Andrew Marr’s Reviews > The Tunnel > Status Update

...and nothing's begun; because we're in that fabled place where compacts of conclusion coalesce like veins of coal, compressed past the thought of further futures and consequently beyond each form of the past, to be free of time like the proverbial bird, fixed...that's what we really don't know and maybe motivates my burrowing–if there's a bottom nature, just what's what where the well ends, when we pass beneath...

We sail the seas and fly the skies and drive up and down all the roads, but the deepest caves, the cleverest caverns, cannot take us to the underground, tell us what goes on in that inner realm, however it happens, whether it's as we think, ever so slowly, and life sleeps upside down there like bats, or whether, at the genetic center of the self, in pure birth earth, there is no need for any action and all is over...

"[S]ympathies in such a cause are not idly, not routinely, not frequently enlisted; and were they to be, what then? what would one learn about oneself? would the soul's hairs rise like a frightened animal's? would one, one day during the exercise, feel that formerly feckless fist smash a hated face into blissfully bloody bits, sense softness at the end of the blows as the cheekbones give...?" (pg 463)

When will this effing thing end

“I remember my relief when my paving block broke the pane of the second shop, the shop of a goy. You see, I said to my cold soul. For my part, [Kristallnacht] wasn’t just Jews.”

“Why should another’s body be so beautiful its absence is as painful as the presence of your own? I bit my thumb enough it bled. You taste like the Third Reich, I said, blood salt on my lips, and you were offended. I think you are tasting the taste in your own mouth, you said.”

Some of the most hauntingly beautiful sentences in the English language about childhood and marriage on the verso, and on the recto, passages whose poetic and philosophical sleight-of-hand support murder, misogyny, and, yes, genocide. This book engrosses – as the farther you dig with Kohler, the more you become absorbed – but after about 30 minutes of reading, one has to put it down, take a break, and sigh – "fuck."

So is Lacelli a relevant character in this book, or is he just another passing character in the life of Kohler - this life of passing misogynistic and genocidal contempt?