“When what is distant disappears, what is near tenderly draws nearer,” said Robert Walser, according to Carl Seelig, about walking in the fog. Walser’s collar is crooked, or worn, or both, he carries his furled umbrella under his arm along the mountain path, his hat is battered, the band torn, he is wearing a suit, somewhat raffish, somewhat the worse for wear, but he has no overcoat. Walser does not feel the cold, says Seelig. He enjoys the clouds, the rain. He distrusts clarity. Walser enjoys his walks with Seelig but asks Seelig not to call for him on any day but Sunday, so as not to disturb the routine of the asylum, in Herisau. There he assembles paper bags with glue, sorts beans and lentils, cleans the rooms. “It suits me to disappear,” says Walser, according to Seelig, “as inconspicuously as possible.” Even from his early days, according to Seelig, who did not know Walser in his early days and so must have had this information from Walser, or possibly another source, though no other source suggests itself, Walser took long walks to overcome the effects of nightmares. Or anxiety. Or the panic that results from the inability to engage. Not that Walser suffers from the inability to engage, exactly, though he seldom talks without prompting, not even to Seelig, says Seelig. Seelig spends little time with Walser in the asylum, but instead on the mountain paths, walking in the cloud, and in the rain, the best weather, to the small village inns where they enjoy this wine or that, or beer, or cider, and cutlets, or fried eggs, or dumplings, or cheese pies, whatever they are, or meatloaf, and pommes frites, or cabbage, or mashed potatoes and peas and white beans. Seelig records it all, afterwards, each detail of the walk and of the food and the drink and the waitresses, and every word that Walser speaks, we suppose, or, anyway, at least the essentials. With great equivalence. Off they walk again together, over the ridge, around the base of the mountain, Switzerland has many ridges and many bases of mountains, to clear their heads after the wine, and then to catch the train that will return Walser to the asylum and Seelig to wherever Seelig lives. Walser “harbours a deep suspicion of the doctors, the nurses, and his fellow patients, which he nonetheless skilfully tries to hide behind ceremonial politeness,” says Seelig, who either observes Walser more frequently than is recorded or has this information from the doctors. Seelig becomes, after all, Walser’s guardian after the deaths of Walser’s brother Karl and his sister Lisa. He republishes Walser’s work. To no avail. But Seelig is invisible to us, through making Walser visible when Walser doesn’t want to be visible. Seelig is Walser’s Boswell. Seelig is the narrator of Walser now that Walser narrates nothing. “Restraint is my only weapon,” says Walser, narrates Seelig. The restraint that made Walser significant as a writer is no different from the restraint that stopped him writing. “The less plot a writer needs, and the more restrained the setting, the more significant his talent,” says Walser, the author of, first, novels, then stories, then feuilletons, then microscripts approximating a millimeter in height in pencil on tiny scraps of paper, hidden about his person, in the Asylum in Waldau, unrecognised as actual writing until after his death, until they were deciphered in the 1990s, then nothing. When he first meets Seelig, because Seelig admires Walser's writing, Walser has already stopped writing. He has written nothing since he left Waldau and entered Herisau. Walser blames Hitler. Or society. Or the new superintendent at Waldau, according the Seelig. Walser blames editors, critics, other writers, according to Seelig. Walser’s work was admired by Kafka. He was admired by Benjamin, Sebald, Bernhard and Handke, according to them. To mention only a few. One critic called The Tanners “nothing more than a collection of footnotes,” according to Walser, according to Seelig. The Assistant was true, which is a surprise, at one time you could visit the advertising clock designed by Tobler, says Walser, says Seelig. Walser wrote the book in six weeks. The world changed. Walser changed, or he failed to change. He was celebrated and then increasingly ignored. He found it hard and then harder to get his work published. Even in the newspapers. “I could not perform for society’s sake,” says Walser, of his failure, according to Seelig, “All the dear, sweet people who think they have the right to criticise me and order me around are fanatical admirers of Herman Hesse. They are extremists in their judgement. That’s the reason I have ended up in this asylum. I simply lacked a halo, and that is the only way to be successful in literature,” says Walser to Seelig, according to Seelig, not without bitterness. Writing can only be done if it is the only thing done. Once, Walser alternated his writing with jobs as a servant or as a clerk, for money, for the time to write. Now he does not write. He wants to disappear. “It is absurd and brutal to expect me to scribble away even in the asylum. The only basis on which a writer can produce is freedom. As long as this condition remains unmet, I will refuse to write ever again,” says Walser, as recorded by Seelig. Walser’s turning away is from writing and from life. Walser's ceremonial politeness is his way of not existing, or of existing in his own absence. He is distant and withdrawn. He likes long walks, alone, we find out later, or with Seelig. He talks with Seelig, a little, when prompted, but not with others. As far as we know. The withdrawal that gives his writing such brilliance is the withdrawal that makes life unlivable, in the end, or at some point some way before the end, when one lets go of something, it is uncertain what, that everyone else grasps, naturally, or, more commonly, desperately, whatever it is, that keeps them clutching their lives. Walser, says Seelig, failed to take his own life, on more than a single occasion. His sister showed him the asylum at Waldau. He could think of no option but to enter. He did what was expected. He is diagnosed, when the term becomes available, as a catatonic schizophrenic, whatever that means, but his enjoyment of the walking, of the scenery, of the food and more especially the drink, and of the waitresses, seems genuine, at least through the eyes of Seelig, who knows him better than anyone, who sought him out because of his work and befriended him in the asylum and who accompanies him on long walks, who records everything and is sympathetic and transparent, at least to us, so that there is no reason to doubt Walser’s small and simple pleasures as they are recorded by Seelig, an affectionate man, on the level of smallness and simplicity at which they are experienced by Walser, who has set about perfecting smallness and simplicity until it resembles so very little it is almost nothing. Who is the sworn enemy of his own individuality. Who shows no emotion when told of the death of his brother, whom he loves, who refuses to break his routine to visit his sister, whom he loves, when she lies dying and asks him to come. “I too am ill,” says Walser, says Seelig. He doesn’t want to do what the other patients in the asylum aren't doing. He has an intestinal ulcer. “Must I be sick?” he asks the doctor, “Are you not satisfied to have me here in good health?” He refuses the operation. Just as well. “Is it true that you destroyed four unpublished novels?” asks Seelig. “That may be,” answers Walser, according to Seelig. Seelig says that Walser’s brother’s wife Fridolina had been told by Walser’s sister Lisa that Walser had destroyed a photograph of himself that had been taken by his brother Karl. “That may be,” answers Walser, records Seelig. Walser is convinced of his failure. At least of his inability to perform as he is expected to perform, to be successful as a writer, though he has an ambivalence towards success, to live even an ordinary life. Everything must be made smaller. “The snow has now turned to hail,” describes Seelig, of the weather. Walser carries steadfastly on. A life is full of details, even when those details are small, or insignificant, if there is such a thing as insignificant. If you wish to disappear you pay attention to the small. You have relinquished everything else and are relinquishing that too, with great care. The doctor says Walser has a disease of the lungs. It affects his heart. He should not leave the asylum grounds, says the doctor, according to Seelig. Walser accompanies Seelig to the train. The next time they walk, Walser does not walk well, says Seelig. He tires and stumbles. It seems there is not much of life left. Almost nothing. One day Walser goes for a walk. They find him later, face-up in the snow.

