David Klompas’s Reviews > The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories > Status Update

Vladislavic comments on the art of translation through the ages when he says, '...the art of translation has changed much over the years...'

A wonderful example of Vladislavic's humour sits at the bottom of the page when, commenting on the failure of his story titled 'Gross,' he says, "My story may have been doomed by a simple miscalculation: I have always been partial to the number 11."

'Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil's own job. Yet words on a page make all things possible. Any line, even this one, may be a place to begin.'

I've just noticed that The Loss Library is situated exactly half way in between the other stories. This came about when Vladislavic said, 'I see the pieces [of this book]...facing one another like book ends with nothing to hold up 'The Loss Library. '

If hats are an index of character, shoes are an index of circumstance.

'The most compelling motive for including a photograph in a fiction is to discount it... They are always less than or more than illustrative; they do not live up to the text or they carry an excess that demands an explanation. Their purpose is less to define than to disrupt, to create ripples and falls in the beguiling flow of the prose. They are pebbles and weirs' (pp. 52-53).