Joseph’s Reviews > Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers: An Anthology > Status Update

In the city, on the beach that was dotted with dog excrement and belonged to the people living in the buildings that had cropped up all along the shore like obscene, scabbing eczema, there was no plaque to remind the inhabitants that in this place human beings had awaited their immanent death. There was nothing anywhere along the shore, and nothing in the town either. Music came drifting out of a seaside café.

The screen creates the illusion that what it shows is taking place somewhere else, even though the sounds you hear are really, physically threatening in their proximity. But at night you shake off that illusion; the eye takes over from the camera and charges the individual experience with sensation and immediacy: the war is what is happening here and now, not what is reported on the news.