Alphabetisation as an organising principle at least possesses the virtue of scientific rigour. Alphabetisation is a way to achieve this. Alphabetisation is very clean, even when that which is alphabetised is very dirty (I mean dirty in a non-pejorative sense). Although it appears to be a principle that organises without adding meaning to that which is organised, a principle that organises without aiding understanding of that which is organised, that is actually its virtue. Although the experiences to which our memories relate may have been temporally organised, if organised is the right word, our memories are themselves certainly not temporally organised. Diaries are not memories, but memories could be somehow rescued from diaries, if we only knew how. Do we force new conjunctions of meaning upon sentences that abut each other merely due to their alphabetical sequence, and is this a good thing? Experimental writing needs to follow a rigorously scientific method to yield interesting results. Heti could have alphabetised all the words or alphabetised all the letters, but these, although they may have some scientific or statistical value (probably a fairly low value, I would guess), would not have been very interesting. Heti took ten years of her diary entries and put all the sentences into alphabetical order. Heti’s text is 60000 words long; my review is not long enough to be interesting. How would we arrange our lives, our thoughts, if we did not use time as a method of arrangement? I am aware that I am unlikely to do this, for reasons that could reasonably be labelled laziness. I, at least, can seldom stretch my comprehension beyond a sentence. I do not think that my attempt is very successful (even though it doesn’t need to be very successful; somewhat successful would be sufficient), but why not? I do not think that we would have got bored, though we do get bored of many things. Is this interesting? I was going to say that the way in which the book is written transforms its contents, or the context of the contents, changing our experience of the contents from what it would otherwise have been. In any case, you will find Alphabetical Diaries funny, tender, poignant, and certainly good company (or maybe it’s the author who is good company). In presenting Heti’s thoughts non-temporally arranged, the book resembles a personality, which is also a phenomenon non-temporally arranged, similarly expressed from sequentially lived experience. Is this an interesting way to proceed? It is, however, difficult to determine by what principle our memories are organised, if they can be said to be organised at all, or, if they are organised, whether they are organised by a principle, if it is not impossible to be organised without a principle of organisation. It presents that which it organises without imposing a meaning or context that would dictate or influence our understanding. Living, I suppose, is a forwardly propulsive phenomenon, temporally speaking, and reading also is forwardly propulsive wherever it lands upon a text. Memories appear to be associatively organised, which is what could be called a slippery principle of organisation, or a soft principle of organisation. Memory, however, is not forwardly propulsive. Now I will put all my sentences into alphabetical order. Otherwise the knowledge that the method will in due course be applied to it may influence the writing of the text. Perhaps there is a quantum length of text at which alphabetisation reveals repetitions, patterns, tendencies that might otherwise not be noticed (that is to say, in a shorter text). Perhaps, though, the alphabetical method, if we can call it a method, only really works if the author of the text to which it is applied is unaware of its future application to the text. Plot is as artificial in texts as it is in our lives. Reading would not be reading if it didn’t have propulsion. Really it is the having of memories that is associatively organised and perhaps not the memories themselves, if there are such things as memories that are separate from the having of them, which  I doubt (though it is hard to say where memories come from if there are not). Really, the alphabetisation of the sentences is an editorial intervention that is more part of the process of reading than of writing. Surprising results are only surprising if we are surprised by them. The alphabetisation dictates how we access the text. The alphabetisation is a morselisation of the writing and has much in common with the way in which we access memory, which also appears in morsels. The book in many ways is a celebration of the sentence because the sentence is the form preserved or foregrounded by the alphabetisation. The sentence is an optimum unit of interest. This is interesting. This makes me want to apply Heti’s alphabetical method to pre-existing works of literature to see what the method may reveal about them once they are liberated from their traditionally temporal arrangement. Time is a harder principle of organisation than association but it is a softer principle than alphabetisation. Time is almost as soft a principle as association. We must free ourselves from plot. We used to read sections of the Alphabetical Diaries when they appeared online about a year ago in The New York Times back when we subscribed to The New York Times, largely, in the end, to read the Alphabetical Diaries. We would read the latest instalment of the Alphabetical Diaries aloud in bed each Sunday morning, alternating the reading so that we could also drink coffee while reading the Alphabetical Diaries. We would still happily be reading instalments of The Alphabetical Diaries in bed on Sunday mornings if the alphabet and our subscription to The New York Times had not run out at pretty much the same time. Why do I present all my ideas, if they can be said to be ideas, as questions? Will my review obscure the book it addresses in the way my reviews typically obscure the books they address? Would it be possible to write a review of this book in the way that the book itself is written, alphabetising the sentences in the review? Would such a review illuminate the book in a way that adds something to our, or my at least, understanding of it? You might think that reading someone else’s diary entries, especially when they are presented without a diary’s traditional organising principle, would become boring if it did not start out boring, but Heti’s sentences are compelling, compoundingly so, either because she has interesting thoughts; or because her thoughts, vulnerabilities, longings and so forth are entirely relatable, if that is not too nauseating a term, even if they are not interesting per se; or because boredom is a temporal phenomenon that has been excluded or bamboozled by the form. 

A puzzle, he said, noticing that I was attempting a rather easy and common sort of puzzle, one which I nonetheless was finding challenging, possibly due to the fact that he was observing me, a puzzle I was in any case doing only to fill in the time as I waited for him to stop talking, a puzzle is a poor sort of puzzle because everyone recognises it as a puzzle, he said, unlike language, which is a stronger sort of puzzle because it is not obvious whether it is a puzzle or not. I knew better than to ask him what he meant by this statement, partly because I didn’t really want to encourage him to deliver one of his long-winded explanations but mainly because I knew that once he had made a statement like that he would deliver one of his long-winded explanations whether he was asked to explain it or not; it seemed not to occur to him that any long-winded explanation delivered by him might not be received with the enthusiasm with which it was delivered. At least it was good to see him enthusiastic. He had just finished reading Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Parade, and was now, it seemed, ready to explain it to me, although not yet having finished it had not stopped him explaining it to me as he was reading it, or at least from frequently exclaiming about it in such a way that was not sufficiently coherent to pass as an explanation, not that his explanations were in themselves generally in any case coherent. Parade, he explained, splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distil, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations (here he made that irritating gesture in the air with both hands about and throughout the phrase as if to indicate that if anybody were to transcribe the phrase they should put it in inverted commas (even though italics would be to my mind more appropriate)), the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the intimate and societal scales, or so he said. Parade, he said, continued Cusk’s project of the ‘Outline Trilogy’, of withdrawing the narratorial involvement from the novel, sometimes perfecting an entirely non-participatory, characterless ‘we’, without assuming, or presuming, really, access to the minds of any of the characters other than as evidenced by their actions or their words. “To see without being seen: there was no better definition of the artist’s vocation,” he read suddenly from a place he had marked in the book. Cusk achieves a wonderfully clean and perfectly flat style, he said, achieving an impeccable neutrality, almost an anonymity, on the most passionate and involving subjects, reporting conversations without contributing to them, but from a near perspective, like the parent in the novel filming her child in the school play so closely and so exclusively that, at least in her representation of it, the play itself made no sense other than that contingent upon the performance of her child. “Pure perception that involves no interaction, no subjectivity, reveals the pathos of identity,” he read again, or had memorised, or was pretending to read or to have memorised in order to give his opinions more authority. There is no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive, he shouted, I think now lost to his own metastasising speculations, at best only barely suppressed, no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive other than as they exist in language! There are no persons, no characters, he said, and I think he was referring to our lived reality as much as to the book that he had read. It reminds me, he said, calming a little, of Nathalie Sarruate's Planetarium, in that persons are unimportant or are at least shown to be entirely constructed by phrases and thoughts and attitudes clustering together and adhering to each other, a phenomenon that is more the province of language than a property of any living actuality. Again, the impulses, motivations and attitudes that may or may not exist in the unconscious, so to call it, he said, or in the preconscious, and we cannot say anything about these states, which cannot be said even to be states because to do so would be to make them or at least their existence to some extent conscious, he claimed, these impulses, motivations and attitudes require and are also formed by the language that is used to express them in order to be expressed. Was he even making sense, I wondered, but he did not pause, seemingly untroubled by such a possibility. Cusk’s practice, kicking away the novelistic crutches, so to call them, he said, removing the distractions of plot, the illusions of character, or at least by demonstrating that plot is a distraction and character an illusion, helps us to see more clearly, to be both present and not present, both involved and uninvolved, both when reading a novel and when reading our own lives, for want of a better term to call them. Language contains the inclinations, he said, that we usually and by mistake apply to persons. I suppose that this is what he may have meant when he spoke of language being a puzzle of a stronger sort, but he did not give me a chance to ask him this. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels, he continued, and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction, Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. I exercised my concentration, finished my rather easy and common sort of puzzle, which at least was readily identifiable as a puzzle, and left the room despite his continuing explanation. 

