard. And isn’t it to still that voice that I write here? Isn’t it to bring it to a halt by substituting a finished post for its eternal streaming?

I suppose a voyage in writing is not a real one; but there is still a way of cutting free from shore – a voyage of sorts, even if it carries me no further than this room, where the curtains are closed against the darkness. Dark at seven thirty; we are five days from the nadir of the year, and from then the days will get longer than our current seven hours. We come home rather than going out; this time of year, as they know in the old country, is about hygge and staying indoors. They light candles in Denmark even at breakfast in place of a sun which barely hauls itself above the horizon.

Perhaps, before television, stories were told by candlelight: was there really a time in which people spoke in gusts and gales? I scarcely know what it would mean to talk thus, or to listen, though when I lived in the big house in Manchester, David would often talk for hours, on this subject, or on that. How could I explain to him the need I felt for speech to stumble?

I think it is Benjamin who says there is a break between the storyteller and the novelist; the one rests in a tradition, passing down the wisdom of forebears; the other ‘is himself uncounseled and cannot counsel others’. And doesn’t he also say that it is the place of death within shared customs, that once gave ‘that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possess for the living around him’? An authority which is the origin of the story.

And for the novelist, for the writer? No such authority – an authorship, now, that dreams of an impossible ancestry, that searches for forebears who live only in the imagination (thus Filip Kobald’s voyage in Handke’s Repetition). I suppose it was not by chance that David was a religious man – and didn’t he say that the Orthodox could every one of them speak for the whole of the Church? Each adherent carried their own source of authority; they belonged wholly to what they possessed in whole.

Victor Hugo, says Blanchot, says the same of maternity: it belongs wholly to each who would share it – but that in a different context: is he referring to revolution (I forget; I don’t have the essay with me)? If so, it is a different kind of authority of which he is speaking, and a different agency. Who wouldn’t like to live wholly, anonymously, in the moment? Wholly, and alongside others, who are likewise anonymous?

But still, as I read, I remember Leiris’s comments in his Diaries, which laugh at Blanchot among the participants of the Events: who did he think he was fooling? Was May 1968 – and one might say the same of another set of events, ten years earlier – his equivalent of what Palestine was for Kafka, who dreamed of travelling to that land to begin a new life?

Kafka, in the afternoons, used to practice carpentry: a life of the hands, a life outdoors, in contrast to the writer’s life he led at night. Blanchot, rarely seen, also went outside, descending to the streets to take part in the Students and Writers Action Committee (Hollier: ‘I saw him once, pale, but real …’).

Heady, unimaginable days. A return to authorship, to authority? But then he insisted, in the anonymous words circulated at this time, that there must be a break with the past, with tradition, with nationalism, with patriotism, just as, ten years before, he wrote that the living de Gaulle, who had returned to power with the aid of mercenaries, was dead, a hollow shell.

Beyond the storyteller, then, and beyond the novelist, ‘the absence of the book’: a new practice, and which called for a new kind of writing. Is this the way to read ‘Disorderly Words’, and of the fragmentary books that followed? I think to this extent, Blanchot had been preparing most of his life for that disorderly writing, for a writing without order.

What would it mean to blow the candles out and step outside? The streets are empty; but might they one day be filled with a new, anonymous movement? Somewhere Holderlin writes of throwing down his pen and going to do battle of one kind or another. But isn’t this because his pen is the last thing from which he might be freed? Whence the necessity of collective practices of writing – Breton and Soupault, for example, writing together; La Revue Internationale … beyond the storyteller, beyond the time of the novelist, there is another kind of writing.

For Benjamin, the storyteller speaks out of the customs that surround death, out of traditional authority; the novelist, like Rilke’s Malte, might dream of these traditions, but has been cast out from them. Perhaps Mishima is only another example of one who would seek to bestow death a sovereign meaning. What then of the writer of disorderly words – of the récit, as Blanchot comes to understand this word – of the fragment?

For a time, David appointed me his literary agent, for he was writing a series of vast fantasy novels, set in the same universe as The Lord of the Rings, and taking up the stories of the wizards only mentioned in passing by Tolkien. The first book had already been rejected; the second, which I thought much better, he did not quite complete, though I saw six hundred well written pages come together in first draft in three weeks.

I should say I spoke frankly to him about his writing, unlike others, and for this reason, he said, I was to be his editor as well as his agent, and would receive half the money when and if his books were published. Of course, they never were, as I knew they would not be. I still remember the agent’s letters we drafted together, which spoke of the fabulous vistas opened by the book, of high adventure and great battles …

I am reading the fourth volume now of a fantasy tetralogy; the first such thing I’ve read for many years. There are swords and magic and journeys by sea and air; voyages across mountain ranges and alien beasts, and strange tribes of half-men. And isn’t it clearest of all as I read that it is here that storytelling is alive today: in the world of fantasy, of unreal domains, where it is tradition that holds the world together?

In the filmed The Lord of the Rings, you can see the orcs beginning to use machinery, but you know the Shire will be forever immune from that. Tolkien wrote of and for little England, but the book I read was not. Wolfe is a different fish, of course, as is Crowley, and if storytelling, in their books, is kept alive, there is also a sense of distance, Wolfe foregrounding, at all times, the status of his telling as telling.

The Book of the New Sun, in many ways, belongs alongside Borges and Nabokov; next year, Crowley’s multivolume saga will be complete, and I intend to read Aegypt again, and the books that follow, which came out at such long intervals from one another. How might one compare Wolfe and Tolkien? The Claw to the Ring?

That’s a post for another time, but I remember agreeing with Moorcock’s well known essay on Tolkien – ‘epic Pooh’, I think he called it. A book for children, I’ve always told myself (Wolfe disagrees). Like so many other fantasies, Wolfe tells a story about growing up; and he tells stories within stories, setting within his novel examples of what Benjamin calls storytelling.

Isn’t Severian’s exile from the Matachin Tower precisely an exile from storytelling? Is this why the Tower, and his training as a torturer, Master Malubrius and the dog Triskele return to him in dreams? Perhaps Severian’s tale is no story – not in Benjamin’s sense. Doesn’t he, in the end, become Autarch? Isn’t this just another fairy tale, like the one in the brown book Severian carries? But the Cumean, who is old and wise tells him the brown book contains the wisest stories of all (proof of Benjamin’s point? Counterproof?) …

I will interrupt these reflections here. In the end, The Book of the New Sun, for which I’ve got into bed to read these past few evenings, is like the candles lit in Denmark to make up for short days and weak light. I think it is itself a kind of sun – a new sun, but that burns reassuringly like the tales of old. Doesn’t Wolfe say, in the introduction to Endangered Species, that the sun is the fire around which the storyteller and his audience turn?

It’s winter, the end of a long term and I put aside Bellow for Wolfe, because I wanted company and comfort until the days began to lengthen. A strange winter, so warm that lambing has already started, and I watch the clay pots in my yard for the first sign of daffodils – our world is warming just as Severian’s is cooling.

I think I only have one hundred pages of the fourth volume of my epic to finish; I do intend to leave the flat until I do. And then, after that, a separate fifth volume, then the second series (I did not complete it the first time) and the third (which I have never read). And so the days will grow longer instead of shorter, and then there will be Christmas, and then the New Year.