John’s Reviews > My Struggle: Book 5 > Status Update

The mist hung over the trees, the rain was heavy and …. the evening sky was gray and shambling, seeming to sink into .... a forest of twisted limbs and disordered minds. With the lights from the windows and the silence among the trees it was as disturbing a place as it was appealing [and] aroused ambivalence ... the routines and the slow rhythm in which everything happened.

I opened my eyes …. The trees outside the window were black, the darkness between them pale [at night]…. The sky was overcast, the air warm and still [during the day]…. Two of the patients … stood watching us …. No one spoke; the sound of footsteps and people on the move, slowly making their way forward, surrounded by the stillness of the forest on both sides…. Lawns, dry and discolored, had been laid between.

[It] was about two lovers moving back and forth in the mass of sinners drifting like a flock of birds in the wind ... who can never come close to each other.

[I hit] him as hard as I could. [I] hit him in the face.... The feeling of finally having acted was strong. I looked up at the sky, which was light and bright and wonderful, and stared into the green darkness of the park, and then I was gone, it was as though I had been switched off.
[ - 242].

The pointillist novel was all the rage ... situated somewhere between prose ... and poetry. [Haugen’s pointillist novel, Anne,] was permeated with darkness … I didn’t know what created this permeation of darkness ... I went through sentence by sentence, it was impossible to say, it wasn’t in any defined place, wasn’t conjured up by any particular words, it was immanent everywhere in the same way that a mood is.

She said his books were a little cold and contrived. I said that was exactly the point, he wanted to describe humanity in a different way, not from within but from without, and the notion that characters in books were warm … that was a construct too, of course, we had just got used to it and thought of this mode as genuine or warm while other ways of writing were equally genuine, [75].

[.... an aversion to metaphors, I noticed, there was almost something ugly about metaphors, or old-fashioned ... passe or antiquated and useless for our purposes. It was bad taste, quite simply, tacky, [73].

[She] came up behind us all in a flurry. She seemed to be one of those women who surrounded themselves with a cloud of gestures and objects, bags and clothes, and cigarettes and arms, [65].