“People are individuals and fully entitled to their individuality, though they first must be brought into an acceptance of it.” If I write more of this it will mean nothing, but this does not stop me sitting at my little desk, here in the hall of our apartment, writing away each night after the others have gone to sleep. The clock in the sitting room slices away the seconds with each swing of its pendulum; the seconds, the minutes, the hours, each moment a decapitation of all that I have written, these sentences just as deserving of being considered shavings from my pencil as the shavings that accumulate at my page-side. Which is the better monument to my labour? It is hard to begin to write, but I am one who believes that beginning to write is possible, perhaps with superhuman effort, or with effort that is human if superhuman effort is not attainable by humans, but I do not believe that it is possible to bring writing to completion, and so I complete nothing. Not that it is not easy to stop; nothing could be easier. Anyone who writes has an equal ability to stop writing; though the ability to write may be very unequally distributed, to stop writing is within the reach of all. Why then, if stopping is so easy, do so many writers not improve the quality of their work by availing themselves more often of this common ability? If a good writer is one who manages not to write bad books, a reasonable definition, then, and I state this without conceit, though I complete nothing I am a better writer than many writers more famous than me. If it is possible to begin and possible to stop but impossible to complete, at least for me who does not believe in the possibility of completion and who does not believe that the world contains completion, only beginnings and stoppings, what is produced by all this writing? I produce nothing but fragments. I believe in nothing but fragments. Even the great sheaf of pages that I call The Proceedings is a fragment, an interminable fragment, uncompletable, and I would rather this is burned after my death than turned into a work by an editor or executor, no matter how well-intentioned. Will there come a day, perhaps a hundred years from now, when the fragment is recognised as a literary form in itself, perhaps the only literary form, the only form that can approach the truth, no matter that it limps in its approach. The smaller the fragment, then, the more perfectly it expresses its inability to be anything other than a fragment, but how shall these fragments be assembled and arranged? Fragments are best arranged in a fragmentary way. Just as dust accumulates throughout an unswept house, but more in some places than in others, such as in the space between an unclosed door and the wall against which it rests, so fragments naturally become lost within the drifts of which they are part. How shall they be found among all the other fragments in which in plain sight they are as good as lost? There is nothing lost about these lost writings. The writer and the reader are more lost than what is written, but only when they write and read. I write to be rid of myself. I write to be rid of thought. I write to be rid of what I have written but every fragment adds to this burden I write to put down. I sharpen my pencil again as the pendulum swings and add to the pile of shavings that is my more fitting legacy, the one that my executor will not hesitate to burn, should they happen to survive that long. I write as the birds begin to sing in the trees in the street below. I will not complete what I write. It is not possible to complete what I write. Whether I wish to complete what I write or not affects nothing, I will produce a fragment, but the question of whether I should strive for completion remains. I will be found where I am lost. Every opportunity is a trap, but I leap in regardless [...]

Humans have continued to evolve, he thought, by making objects that are extensions of themselves, extensions not only in a physical and practical sense but in a mental sense also. Thinking is done mainly outside my head, he thought, my memories and intentions are embodied in and enacted by the great commonwealth of objects in which I hang suspended, displacing my volume perhaps, but entirely at the mercy of objects that mediate my every experience and over which I have only very narrow and limited control. These objects grasp me more tightly than ever I could grasp them, he thought, they define the scope of my thoughts and actions, they call to each other through the qualities they share with each other, and they bind me to all the other people similarly caught in this inescapable infinite web of objects. I am caught, he thought, I am connected through objects to everyone and to everything that everyone does with any object anywhere. I am not sure that I like this. Through the objects around me, both useful and ornamental, through these objects’ connections with and similarities to other and yet other objects, I am implicated in all actions committed by all humans using objects that embody intentions, that are made for a purpose or suggest themselves as suitable for a purpose, that are available for the use of humans, that press their purpose on the minds of humans. We are all connected through objects because all objects are connected. “Everything in this damned world calls for indignation,” states the protagonist, so to call her, of Lara Pawson’s excellent little book, Spent Light. Although the ostensible scope of the book is entirely domestic and simple and small and plausibly claustrophobic, the quotidian household objects that she considers, objects that are seldom considered but merely used, reveal, by similarity, connections with objects used in and enabling acts of violence, injustice and exploitation committed on both humans and the environment anywhere in the world. A pepper mill is connected to a grenade, an egg timer is the same mechanism used to detonate a time bomb, on the toaster given to her by her disconcerting neighbour “above each light is a word printed in the same restrained font found in CIA documents. Together, they form a synopsis of the anthropocene: REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL”. Every characteristic of every thing twitches a web of association and resemblance often leading to her memories or at least knowledge of despicable actions committed with similar objects or implicated by the functions of her objects somewhere distant or else. These associations often reveal Pawson’s close observation of cruelties from her time as a war reporter in parts of the world seemingly different from but in fact not unconnected with her current rather domestic existence. But although the reader never knows when they will next be shocked by Pawson’s association of an object, an object that they very likely have themselves or which is very similar to an object that they have in their own intimate environment, with an act of cruelty, torture or genocide, an association that may change forever the way that the reader looks at their own object, the same world-wide web of objects that links us to these acts contains also associations that connect us, despite or because of the objects that we own, with others in acts of support, nurture or love; acts of support, nurture and love that are all the more angry, vital and beautiful because of the global contexts in which they must be waged. Lara Pawson, he thought, on the evidence of this book, is good company in the waging of such acts.

Boredom is a sub-optimal mode, he thinks, but it is at least a functional mode compared with the revulsion it conceals, boredom at least connects one end of the day to the other, boredom is doubtless detrimental but it is by definition tolerable, let us all hope for boredom. That is not a good way to start his review, he thinks, it has some bearing on the book but it is not a good introduction to the book. Two is a situation of stasis, he thinks, three is dynamic, three is the catalyst that reveals the harms hidden in two, the harms that mathematics suppressed mathematics reveals, or not mathematics, physics perhaps, or chemistry, more likely. This also is not a good way to start. Well, he thinks, the review is far enough through not to worry any longer about starting it, a bad start is at least a start, that is something, I can adjust the performance using the choke, or perhaps the throttle, I need to find out the difference between these two obstructions, he thinks, these two forms of respiratory impediment, our relationship with engines is a violent one, he thinks, and this thought stalls the review. There is no access to the interior save through performance, he thinks, restarting, there is perhaps only performance, who can know, a middle class couple converse, the words pass between them but also bounce off their surroundings, language is a force-field, he thinks, a sonar, and a conversation is the pattern of disturbance, the pattern of interference, produced by two emitters, or should that be transmitters, of language. In this book, he thinks, Quin reproduces, well actually produces, that disturbance, those two voices, the Ruth voice and the Leon voice, as they run together as one entity, caught on the page, as if there is anything about a novel that is not on the page. In the Ruth-and-Leon sections of the novel, these verbal slurries, that is not the word, are both Ruth’s and Leon’s, caught on the framework of descriptions as bald and precise and mundane as stage directions, they are stage directions in the past tense, so hardly directions, stage descriptions perhaps. We learn that S, a younger, working-class woman who had lived with them, has committed suicide by drowning, Quin’s fate eventually incidentally, she left a note, but they still hope it might have been an accident. Are they guilty? In S’s room they find some tapes she has recorded, and her journals, and these are transcribed, if that is the word, inscribed is more accurate perhaps but we have to play the fiction game so transcribed is the better word, in other sections of the novel, but Ruth and Leon do not find either the absolution nor the indictment they both hope for and fear in these tapes and these journals, the tapes and the journals merely complicate the picture, add other layers of performance, leave more unsaid than said. The more that is unsaid, the greater the weight of what is unsaid, the stronger its gravity, the more distorted the said, the said, even in its utter mundanity, points always at the source of its distortion. As the book progresses, though progresses is not the word, there is no progress in Quin, we read also a tape made by Ruth and a diary written by Leon as, respectively, Leon and Ruth gain access to them, they take access, if that is the way to put it. There is no progress but the tension increases, tension in the past, if that which is in the past can be said to increase, each mundanity is freighted, that is not the word, with the catalytic action of each one upon each other two, a sexual static that builds and cannot discharge but reveals ultimately the fundamental destructive incompatibility not only of Ruth and Leon but of any combination of Ruth and Leon and S, and, perhaps, of any persons whatsoever, if Quin held this misanthropic view, perhaps she did. The instance of sexual violence eventually revealed is no surprise, but its awfulness floods backwards through all that precedes it in the book. Boredom is all that holds the horrible at bay, but the horrible is no less horrible for that. 

