Bagus > Recent Status Updates

Rereading this in the original Dutch, as I happened to obtain a copy of it at Scheltema Amsterdam!

Rereading this since my book club is going to discuss this next month 🥹

'Inside all of us there's a feeling of not being of standard value, the belief that we lack something that everyone else possesses. All our lives we must come to terms with this sense of inferiority, overcome it or harness it to the cart of our ambitions and our ruinous pursuit of perfection. But what is perfection, does anybody know?'

This hit too close to home somehow 🥺

"Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women."

Such a strong sentence.

'To love, and to be loved, and yet not be able to let anyone know about it. And every trace of love obliterated when you're gone. No one would ever know it had ever existed, that it had given you great joy,' she said, 'perhaps the only joy you'd experienced in your life.'

Damn, I could fall in love this instant with Lesley Hamlyn.

'You know what ... money really is? Money's the sixth sense. If you don't have it, you can't make ... the most of the other five.'

A sentence to be read and re-read again when money is tight 💀

'You won't find anything like it anywhere in the world,' I said. 'Over the centuries Penang has absorbed elements from the Malays and the Indians, the Chinese and the Siamese, the Europeans, and produced something that's uniquely its own. You'll find it in the language, the architecture, the food.'

I can feel so much weight carried by this sentence 😳

We are told, in line with our loquacious culture, that the real hardship of death consists of the frustrating – very frustrating – inability to argue. There is, actually, an interesting vision behind this extraordinary diagnosis.

“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies’, ‘one against all’, that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.”

"The British tried to escape the dangerous inconsistency inherent in the nation's attempt at empire building by leaving the conquered peoples to their own devices as far as culture, religion, and law were concerned, by staying aloof and refraining from spreading British law and culture." Interesting uptake

It's a quirky, funny, and dark story at the same time. Vincenzino's way to explain other characters' behaviours through psychoanalysis is just a wonderful punchline. How true it is that we could find the richness of life through the lens of ordinary people

I’m still not used to the setup of the page yet (the book starts with the last page number and ends on p.1, in a nod to books written in Hebrew but still read from front cover to the back). The Books of Jacob, or a Great Journey Through Seven Borders, Five Languages and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Small Ones - surely will be my favourite for this year

How are great yet simple plans born? Ideas are conceived and grow in the subconscious before you have any definite purpose for them. Then suddenly elements long familiar perhaps to others as well as yourself spontaneously converge, and it is in your head that they fuse to form a single plan, a plan so clear and simple that you wonder why no one has arrived at it before.

Then the museum advisor, a historian, asked me what I was writing about and I began to explain. “Ah,” he said. “One of those books where the author travels around the world in search of his or her roots—there are plenty of those now.”
“Yes,” I answered. “And now there will be one more.”

Just reached Part Two of the book. Still asking myself the similar question that the Booker Prize judges asked themselves while reading this book, "Is Maria Stepanova's In Memory of Memory a work of fiction?" Part of it seems to me like a memoir chronicling the family history of a Jewish family in Russia, while also in times turning to essay forms in the style of Sontag. Genre is an outdated concept, sui generis

Just reached Part Two of the book. Still asking myself the similar question that the Booker Prize judges asked themselves while reading this book, "Is Maria Stepanova's In Memory of Memory a work of fiction?" Part of it seems to me like a memoir chronicling the family history of a Jewish family in Russia, while also in times turning to essay forms in the style of Sontag. Genre is an outdated concept, sui generis

The matryoshka (nesting) doll insisted on the preeminence of single daughters, each emerging from the one before and inheriting, with everything else, the gift and the opportunity to be the single teller of the tale.

The gate of gates,
No key in our hand. But we entered,
Refugees to our birth from the strange death
And refugees to our homes that were our homes and we came.
In our joys there were scratches
Unseen by tears until they’re about to flow.

“What is success? It is an inner, and indescribable force, resourcefulness, power of vision; a consciousness that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me. It is my belief in the adaptability of life to my own ends. Fortune and success lie with ourselves. We must hold them firmly – deep within us.”

“Tom is a politician – he knows what he wants. Who was it threw Christian out? That is a strong language, Ida, but that was really the truth of it. And why? Because he was compromising the firm and the family. And in his eyes I do the same thing – not with words or acts, but by my very existence as a divorced woman.”

The first and titular short story "Shoko's Smile" brings a really intimate outlook into contradictory points of view of Soyo, the main character, between wanting to belong to the traditional structure of a family and wanting to be recognised as someone exceptional. Totally relatable.

Only Erpenbeck will put “Kein Roman” as the title of her memoir in a mocking tone. No one writes like Erpenbeck

Somehow very excited that my preordered copy just arrived at my doorstep :))

A few chapters into the story, and I could already feel the intense loneliness that Mr Singer and the people around him feel...

Willy Brandt’s view is quite unique despite his young age during the time he wrote much of the content in this book while living in exile. Can see clearly why he got elected as the Governing Mayor of West Berlin and ultimately as the Bundeskanzler of West Germany

“We’re not legally registered to live here… we have no rights… There are as many of us here as there are grains of sand in the desert. Hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes: Tajiks, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Chechens… They escaped to Moscow, the capital of the USSR, only now it’s the capital of another country. You won’t find out nation anywhere on the map…”

Just reached the part where the author interviewed an anonymous person about the suicide case of General Akhromeyev after the failure of the putsch in August 1991. No one realised at that time, that Stalin had built a Union that was impenetrable from below, but very fragile from the top. It was the leadership themselves who crushed the Union. The failure of the putsch strengthened Yeltsin and brought down Gorbachev