Ema > Recent Status Updates

If you're wondering which bookish gem to read next, I heartily recommend The Women of Lazarus by Russian author Marina Stepnova, recently translated into English at World Editions. I read the novel in Romanian and loved it so much that I contacted the writer and asked her some questions: http://lecturile-emei.blogspot.ro/201...

I am actually enjoying this novel when Naphta is not making an appearance... I don't hate him, but I am not the right kind of audience for his verbal duels with Settembrini, either.

What we spend up here isn't time at all, and the new winter, when it comes, isn't new, but the same old winter all the time.

What is time? A mystery, a figment —and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask. Is time a function of space? Or space of time? Or are they identical? Echo answers.

This novel is different from what I've read before. Hmm, I wonder how many times can one say 'this is different'?

Our brains grew accustomed to connecting, connecting, connecting everything with everything else, until we did it automatically, out of habit. I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

I feel I'm wasting my time with this novel - though, once in a while, I come across a phrase that I like:
How beautiful to live in a period where every page, even if it has just come from the papermaker's workshop, is yellowed.

I am sinking all I have left and going underwater. If I speak, it will be in bubbles of air. They will not be able to keep my words for themselves.
They will see the whore, the madwoman, the murderess, the female dripping blood into the grass and laughing with her mouth choked with dirt. But they will not see me. I will not be there.

Erika walks and walks. Her back warms up in the sun. Blood oozes out of her. People look up from the shoulder to the face. Some turn around. Not all. Erika knows the direction she has to take. She heads home, gradually quickening her step.

Erika holds him far away. A yawning abyss, made up of seven inches of dick, plus Erika’s arm, and ten years difference in age, gapes open between their bodies. Vice is basically the love of failure.

What a lovely feed today! I'm seeing like six reviews for Moby Dick, five for Hunger Games, three for Master and Margarita and so on. Well, I could slyly re-post my old reviews now, everybody will think it's the bug!

She has bred this young audience in her own incubator. They seem to delight in their mediocrity! Yet they dare to tackle Mozart, Schubert! They take up room: fat islands floating in the amniotic fluid of the notes. They imbibe temporarily, but do not understand what they are drinking. After all, people with a herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem.

This novel is, in (many) parts, beyond the realm of my comprehension: Binah, Diotallevi used to say, is the palace Hokhmah builds as He spreads out from the primordial point. If Hokhmah is the source, Binah is the river that flows from it, separating into its various branches until they all empty into the great sea of the last Sefirah. But in Binah all forms are already formed.

A very promising thriller which started to bore me in the second half. I don't even care how it's going to end.

Steinar Steinsson talking to King Kristian, who granted independence to Iceland:
My dear and excellent king, I wish to proffer you the thanks of my district for giving us what is already ours, namely, permission to walk upright here in Iceland. No one can receive a better gift from those in power over him than permission to be what he is and not something else.

'Ah!' thought Thérèse: 'I shall have to begin again from the beginning...' But what is the beginning where our actions are concerned? Our destiny, once we begin to try to isolate it, is like those plants which we can never dig up with all their roots intact. Would she find it necessary to go back to her childhood? But even our childhood is, in a sense, an end, a completion.

"What happened to her books?"
"They went up in smoke. Confiscated by the Red Guards, who promptly burned them in public, right in front of her apartment building."
We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.

The house of a childhood lying half a century in the past is a mostly airy structure. It consists more of views in and out of it than of solid walls: of partial views of corners, nooks and crannies, certain pieces of furniture, foregrounds and backgrounds — in short, something fragmentary, like the disparate sets in a film studio for a movie shot from the perspective of a knee-high nipper.

At thirteen she knew as well as I with my nine years that to preserve something valuable, one has to know how to renounce it in good time.

At that time, city noises had not yet fused into a single continuous and deafening shriek of machines and roar of engines. Urban noise still had a kind of human dimension, composed of voices and natural sounds.

We belonged to two different civilizations. She had been born before the general proletarization of the postwar era, in a world that still believed itself to be whole, while I was the true son of an era of universal disintegration.

I would have kept my innocence much longer had I not been suspected so early of having lost it.

As my father used to say, primitive people have no grasp of the abstract concept of beauty in nature, since for them, sensory perception of nature flows together with love of the ancestral soil; anything else is merely alien.

All the people I have liked most in my life have been the very opposite to me: none of them was mean; but, if the truth was known, I have always been a mean little sod myself. I have always held something back, and seen to it I kept on the safe side. It is good to be shown up in your old age for what you are.

I don’t know why it is, but it is always the people I don’t like who get on well in this world. Those I do like come to a bad end.

When I go to Town nowadays and see all the visitors about, it is as much like a bad dream as when the Germans was here. I feel I got no right to live on the island now; except in the winter.

He said when you are young you are full of trust, but are taught all manner of things which are not true; and then, when you grow up, you have to undo it all, and think different: but you have lost your ability to trust anything taught.