“A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses.” Upon entering the room of her apartment that had been inhabited by her maid, the narrator is frightened by a large cockroach emerging from the wardrobe and shuts the door upon it. This act of violence creates a bond of association between the two, a bond which language-based thought is not able to withstand, and, as the narrator looks into the face of the cockroach and at the white paste that oozes from its fatal wound, she becomes indistinguishable from the cockroach and indeed from all life, she becomes what she terms 'neutral', not individuated by the spurious but 'useful' concepts of identity and time. "Until the moment of seeing the roach I'd always had some name for what I was living, otherwise I wouldn't get away. To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona." Her mental disintegration is both a symptom of and an escape from life traumas that are barely hinted at (an abortion, a lost lover), and her experience with the cockroach entails a relinquishment of everything she had thought of as herself. The ecstatic and the horrific cannot be distinguished from one another. Only thinking and the use of language can keep this reality at bay. "I was abandoning my human organisation — to enter that monstrous thing that is my living neutrality." But, of course, the relation of her experience is in itself a feat of language: perhaps it is through the failure of language to reach further that the edges of experience that the shape of experience may be conveyed. "Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. ... The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language."  After slowing time down with great austerity in the first two thirds of the novel, Lispector has her narrator progress into a delirium of religious and metaphorical ravings, which, for me, demonstrates how 'profundity' (as so precisely and compellingly delineated in the first part) has no certain point of delineation from madness (though I am not entirely sure that this was the author's intention (and I must say that the novel lost my unreserved admiration at this point)). The novel, and the narrator's identification with the cockroach, culminates in the narrator taking into her mouth, as a kind of communion, some of the crushed insect's innards.

“Art is always an overreaction,” writes Yoko Tawada in her lithe and compact novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky); this statement being in itself an overstatement, as all statements are overstatements. Did we not learn at school, he pondered, that every overreaction provokes an equal and opposite overreaction, that the impact of each overstatement causes another overstatement to leap out at the end of the line, and so forth back and forth until the Newton’s cradle of the mind is finally still if it ever can be still. Does any movement towards certainty destroy the very certainty towards which it moves? Is that for which we reach inevitably destroyed by the reaching? This is no way to start a review, he thought; in his search for clarity he has produced a wash of vague sensations barely distinguishable from life itself, so to call it, a fractality of precisions more complicated than disorder; what is literature for, after all, if not to make life more wieldable, or our thinking about it more wieldable at least? No such luck. If the words for things can be used as substitutes for things, they are subject to linguistic forces and relations to which the things themselves are not subject. There’s an illness in all of this, a linguistic illness, or an illness of consciousness, that blurs, ultimately, or penultimately, or by something preceding the penultimate by one or several or many steps, the distinctions between words and their objects and between words and other words, a blurring that allows for or entails the febrile reconfiguration of language into new forms, he was going to write new and less useful forms, but the utility of language is no measure of its other functions (its other pathologies, he almost wrote). The narrator of Tawada’s novel refers to himself as ‘the patient’ and refers to himself in the third person (“third person is a form of salvation” (as we know)) and gives an account of the stayings-in and goings-out that are constrained by the vagaries of his illness and the vagaries of the illness of the world at large, if these are not one and the same: “The patient leaves the house as seldom as possible, and every time he is forced to go out, he first checks to see if the coast is clear. The coast is seldom clear, hardly ever.” If he ever does go out. He meets and befriends one Leo-Eric Fu, who shares with Patrik (Patrik is the name attached by others to the one who calls himself the patient; the patient's name as he approaches the collective world (plausibly a kind of healing (“A person who can continue to distance himself from home, one step farther each day, is no longer a patient.”))) a love and knowledge of the work of Paul Celan, a poet who made from German, a language broken by the trauma of hosting the Holocaust, a new language of beauty and possibility made entirely of the marked, traumatised and broken pieces of that language, and with whose work this novel is a form of conversation (please note that it is not necessary to the appreciation of the novel to be familiar with the other pole of that conversation, though the novel may lead a reader towards that pole). For the patient it is, we assume from the deliberately inconclusive evidence, the trauma of the Covid 19 pandemic that has broken language, either because of the collective circumstances in which he finds himself or also because he himself is actually in addition to metaphorically ill. I am not unfamiliar, he thought, as he attempted to continue with what was intended as a review but was suffering from an illness which made it both not really a review and very hard to sustain, with the linguistic deliria induced by fever, with the disintegrative and recombinatory compulsions that reveal something about language and are in fact structurally inherent in language but usually suppressed for reasons of utility or ‘health’. Any illness will remake language, given the chance to spread. In the delirium of the novel, the patient’s illness (“an autoimmune disorder of the mind”) attacks the distinctions between the binaries it posits: isolation/connection, illness/health, internal/external, uncertainty/comprehension, experience/identity; and attacks all borders generally: those between persons individually and those set between groups and nations. There are no contradictions. “People say I'm sick because I can simultaneously leave the house and stay home.” The forms of thought that gave rise to the illness, whatever it is, are broken and remade: “I prefer a not-yet-knowing or a no-longer-knowing to actual knowledge. These are the fields in which I'll find my role.” It is possible, even probable, he thought, that the entire book takes place within the patient’s head, if such a place exists (“What if Leo-Eric isn't really sitting here and this is all just taking place in my imagination?”), although, towards the end, the Patrik-impulse begins to gain a little ground from the patient-impulse, and the possibility that the idea of Patrik and also the ideas of Patrik could exist in the minds of others begins at last to emerge. Language, ravaged by trauma and isolation, begins to adopt new forms. Is this healing? Illness, we begin to see, is entangled in time: “The present is a constant deferment.”

Well, he thought, I am not travelling on a bus in Paris, and, who knows, I may never travel on a bus in Paris, but, in the company of Lauren Elkin, even though I have not met Lauren Elkin, and, who knows, I will probably never meet Laren Elkin, I have no particular wish or need to meet Lauren Elkin, at least not in the conventional sense, and, almost certainly, Lauren Elkin will never meet me in any sense whatsoever, and she will be missing nothing thereby, nonetheless, in a sense, in her company I have been riding in my thoughts, or, rather, her thoughts, it is hard to tell which, as she has been travelling on the No.91 and No.92 buses in Paris over a few months in 2014/2015, when she was commuting to and from some teaching position she then held, evidently teaching literature, possibly writing, who knows, and wrote the notes which have become this book on her cellphone, as an attempt to use her phone to connect herself to the moments and in the locations in which she was holding it, rather than as a way of absenting herself from those locations and those moments, which is usually the way with cellphones, so she observes, they are a technology of absence, after all. Unlike in the bus, where who will sit and who will stand is constantly negotiated on the basis of a generally unspoken hierarchy of need, and the passengers are crammed together in each other’s odours and in each other’s breaths in a way that now seems horrific, there is plenty of fresh air in Elkin’s thoughts, there is room both for her fellow passengers, for all the details Elkin notices about them or speculates about them, for all her observations, so to call them, about what she notices and about what she notices about herself in the act of noticing, and for writers such as Georges Perec and Virginia Woolf, who, in their ways, are along for the ride, using Elkin and her cellphone to speak to us through Paris, though whether this makes Paris a medium or a subject is hard to say, using Elkin’s bus pass, too, and, I suppose, he thought, all these thoughts are waiting there, both outside and already aboard Elkin’s mind, constantly negotiating which will be next to take a seat in Elkin’s text on the basis of a generally unspoken hierarchy of need, if it is need. Elkin attempts in the practice of these notes a written appreciation of the ordinary, even the infraordinary, aspects of her journeys as a discipline of noticing, guided by Perec, a turning outward that clears her thoughts or clears her of her thoughts, he cannot decide if there is a difference, he thinks not, leaving the shape of the observer clearly outlined in their surroundings by their careful lack of intrusion upon them (in the way that Perec is always writing about something that he does not mention), but this exercise in finding worth in the ordinary, the sensate, the unsensational, against, he speculates, the general inclinations of our cellphones, is, in the two semesters in which Elkin made these notes, sometimes intruded upon by occurrences antagonistic to such appreciation, occurrences both within Elkin’s body: an ectopic pregnancy and the resulting operations; and in the collective body of the city: terror attacks that change the texture of communal life. “In an instant, the everyday can become an Event,” writes Elkin. Are Events inherently antagonistic to the worth of ordinary life, he wonders, or could rethinking the ordinary help us to resist the impact of such Events? Most Events are instants, he thinks, but some, such as pandemics or climate change or neoliberal capitalism, go on and on, exhausting our conceptual resistance as they strive to become the new ordinary, to normalise themselves. Conceptual resistance is useless, he almost shouts, conceptual resistance is worse than useless, we must adapt to survive, reality deniers display the worst sorts of mental weakness, pay attention, your nostalgia is an existential threat! He checks his mouth for froth, but there is none. But, he wonders, can we use an attention to and appreciation of the infraordinary to reconstruct the ordinary and thereby survive the extraordinary? Actually, the infraordinary is all we’ve got, he thinks, so we had better get to work and make of it what we can.  

So, what makes you want to write a review of David Shields’s new book, The Very Last Interview? 

Then why are you writing one?

