-The ridiculous amount of name-dropping, philosophically
(Arendt, Heidegger, Derrida) Kierkegaard, Freud, was often incompatible (i.e.,
intra-book contradictions), and bothered me until I realized it was a hopeless
search for framework and meaning by the author. This, after the fact, makes a
tremendous amount of sense if/when trying to reconcile post oppression life by
grabbing onto things that make the past make sense… This extends to the
characterization of himself/parents/grandparents and events in the context of
Romeo and Juliet, Ulysses, etc.
Later I realized his degree of alienation. He doesn’t even
use “I” to talk about his self. It’s a full rejection of his self, the divorce.
He uses it as an effective rhetorical strategy, but I think the argument for
the deeper meaning is made fairly well. There’s a passage where he continues to
write about “the child” and it’s insistence that the family to flee. It was
disturbing because of the animalistic nature and reaction to “bad” on the
horizon. He concludes the scene by switching into first and saying something
like, and I was the child. The shift worked well there.
-Fascinated by the fact that his existential crisis is an
actual existential crisis—the physical threat against his existence and the
place he is. Most people do not have this grounding. He does, which gives it an
additional layer of (this isn’t the right word, because I don’t want to seed
existential crises to only people in his situation, but it will suffice) legitimacy.
-Highly reflective/super aware of being a book (although
there are some great sentences about what it is to write) and an author to a
nearly insufferable degree—particularly where the author is complaining about
not winning major literary awards (because was on right track – and won the
MacArthur, etc.) Many stops to reflect on the value of writing, flying from one
extreme to the other. Of course, much of this is due to the fact that he was
actually and author, but I don’t know what to do with his deep reflections on
the value of writing. It feel prescriptive, somehow, which is eh. Near the end
he experiences a kind of despair about the value of writing, what good it will
do, what is means about him, that he’s foolish to perceiver yet he does so
despite his turmoil about what to do with the events of his life—which seems
like a fair reactions.
-The preservation of his
language is clearly very important to him. However, it’s fascinating to me that
thorough the book he writes in foreign languages and then provides the
translation (which makes it accessible). However I was somewhat curious about
why he didn’t just stick to Romanian…
-Tired metaphors/ideas. People = cattle = apples. That’s so
clearly the case, has been heard before. The events remain horrifying, despite
the language.
-Where is home? Once
again, a lot of equivocation. What is home when home is gone? An apartment, your
family, a detached person searching for anything to hold onto, or be angry
with, whatever it is. He concludes that “home” is his new york apartment.
-The struggle with exile. Exile is, he argues, is suicide
for a writer. In an ephemeral sense and a strange line of near sophistry. The best
interpretation, is that it’s a redefinition of the self—which is legitimate and
valid, but the leap to suicide is difficult. I suppose, had he truly cared for
a cause, he could have died for it, or—as he did—protested in exile.
“’Let you books come home,’ she says. ‘Even if only one
person loves them, it will be enough. Ten were enough to save Gommorah.” As she
starts to describe the daily warfare among our compatriots, I interrupt her and
launch into my own evocation of exile, its theatrically, mimetic fission, its
division of the self. The infantile stand-in is allowed to perform his new
script, while the grown-up other half is bending over in the schizophrenia of
ancient reflexes.” 297.
“…how much of me was going to die with departure” (128)
-He the author, homeless, defines himself as an anti-self.
The rejections of his identity, in a strange way, because his identity and his
home. He’s afraid he’ll literally be obliterated.
“Still, the terror of ending up in the trash bin of failure,
that creeping fear, expanding and contracting in turn, was with me always,
asleep or awake.” 103
The author complains about the commercialization of the
holocaust. It seems that his entire novel is guilty of being this—or at the
very least, complicit in commercializing on the holocaust—274.
He defines himself as against something, an anti-thing, not
a thing… And seems to actually just want more external validation in the form
of literary awards.
Condemned to write (122). It seems as if the author writes
because it’s really the only actual thing he has, when everything else is gone
and moving. He realizes the importance, to him, of not loosing the past w/ the
passage where he mentions that it didn’t occur to him to record his mother’s words
when she was alive.
“Nothing, however,
could be more important than the hypnosis that had suddenly placed a man and a woman
at the very center of the world…” (64)
Beautiful.
Amazing looks into the asinine nature of oppression. The
affair with who can own an apartment and how they are/were allocated was
particularly absurd. 206.
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