Drew > Recent Status Updates

A free jazz memoir that rolls its own stories and floats above the parapet of genre like a bright flag. It's an exhilarating torrent of ideas, opinions and silliness. Whoever decided to call it a novel is probably still enjoying the joke.

The carriage scene was breathtaking.

I was about to start reading Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann and realised that it too has a major character called Ivan. That really would have been too many Ivans at the same time.

In many ways it's an oddity that this book's rich embroidery of dreams, desires and romantic folly has come to signify the apogee of realism.
What realism there is lies in the way that Flaubert brutally undercuts these fanciful daydreams with the bathos of provincial life in Normandy

These stories veer between the incomprehensible and the terrifying, each page an uncanny and disturbing step along a dark and uncertain path with the mountain above and the icy cliff-edge below...

So much fun.

This is really fun.

So close now. Warsaw, Tristan da Cunha, Akureyri, Toulouse, Onkalo, Olkiluoto, Berlin, Shanghai, Yangshan, Moscow, Ozyorsk, Novaya Zemlya, Cape Verde, Saint Helena, the South Atlantic...
And finally back to Forus and Stavanger...

Reading this late into the night yesterday I realised that it’s in someway an English low land version of Thomas Mann’s the Magic Mountain. But instead of a resort in the Alps, the scene is the English countryside in which we pay witness to the disappeared world of privilege and steadfast conviction that things can and will never change, shortly before that all gets blown up by the first world war.

I think I have developed Stavanger syndrome. I’ve been living inside this book for so long, that I have taken on the ideas and viewpoints of my literary captors.