Every week? Whose idea was that?   

Surely at your age, you shouldn’t be so bound by obligation or by expectation, or whatever you call it?

Yes, but do you really care what these readers might think, and do you even believe that there are such people? Aren’t you being altogether a bit precious? 

Do you really think that this helps to pay the mortgage, I mean that this makes a direct and measurable contribution towards paying your mortgage? Or even an indirect and unmeasurable but still valuable contribution towards paying your mortgage? 

Well, what else would you be doing?

Surely you’re joking? 

Okay, we’ve got a bit off the track there. I will reframe my first question. What makes you think that you are able to write a review of David Shields’s new book? 

Don’t you think your humility is a bit mannered?

The Very Last Interview is a book consisting entirely of questions that interviewers have asked David Shields over the years, omitting his answers, assuming he will have answered probably at least most of the questions, and your review, if we can call it that, of this book also consists of a series of questions ostensibly directed at you but without your answers, if indeed there were answers, which is less certain in your case than in the case of David Shields. Is this, on your part, a deliberate choice of approach, and, if so, is it justifiable? 

Do you really believe that a review written in imitation of, or in the style of, the work under review inherently reveals something about that work, even if the review is badly written, or should your approach rather be attributed to laziness, stylistic insecurity, or creative bankruptcy? 

Has it ever occurred to you that the supposedly more enjoyable qualities of your writing are actually nothing more than literary tics or affectations, and, furthermore, that it might be these very literary tics and affectations that prevent you from writing anything of real literary worth? 

Do you think that, by removing his input into the original interviews but retaining the questions, David Shields is attempting to remove himself from his own existence, or merely to show that our identities are always imposed from outside us rather than from inside, or that we exist as persons only to the extent that we are seen by others? Is this, in fact, all the same thing? 

What do you mean by that statement, ‘We are defined by the limits we present to the observations of others’?

What do you mean by that statement ‘There is no such thing as writing, only editing,’ and how does that relate to Shields’s work? 

Do you think that David Shields, in this book as in the much-discussed 2010 Reality Hunger, sees the individual as an illusion, a miserable fragment of what is actually a ‘hive mind’ or collective consciousness, and that ‘creativity’, so to call it, is another illusion predicated on this illusion of individuality?

You don’t? What, then?

What do you think David Shields would have answered, when asked, as he was, seemingly in this book, “But what is the role of the imagination in this ‘post-literature literature’ that you envision?” and how might this differ from the answer you might give if asked the same question? 

Shields was asked if he had written anything that couldn’t be interpreted as ‘crypto-autobiography’, but don’t you think the salient question is whether it is even possible to write anything that couldn’t be interpreted as crypto-autobiography? 

Is a perfectly delineated absence, such as David Shields approximates in The Very Last Interview, in fact the most perfect portrait of a person, even the best possible definition of a person, as far as this is possible at all? 

But do you actually have a personal opinion on this? 

Do you think then that you, like Shields, like us all perhaps, are, in essence, a ghost?

How does a word reveal its meaning at the same moment as it becomes strange to us, he wondered. Or should that be the other way round, how does a word become strange to us at the same moment as it reveals its meaning. Same difference, though he was a little surprised. No closer to an answer in any case. Words, experiences, thoughts, the same principle seems to apply, he thought, or certainly its inverse, or complement, or opposite, or whatever. Familiarity suppresses meaning, he thought, the most familiar is that for which meaning is the least accessible, for which meaning has been obscured by wear until a point of comprehensibility has been attained, a point of dullness and comfort, a point of functional usefulness, if that is not a tautology, a point of habituation sufficient for carrying on with whatever there is to which we are inclined to carry on, if there is any such thing to which we are so inclined. Perhaps ‘meaning’ is not the right word. Or ‘strange’. Or the others. I should maybe start again and use other words, or other thoughts, or both, he thought. All philosophical problems can be solved by changing the meanings of the words used to express them, he had somewhere read, or written, or, more dangerously, both. All that is not the same or not exactly the same as to say that the simplest thing carries the most meaning but is too difficult to think about so we complicate it until we can grasp it in our thoughts, at the moment that its meaning is lost, the moment of comprehension, he thought. Again this strange use of the word ‘meaning’, whatever he meant by that, he was no longer sure. The everyday is that to which we are most habituated, that of which we are the most unaware, or the least aware, if this is not the same thing, to help us to survive the stimulation, he thought, a functional repression of our compulsion to be aware, but this comes at the cost of existing less, of being less aware, of becoming blind to those things that are either the simplest or the most important to us or both. Our dullness stops us being overwhelmed, awareness being after all not so much rapture as terror, not that there was ever much difference. Life denuminised, that is not the word, flat. How then to regain the terrible paradise of the instant, awareness, without risking lives or sanity? How to produce the new and be produced by it? These are not the same question but each applies. They are possibly related. Perhaps now, he thought, I should mention this book, Bordering on Miraculous, a collaboration between poet Lynley Edmeades and painter Saskia Leek, as there appear to be some answers here or, if not answers, related effects that you could be forgiven for mistaking for answers even though there are no such things as answers. Near enough. Poetry seems sometimes capable, as often here, of briefly reinstating awareness, as does the discipline of painting, as does the presence of a baby as it simultaneously wipes your mind. And alters time. What a relief, at least temporarily, to lose what made you you, he thought, or remembered, or imagined that he remembered. What a relief to be only aware of that which is right now pressing itself upon you, or aware only, though only aware is the more precise choice. “Which is more miracle: the things / moving through the sky or the eyes that move / to watch them” asks the poet, looking at a baby looking, he assumes. Such simplicities, the early noticings of babies, infant concepts, are the bases of all consciousness, he ventured, all our complexities are built on these. The first act of comprehension, he thought, is to divide something from that which it is not. “A border is / as a border does.” This book, the poems and the paintings in this book, continually address this primal impulse to give entities edges or to bring forth entities through their edges. All knowledge is built from this ‘bordering’, he thought, but it is always fragile, arbitrary, subject to the possibility of revision, more functional than actual. The second act of comprehension is to associate something with something that it is not (“One cannot help but make associations,” the poet writes), but it is never clear to what extent such associations are inherent in the world or to what extent they are mental only, the result of the impulse to associate, he thought. Not that this matters. Everything is simultaneously both separating and connecting, it is too much for us to sustain, we would be overwhelmed, we reach for a word, for an image, for relief. We pacify it with a noun. To some extent. To hold it all at bay. But also perhaps to invite the onslaught, he wondered, perhaps, he thought, the words release what the words hold back, perhaps these words can reconnect while simultaneously holding that experience at bay. Not that that makes any sense, or much. “One / cannot help but make / nouns,” the poet writes, but there is always this tension, he thinks, between accomplishment and insufficiency in language, never resolved, the world plucking at the words and vice-versa: “Something is there that doesn’t love a page.” “It is this kind of ordinary straining / that makes the margins restless.” The most meaningful is that which reaches closest to the meaninglessness that it most closely resembles. He has thought all this but his thoughts have not been clear, he has lost perhaps the capacity to think, not that he ever had such a capacity other than the capacity to think he had it. He feels perhaps he has not been clear but this beautiful book by Edmeades and Leek is clear, these poems and these paintings address the simplest and most difficult things, the simplest are the most difficult, and vice-versa, this conversation, so to call it, between a poet and a painter, reaches down to the bases of their arts, he thought, to the primalities of consciousness, have I made that word up, a gift to us from babies, perhaps the babies we once were. It is not as if we ever escape the impulses we had as babies. A baby comes, the world is changed. “Goodbye to a future / without this / big head / in it.”

