Passages
Page 20: "He was alluding to
the inner nature of the artist, ill equipped for everyday life, a bungler who
dreams of other rules and rewards, and looks for solitary compensations for the
role he has been saddled with whether he
likes it or not." I'm never partial to descriptions of artists, and I feel
like there's nothing particularly interesting about this one, but coming at the
beginning of a section as it does -- and right after a section that I found
very difficult to comprehend, in chapter two -- it feels like a nice, clear
idea with which I can grapple, which at this point in the book I'm welcoming with open arms.
Page 224: "It would also be
like peeling away one's skin, layer after layer, in competition with the
tell-all confessions of television talk shows or theself-revelations of group
therapy./ I pondered the typewritten lines. Public commemorations have
transformed horrors into clichés, which have been worked over until they have
become petrified, thus fulfilling their function, followed, of course, by
fatigue and indifference." This is one of the most interesting passages in
the book to me, because the ideas aren't tremendously inventive, the writing
isn't overly great, and yet there's a severe honesty in the prose that
supercedes all of that, and I'm pretty sure that I only feel that honesty
because of how many pages of honesty and peeling back of layers that I've
already read from this author, so that I truly understand what he means by this
almost-cliché in a way that would have felt almost anywhere else to be overly
abstract.
Techniques
Lots of lists; we've seen these
in a lot of books this quarter
Page 8: "He hands me the
plastic-covered menu." This is the first time we've seen the first-person
narrator. Previously, it had seemed we were in third.
Page 8: "The waiter turns to
the customer's unknown companion. 'What about you, sir?' 'I'll have the same,'
I hear myself mumbling." Still trying to figure out who the I is, but it's
an interesting way of not describing himself that the I is employing. Not sure
what to do with it as of yet, but it needs to be noted.
Page 22: "The slim blond
waitress appeared, with her miniskirt and the name tag Marianne on her right breast -- a French girl from Israel, studying
in New York and working part-time as a waitress at the Café Mozart, on
Seventieth Street, on the Upper West Side, not far from the apartment where I
was busy experimenting with my afterlife." This is either pure imagination
of a sort that we haven't seen to this point, or the author dipping into a
third-person omniscient that also doesn't seem like something we've seen
before. Either way, it strikes me as incredibly curious that we're doing all
this for a minor character, but we've seen a couple books in this class chose
to go this route, slipping in techniques that are different from the normal
storytelling technique of the piece while paying attention to lesser
characters. I'm wondering if the reader is more forgiving when dealing with
people who seem not to matter as much to the text?
Page 43: "Decision is a
moment of insanity,' Mr. Kierkegaard whispered insidiously, as he did every
evening." There are a lot of these byplays with historical figures,
intersection of text with thought, but rarely as clearly and succinctly as
here, and this is the first time where the thoughts actually seem to be
characters themselves.
Page 63: "My earliest memory
is linked to this trip. A memory preceding my birth, a memory of the being I was
before I came into being--the legend of a past before the past." The transition
is awkward, but it feels intentionally awkward, almost as if the writer is
daring us to be frustrated with the piece. I've felt that way a lot in the
text, that the author is expecting a lot more out of me than I might possess,
but this is the first place I've really been able to put my finger on a place
that exemplifies that feeling.
Page 66: "I hung back on the
platform of the truck, biting my fingernails." This is the first place in
the work that really feels like a massive misstep, to me. The biting of the
fingernails was a great detail that I absolutely loved, and the callback to it
was great, but then the final paragraph of this chapter brings it up again,
twice, and takes any pleasure of discovery out of the moment, making it instead
impossible for any reader to miss.
Page 85: "Chernobyl, 1986.
April 1945. The truck stops…" First, the slide from title to first line is
strange and immediately draws me in. Also wanted to point out that we're jumping
into present tense here.
Page 116: "…the daughter-in-law…"
here we're in a moment of the story where the narrator, the I that's followed the
rest of this piece, does not exist, yet it's written in the same certain
narratorial memoir style.
Page 145: "It was now the
summer of 1948…" It's fascinating how willing I am to go along with the time
changes. For a while I felt there was an emotional link between time period
shifts, and there is for many of them, but this one in particular seems to
simply be a jump because it's been decided that the narration will jump, and
yet I don't bump over this at all. Have we simply been trained to be okay with
this in the narrative, or is this something that could be used at any time, and
as long as no large deal is made of it, a reader might not find it problematic?
The constant conversation with
other literature, but most especially with Joyce, and specifically
Ulysses--many important moments in the book happen on Bloomsday, in particular,
but there are plenty of other references as well.
Page 240: As the question of
sanity becomes a question with this visit to the therapist, the book slides
into the second-person. Inventive, and completely logical. Also took me a
minute to notice it, so I'm once again sliding into acceptance of anything the
author is attempting.
Words
Interlocutor
Adduced
Stories/lines/ideas
to steal/attempt
Page 10: "I am not yet
indifferent enough to my past."
Page 19: "Language,
landscapes, stages of life are not automatically annulled by outer
adversities."
Page 28: "…the intensity of
a whole lifetime…"
Page 30: "Poetry, too, has
grown old and can no longer write itself."
Page 103: "…the armor that
would protect me from my circumstances and my own vulnerability."
Page 122: "…he knew no cure
for the madness of writing…"
Page 153: "…a comforting
symbol of failure…"
Page 186: "the voices and
the colors of the fairy tale…"
Page 192: "…their dumb
lollypop of hope…"
Page 216: "The claw of the past
is no less painful."
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