Cynan Jones - "Stilicide"

Strange, near-poem like story. Chapters of different people, slowly interweaving, of a world without enough clean water. The Water Train, the iceberg being towed to London. Amazing how the chapters wrap into each other.

Originally broadcast by the bbc, one chapter at a time?

Reminds me of Paul Auster's "In the country of last things", Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams" and Daisy Jones' "February" (?? I can't find this!), as in short, strange books that leave you bewildered and confused.

Focus, John.

The hospital behind him.

The scene below an object now. A coin through a jeweller's loupe.

Watch the bridge, he coached himself. Focus on the bridge.

The protest now was filtering. The crowd seeming to pour.

Something microscopic in the fact the smallest tap could send a hundred-and-seventy-grain bullet three-quarters of a mile.

Move your finger just a millimetre and you could end a life; but you cannot save one. Her. Not with the strength of your whole body.

Branner felt himself sliding again, away from the wider world. Into the big hole in his ground, the time ahead without her.

Paul Auster - "Report from the interior"

The "sequel" to Winter Journal, supposedly a more mental oriented autobiography. Perhaps I read it too soon after Winter Journal, but it was too much of the same. Not boring, but lots of the interesting bits - the details of the how & why he felt - left out.

One interesting quote about himself, feeling more and more distant, which seemed quite a parallel with his New York Trilogy kind of writing.

Paul Auster - "Winter Journal"

"You lay on the floor and howled, howled at the top of your lungs, howled because death was inside you and you didn't want to die."

The third in my autobiography triptych reading wave. Fast, punching you in the face with his lines that are hurled rhythmically at you. Perhaps it is the usage of 'you', constantly 'you, you you', without ever letting go that made reading this book such a ride.

I should study it more closely. See how he weaves normal occasions into a wonderful story.

Quoting Keats, something he scribbled in the margins; "the bitter outcry of a young man who knew he was headed for an early grave, darkly underscored by the word now in the first line" :

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd - see here it is - 
I hold it towards you.

James Joyce in Paris in the 1920s, standing around at a party eighty-five years ago when a woman walked up to him and asked if she could shake the hand that wrote Ulysses. Instead of offering her his right hand, Joyce lifted it in the air, studied for a few moments, and said: "Let me remind you, madam, that this hand has done many other things as well."

"The dead are still there, and the Towers are there as well - pulsating in memory, still present as an empty hole in the sky."

Paul Auster - "Man In The Dark" (read by Paul Auster)

Gripping from the very beginning, skipping back and forth in time- and storylines, this was a success from the very first second.

I must admit that after the tale of the "man with no memory", who ahd to kill the writer in order to stop the war (great idea) I gradually lost a bit of interest. Whether this was due to the story being less interesting, or the difficulty of listening for 6 or 7 hours, I cannot tell.

But definitely worth while. Should read the book, couple of years from now.

Paul Auster - "New York Trilogy"

Wrote so many notes during reading I'm not sure what to write here.

Blown away. Meta-writing to the max, superbe!

It keeps you wondering and wondering even more, changing thoughts and ideas all the time.

What a genius.

(I know, I'm not writing anything useful down. I'll see what I can do later on)

Paul Auster - "The book of illusions"

A wonderful book, but I will not be able to say many useful things about it.

I have been reading it on and off, and almost only when I wanted to relax.

In any case, I am not very good at dissecting the story, characters, motives, structures, &etc.

It is about loss. Chance and loss. About finding a new goal, a new purpose again, about more chance, another love, and more loss.

About films that nobody has seen and books no-one can ever read.

A good book to reread in a couple of years.