You’re soaking in it, he thought, not for the first time. Could he quote David Hume, he wondered, and say, All there is is detail and anything else is conjecture, no, he could not quote Hume, at least not accurately, with that particular sequence of words, though of course he could not be certain that Hume did not say or think such a thing. The thought stands though, he thought, or the words that seemed at least to him to convey the thought, not that anyone reading the words would be in a position to judge the distance, if any distance is possible, between the thought and the words he wrote, but this is a whole other story and already he had come unfortunately quite far from that about which he purposed to write, he carefully wrote. All there is is detail, actually, he qualified deliberately, and we use these details to construct the sad narratives of our lives, or happy narratives, why not, though it would be more accurate to say that the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, neurology will back me up on this, he thought, no footnotes forthcoming, the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, he wrote, living and reading are not so different after all, the damage or whatever to the brain is the same whatever other harms may be avoided. Reality is produced by our failure to reach the actual, he wrote, but who he wondered could he pin this quote on. Anybody’s guess. A novel is more or less full of details, if there’s such a thing as more than full, in fact literature is all detail of one sort or another, supposedly all relevant and chosen by the authority, the reader has no business to think that there’s anything more, but also, he thought, no business to think that there isn’t anything more, in any case in the world of detail that we’re soaking in we assume there is more than those morsels of which we are aware, though in fact there may not be and no experiment can relieve us of this possibility, how claustrophobic, but let us assume for the sake of argument, if you want an argument, or for the sake of the opposite of claustrophobia, whatever that is, agoraphobia perhaps, the terrifying infinitude of possibility from which we protect ourselves with stories, to not be overwhelmed, that if we could let down our stories just for a moment we could expose ourselves to other details, unstoried or unstoried-as-yet, which could support quite other stories and all that attaches to those, or whatever. For three days in October in 1974 Georges Perec challenged himself to *merely observe* whatever passed before him in Saint-Sulpice, recording his observations as fast as he could write, except for when he was ordering coffee or Vichy water or Bourgueil. Observing without presupposing a story gives an equivalence to all details, the oridinary and what Perec calls the infraordinary are full participants in a thoroughly democratic ontology, every detail shines with significance even if it signifies nothing beyond its own existence. Almost it is as hard a discipline to stop a story suggesting itself as it is to suspend the stories we bring, although, I suppose, he thought, any story that suggests itself is in fact a story I have somehow brought with me even if I was unaware that I had it on board, which is interesting, he thought, in itself. No conjectures! Of course Perec cannot write fast enough, time, whatever that is, moves on or whatever it is that it does, the moment is torn away before he can catch much of it, the limits of his capacities affect his ability to observe, he is overwhelmed by his task but not destroyed so not in fact overwhelmed, so many details are suppressed by practicality, there must be some story taking place, the story of the observing I, of the capacities and the limitations that make up Georges Perec perhaps. Why these details and not other details given that we generally assume there to be a limitless amount of details *out there*, are we to conclude that every attempt at objectivity is autobiography, someone’s story, by necessity, at best. Subjectivity is a product of time, he thought, or produces time, whatever that is, the progression of our attention through a certain set of details, the constraining force that suppresses all but the supporting details, the readable details or at least the ones that we read, in either literature or life, the subjectivity that burdens us with personhood and other what we could call spectres of the temporal. He couldn’t get all the infraordinary down, he wrote, referring to Perec, Perec made an attempt at exhausting a place in Paris but his attempt was doomed to fail, just as it was revealing possibilities which made it a success it failed, due to time, due to the particular set of limitations that passes in this instance for Perec, he couldn’t get more of the infraordinary down without stopping time, without removing himself or at least seeming to, without taking a place, a small place, perhaps of necessity a fictional place but I’m not sure of this, without taking a place and truly exhausting it, stopping time, recording every infraordinary detail and watching them vibrate with the potential for unrealised story, without in other words sitting down and writing, soon after writing this book, his masterwork of detail, Life, A User’s Manual, he wrote.

She has come back to Australia to clear out her father’s house following his death. Her father was a hoarder so his house is very full. Of many sorts of things. Some of the contents are decaying. Some of the contents are carefully ordered. Others not ordered at all. Carefully disordered, even, if this is possible. This is what remains of her father; her memories of him cannot be untangled from the foibles she now perceives in herself. They are not dissimilar. Or were not dissimilar. Being similar. She thinks of herself as an artist; that is to say, she is therefore an artist, and others also think of her as an artist. Her art doesn’t sound particularly good, but it takes up a lot of her time. Which is something. I suppose she makes art in which other people can perceive the qualities that they look for in art, not that these are related to the qualities she herself perceives in her art, particularly, not that it matters. She is most well-known, not that she is well-known, for a three-person piece of student performance art about their anorexia, a piece that was misperceived, or rather misdetermined, if there is such a word, by others, who assumed conceptual dominion, if that is not too strong a word, over it, which, I suppose, is the anorectic predicament. The person who most misdetermined the work was their tutor, her one-time and seemingly enduring art mentor, so to call him, now a gallerist, whom she badly wants to impress or make use of, which is the same thing, despite his dubious qualities and ludicrous name, or because of them. She wants to make another work, her own work, about anorexia, and to call it ‘Wall’, a work this time determined by her, but she doesn’t know how to do this; perhaps this is impossible, perhaps a self-determined work could never say anything much about anorexia. Anyway, she has come back to Australia and had the idea of making the entire contents of her father’s house into an artwork, not the anorectic artwork, transporting, sorting and displaying it in a gallery. This has been done before, however, so it is not exactly a new idea. Also, she doesn’t have the time or the energy or the stickability to achieve it, and, in any case, it is not as if the contents of her father’s house say in themselves much about her father; rather it is the way that they are packed into the house, some of the contents carefully ordered, others not ordered at all, carefully disordered, even, if such a thing is possible, that comprise the person that was her father. And, of course, she is not dissimilar, or is similar, herself. It is not her thoughts, of which the words in this book are a fair example, that comprise her; many of these thoughts are thoughts that come to her from others, who knows where thoughts come from, detritus and happenstance; it is the bundling of the thoughts, the way they are arranged, their syntactical relationships, that comprise a person. Not that she can perceive herself as a person; she can only be perceived by others. She exists, if that is not too strong a word, only in the ideas had of her by others, as do we all, and the ideas had by others are seldom anything but misperceptions or, rather, misdeterminations, if there is such a word, or, even better, mispresumptions, there is surely no such word, at least until now, which brings us back to the anorectic predicament: what, if anything, of ourselves is not determined by others? Without the ideas that others have of her, we know, she can barely be said to exist. The words we read have ostensibly been written by her to someone, presumably her partner, back in London, and this determining ‘you’ both dominates the text and the form of her existence, so to call it, the bundling of her thoughts, therein, and is as well the mesh against which she can push herself and see what, if anything, and maybe there’s something, gets through. She has come back to Australia to clear out her father’s house. As soon as she arrives there it is obvious to her that she will never make the intended “post-war manifestation of twenty-first century anxiety on a suburban Australian scale” based on Song Dong’s famous artwork; she immediately orders a skip and begins to throw the contents of the hallway onto the lawn. By the end of the book she has only begun to enter and to clear out her father’s house; she has only begun to enter and to clear out the contents of her mind, so to call it, so bound up as it is with the foundational idea of her father, she is a hoarder just like him, a mental hoarder, and to throw the contents out onto the lawn in preparation for the skip, both the objects and the thoughts, if I can force the metaphor, not that this is a metaphor. All accumulations, things crammed into houses, thoughts crammed into minds, function in similar ways, are hoarded and dispersed in similar ways, are susceptible in similar ways to our sifting and sorting and also to our failure or refusal to sift and to sort. Jen Craig’s syntactically superb sentences are the best possible intimations of the ways in which thoughts remain stubbornly embedded in their aggregate when we attempt to bring them into the light.  

