A strange tale with many tales, in which a man with dementia recounts, or rather, still thinks, his son, to whom he told many stories, is home again.. or still? Stories in stories, with many a famous legend glued in.
Hart Crane. Fin. The boat. The airship. Mother Rabbit and her dead son, Eldest. Yasha. The three bears....
It was sometimes difficult to get through; hardly anything is explained and I think I missed many connections and references, but a very unique book and still a good read.
What story / legend is the spider "working away in the eye of the God"? Anansi?
Houses, bodies, physical constructs, morphing into each other. Stones, words, not to keep going, but structure...
"He saw himself ready to walk out the door and walk and walk and carry himself right out of life, but somehow in his rage, his how-dare-he, he saw himself in the days to come, the days that never really came, saw himself watch his weak little son cry and struggle and break down, lose all his anger, lose all his, yes, lose all his independence, and need him, give in. He saw it as the natural centrifugal process of detachment, break nd reattach again and again, until the child spins off into adulthood. If I died, if I went to war, if I left them all, if I never spoke again, if I became a statue, if I refused to hear him, if I emptied his room and throw out his clothes, if I threw out my clothes, if I changed my name, if I told him he wasn't mine. One side of a father's love is absence, the favor of disappearing, not needing and not being needed. And so it is, he thought, we enter the broken world."
"Tired chair, tired flesh, when all the books have been read."