A puzzle, he said, noticing that I was attempting a rather easy and common sort of puzzle, one which I nonetheless was finding challenging, possibly due to the fact that he was observing me, a puzzle I was in any case doing only to fill in the time as I waited for him to stop talking, a puzzle is a poor sort of puzzle because everyone recognises it as a puzzle, he said, unlike language, which is a stronger sort of puzzle because it is not obvious whether it is a puzzle or not. I knew better than to ask him what he meant by this statement, partly because I didn’t really want to encourage him to deliver one of his long-winded explanations but mainly because I knew that once he had made a statement like that he would deliver one of his long-winded explanations whether he was asked to explain it or not; it seemed not to occur to him that any long-winded explanation delivered by him might not be received with the enthusiasm with which it was delivered. At least it was good to see him enthusiastic. He had just finished reading Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Parade, and was now, it seemed, ready to explain it to me, although not yet having finished it had not stopped him explaining it to me as he was reading it, or at least from frequently exclaiming about it in such a way that was not sufficiently coherent to pass as an explanation, not that his explanations were in themselves generally in any case coherent. Parade, he explained, splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distil, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations (here he made that irritating gesture in the air with both hands about and throughout the phrase as if to indicate that if anybody were to transcribe the phrase they should put it in inverted commas (even though italics would be to my mind more appropriate)), the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the intimate and societal scales, or so he said. Parade, he said, continued Cusk’s project of the ‘Outline Trilogy’, of withdrawing the narratorial involvement from the novel, sometimes perfecting an entirely non-participatory, characterless ‘we’, without assuming, or presuming, really, access to the minds of any of the characters other than as evidenced by their actions or their words. “To see without being seen: there was no better definition of the artist’s vocation,” he read suddenly from a place he had marked in the book. Cusk achieves a wonderfully clean and perfectly flat style, he said, achieving an impeccable neutrality, almost an anonymity, on the most passionate and involving subjects, reporting conversations without contributing to them, but from a near perspective, like the parent in the novel filming her child in the school play so closely and so exclusively that, at least in her representation of it, the play itself made no sense other than that contingent upon the performance of her child. “Pure perception that involves no interaction, no subjectivity, reveals the pathos of identity,” he read again, or had memorised, or was pretending to read or to have memorised in order to give his opinions more authority. There is no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive, he shouted, I think now lost to his own metastasising speculations, at best only barely suppressed, no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive other than as they exist in language! There are no persons, no characters, he said, and I think he was referring to our lived reality as much as to the book that he had read. It reminds me, he said, calming a little, of Nathalie Sarruate's Planetarium, in that persons are unimportant or are at least shown to be entirely constructed by phrases and thoughts and attitudes clustering together and adhering to each other, a phenomenon that is more the province of language than a property of any living actuality. Again, the impulses, motivations and attitudes that may or may not exist in the unconscious, so to call it, he said, or in the preconscious, and we cannot say anything about these states, which cannot be said even to be states because to do so would be to make them or at least their existence to some extent conscious, he claimed, these impulses, motivations and attitudes require and are also formed by the language that is used to express them in order to be expressed. Was he even making sense, I wondered, but he did not pause, seemingly untroubled by such a possibility. Cusk’s practice, kicking away the novelistic crutches, so to call them, he said, removing the distractions of plot, the illusions of character, or at least by demonstrating that plot is a distraction and character an illusion, helps us to see more clearly, to be both present and not present, both involved and uninvolved, both when reading a novel and when reading our own lives, for want of a better term to call them. Language contains the inclinations, he said, that we usually and by mistake apply to persons. I suppose that this is what he may have meant when he spoke of language being a puzzle of a stronger sort, but he did not give me a chance to ask him this. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels, he continued, and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction, Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. I exercised my concentration, finished my rather easy and common sort of puzzle, which at least was readily identifiable as a puzzle, and left the room despite his continuing explanation. 

The desire to understand must not be confused with the desire to know, especially in biography. Too often and too soon an accretion of facts obscures a subject, plastering detail over detail, obscuring the essential lineaments in the mistaken notion that we are approaching a definitive life. Such a life could not be understood. Instead a whittling is required, a paring from the mass of fact all but those details that cannot be separated from the subject, the details that make the subject that subject and not another, the details therefore that are the key to the inner life of the subject and the cause of all the extraneous details of which we are relieved the necessity of acquiring (unless we find we enjoy this as sport). Jaeggy, whose fictions remain as burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries, some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them, Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were all intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for Jaeggy, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. How memorably Jaeggy gives us sweet De Quincey’s bifurcation, by a mixture of inclination, reading and opium, from the world inhabited by others, his house a place of “paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust”, and poor Keats, whose “moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes,” and Schwob, with his appetite for grief tracing and retracing the arcs of his friends’ deaths towards his own. These essays are so clean and sharp that light will refract within them long after you have ceased to read, drawing you back to read them again. Is the understanding you have gained of these writers something that belongs to them? Too bad, you will henceforth be unable to shake the belief that you have gained some access to their inner lives that has been otherwise denied.

“Who eats in a cage? Or with a caged mouth?” There is either writing or not-writing (even though not-writing may be as specific concerning what is not written as writing is concerning what is), and the dividing line between the two is not so much a wall as a cliff, an inequality more effective than a barrier. Anne Boyer’s collection of prose poems, Garments Against Women, is everywhere alert to the ways in which the world as experienced by those who live in it is riven by inequalities. Those who wield a power or who benefit from the wielding of that power have little perceptual overlap with those upon whom that power is wielded or who suffer from the wielding of that power, but, interestingly, the advantaged live in a world of more restricted truth, even though the disadvantaged may feel the effects of this restriction. This asymmetry acts as a constraint upon those to whom falls more heavily the burden of existing, “lives diminished by the arrangement of the world,” their time forced into objects and taken from them by what is termed an ‘economic system’. Boyer’s poems interrogate her relationship with objects, for instance the garments she sews or that she buys from thrift shops: “the fabric still contains the hours of the lives.” Can these hours have their value restored? For whose benefit have these hours been put into objects? If “writing is the manufacture of impossible desires,” can we write of or read of objects without involving ourselves in the mechanisms by which time is taken asymmetrically from workers? Is it possible for an object to not exist except as a vicarious object, “an object which exists only as it might exist to another”? Are all objects more vicarious than not? “I am the dog who can never be happy because I am imagining the unhappiness of other dogs,” writes Boyer. How it is possible to write, even to imagine writing, even if one had the time to write, without writing ‘garments’ that are designed by and are to the benefit of those who have confined ‘writing’ in the narrow world of their advantage? Whose roles must be challenged and overhauled? “I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping", writes Boyer, an self-described “addict of denial”, in the poem ‘A Woman Shopping’. “It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing.” Everyone is smothered by their role: “If a woman has no purse we will imagine one for her.” “Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing,” but the real struggle is “not between actor and actor. It’s between actors and the stage.” Boyer’s poems provide subtle and often surprising insights into the relationships between individuals and their roles, desires and scripts, personal and societal misfortunes, struggle and survival, despair and surprising joy. Can writing effect real change? “I thought to have a name was to become an object,” writes Boyer. “I thought I was a charlatan. I was mistaken. I was not a charlatan, I was a search term.”

The background in a painting of Pierre Bonnard often assumes more importance than the foreground, overwhelming the subject with the force of greater light and colour. Bonnard’s work, according to critic Roberta Smith, is remarkable for “the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures.” Gabriel Josipovici’s subtle, disconcerting and remarkable novel, Contre-Jour: A triptych after Pierre Bonnard, is written in a similar way, against the light, a work of obsessive background that at once conceals and reveals its subject. The first and longest of the three sections of the novel is addressed bitterly by a young woman to her estranged mother, lamenting that she was forced to leave the family house, pushed out of the all-consuming relationship between her mother and her father, an artist who obsessively works to turn life into art, making him a passive but controlling observer, sketching and painting everything around him and draining them of autonomy and meaning. “‘Nothing stands still, nothing opens itself to our gaze but always retreats, vanishes, turns into something else,’” the daughter reads in her father’s notebook. The daughter returns again and again to the moment when she realised her exclusion from her parents’ relationship, when, as a child, she came into the bathroom where her mother was lying in the bath and noticed her father in the corner sketching, excluding her by his gaze. “Though your eyes are open,” she accuses her mother, “ and you must have seen me, you did not react to my presence. But perhaps you didn’t see me. Perhaps it is only in my memory that your eyes are open.” In one moment, which was no different perhaps from many other moments (incidentally, Bonnard repeatedly painted his wife Marthe de Méligny in the bath after they moved from Paris to the south of France in 1939 and before her death in 1942), in a moment that was merely an iteration of an obsessively repeated super-moment, the daughter realises that “it was not possible for the three of us to be together.” Could this moment, so like so many other moments, have been different? “Should a word have been said then, by me, by you, by him, which, unsaid, made all speech between us impossible ever after?” The gaze that binds her parents into the relationship from which art is produced, the relationship that excludes all else, is the gaze that nullifies the daughter. “And do you know what that made me feel? Not just that I was not wanted, but that I did not exist, I had never existed and I would never exist.” The words come “as if I had nothing to do with the words I speak to you. As if there were not spoken by me but to me or at me or in me. In my head. In my mouth. Wherever it is that words resound. In some space or place where words resound.” The daughter realises that the gaze simultaneously sustains and nullifies its object, her mother, and that the mother’s complicity in the obsessively visual relationship was a way of destroying both herself and monopolising her husband. “When you turned your face to the wall and cried he sat there in the corner sketching.” Obsession defers depression. “What you wanted, I think, as time went by, was to disappear entirely, to efface yourself from his presence. There was something that was killing you in his even-handed depiction of everything around him.” The second section of the novel is addressed by the mother to the daughter, whom she blames for their estrangement, and with whom she has many times attempted contact. “I have written you letters and posted them at the corner of the street. Why do you never reply?” The mother is stricken by the impossibility of a relationship with her daughter, impossibility within herself as much as in the daughter or the situation: “Where does it come from, this love one is supposed to give?” In the same way that the father has written in his notebook, of his art, “I want my people to be bathed in time as the impressionists bathed them in light,” the novel shows its characters overwhelmed by the temporal medium in which everything takes place, and the characters are depicted not so much against light (contre-jour) as against time (contre-temps). “You wake up and things have changed but you know that things have been changing for a long time,” the mother says. Despite the capturing of moments (“When he is not sketching me I wonder if I am really there.”), or perhaps because of this, time is always the overwhelming, unresolvable problem. “‘How to paint what happens when nothing happens?’ he used to say. I knew what he meant,” the mother says. “Nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens and all of a sudden there is a whole life gone and you realise that all those nothings were in fact everything.” The mother tells of a visit to her daughter’s apartment, which went so improbably well that we begin to suspect what is eventually manifestly the truth: the daughter does not exist and has never existed. The daughter is the delusional creation of the ‘mother’, but a creation that cannot receive or return love. “Oh my daughter. Whom I never had. For whom I longed. … If I had had you all the world would have been different. Even if things had been bad between us. It would have been different if I had had a daughter. Not this great emptiness. This great silence.” Reality, without the daughter, is intolerable, and, towards the end, we learn of the reason for the move from Paris to the countryside, and for the seemingly obsessive attention given by the artist to his subject: “Why could we not go on living in a fourth floor flat? Because of the animals? No. Because I tried to jump out of the window.” The daughter, the voice of the daughter, the daughter who exists only as a voice, the voice of the entire first section of the novel (the voice who said, “I had never existed and I would never exist. … I have nothing to do with the words I speak to you. As if there were not spoken by me but to me or at me or in me. In my head. In my mouth. Wherever it is that words resound,” &c), is a product entirely of the ‘mother’s’ mind, just as it is, in turn, a product, along with the ‘mother’s’ voice, of the author’s mind (and, by extension, of the reader’s mind). If the daughter exists, to the extent that she exists, and it cannot be said that she does not exist, in the way that all fiction exists, for the saddest of reasons in the mother’s mind, what does this tell us about the author’s mind (and, by extension, the reader’s mind)? What does this tell us about the mental operations that, when not overwhelming our sanity, we call fiction? The third and last section of the novel is a very short, sad and straightforward letter from the artist informing a friend of his wife’s death. It constitutes the only ‘objective’ element in the novel.  

The idea we have of the world is inextricable from the words which could either be said to describe it or to comprise it. As children, our knowledge of objects, actions and expectations is gained concurrently with the words and phrases that, at the moment of their learning, both separate these objects, actions and expectations from the undifferentiated mass of the Unknown and incorporate them into the networked mass of social constructs we think of as our world. In the novella ‘The Book of Words’, we are presented with what at first it seems a series of childhood memories presented in relation to the words that describe them, and it is not not this. As well as being a tender reminiscence of a young girl’s life, presented in crystalline present tense with all the quirks and facets of a child’s view, increasingly we find, in the same language, the trace of something horrible, something that has erased the words that could be used to describe it. People who have featured in the narrative begin to be absent from it. Awful details appear and are, initially, quickly brushed aside or overwritten by other memories. Hints of wrongness in the world beyond the family start to insert themselves into the girl’s memories, despite her resistance to them or because of her innocence about their significance. The particles of wrongness in this novella are all the more horribly wrong for having such weights of benign quotidian detail levered upon them. Language, which builds as a child learns, cracks, distorts and fragments under trauma, as does the concept of reality that it bears. As the narrative continues, it becomes increasingly horrific, increasingly hysterical, increasingly divorced from rational sense, the language distorted and abused by the horrors that it conceals. The motto “Silence is health,” innocently mentioned early on, becomes an uncomfortable call to turn the head away from that which cannot be faced. Towards the end of the novella, as the girl is given an early birthday party (and she is much older, therefore more mentally stunted, than we had imagined) and the family flee the country after what we surmise has been a political reversal, we learn that that father has been a torturer in the old regime, his activities being described in the same tone, the child’s tone, as the innocent details of the child’s life, all the more horrific for being so described: “Once you’ve connected a body to an electrical circuit the truth comes out of it like a worm.” Although not specified, details in the text suggest the complicity of the father, apparently a Nazi post-war immigrant, in Argentina’s CIA-backed ‘Dirty War’, and in the disposal of the bodies of the ‘disappeared’. “What is sick will die out. The future belongs to us,” the father declares, in ultimate futility. What future is there, though, for the narrator, whose world of words has been so malformed by the circumstances of her upbringing? 

The inability to tell on a coldish day whether the washing you are getting in is actually still a bit damp or merely cold is a universal experience, he thought, at least among those whose experiences include getting in washing on a coldish day, which would not be saying much (‘A’ being the universal experience of those who have had the experience ‘A’) if it were not for the fact that perhaps the majority of people (in whom I am immersed and from whom I am separate) have actually had that experience. Why then, he wondered, is Amy Arnold’s book Lori & Joe the first book I have read that records this experience? And why do I find it so thrilling, he wondered, to read this account of what could be termed a fundamental existential dilemma writ small, why, in my deliberately solitary pursuit of reading this book, am I thrilled by the most mundane possible universal experience? Maybe exactly for that reason, the unexceptional experiences, the fundamental existential dilemmas writ small, are exactly those that connect us reassuringly when we are reading solitarily. What is thought like? What is my own thought like? What is the thought of others like? I am not particularly interested in what is thought, he thought, I am more interested in the way thought flows, surely that is not the word, the way thought moves on, or its shape, rather, if thought can be said to have a shape: the syntax of thought, which, after all is the principal determinant of thought, regardless of its content but also determining its content. If my primary interest is grammar, then what I want from literature is an investigation of form, an adventure or experiment in form. I think but I do not know how I think unless I write it down or unless I read the writings down of the thoughts of another in which I recognise the grammar of my own thoughts. What I think is a contingent matter, he thought. Why washing is called washing when it is in fact not washing but drying is another thing he had wondered but maybe nobody else has wondered this, he thought, it does not appear in this book but this book does not pretend to be exhaustive of all possible thoughts either explicit or implicit in quotidian experiences, though it is fairly exhaustive of all the thoughts that rise towards, and often achieve, consciousness, so to call it, in its protagonist, so to call her, Lori, who takes up her partner Joe’s morning coffee one morning just like every morning and finds him dead, not like any other morning. Lori immediately then sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells, in typical weather and mud, and the book consists entirely of a record, for want of a better word, of the pattern of her thoughts, looping themselves onto the armature of a fairly constrained present, winding twenty-five years of repetitions and irritations and unexpressed dissatisfactions, such as we all have, I suppose, he thought, memories of all those years since she and Joe came to live in the cottage, their isolation, the landscape, the weather, the routines of mundane existence, ineluctable and cumulatively painful when you think of them, their breeding neighbours, no longer neighbours but no less inerasable for that, the small compromises made when living with another that become large compromises, perhaps less conscious ones but maybe intolerably conscious ones, consciousness after all being what is intolerable, through repetition over decades, all wound over and over and around themselves and around the armature of the present, drawn repeatedly, obsessively to whatever it is that troubles Lori the most, but always turning away or aside without reaching that something, or in order not to reach that something, which remains as a gap in consciousness, unthinkable, but a gap the very shape of itself. Lori & Joe is a remarkable piece of writing that shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold shows how Lori’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies.  It reminds me, he thought, suspecting that readers of his review might respond better to a little name-dropping than to his attempts to express his own enthusiasm, of works by Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard in its fugue-like form, its musicality, so to speak, in the way that it perfectly calibrates the fractality of thought, so to term it, and he wished that he had not so termed it, upon the unremarkable slow progression of the present.

Rachel Cusk continues her project of kicking away traditional novelistic crutches to force herself and her readers to engage differently with fiction and to the ‘real world’ to which it relates. Forensic in approach and coolly crystalline in style, Parade splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distill, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations, the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the personal and societal scales. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels — and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction — Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. {Thomas}

• Read Thomas’s ‘review’.

• Knitted cathedral.

• Relentless dismantling.

• Exterminating the novel while still writing one.

• Art, violence and freedom.

• Not feeling gendered.

• Second nature.

• Striking out against conformity.

• A leap into unknown territory.

• The feminine non-state of non-being.

• Read Thomas’s reviews of the ‘Outline’ trilogy: Outline, Transit, and Kudos.

• Read our reviews of Second Place.