It came and went

"Go back?" he whispers.

I desperateley shake my head and wave my fist right in his visor — Cut that out. For God's sake! You never know which way to look with these novices — at the Zone or at them... And here my mind goes blank. Over the pile of ancient trash, over the colorful rags and broken glass, drifts a tremor, a vibration, just like the hot air above a tin roof at noon; it floats over the mound and continues, cuts across our path right beside a marker, lingers over the road, waits for half a second — or am I just imagining that? — and slithers into the field, over the bushes, over the rotten fences, toward the old car graveyard.

Damn these eggeheads, a great job they did: ran their road down here amid the junk! And I'm a smart one myself — what on Earth was I thinking while mooning over their stupid map?

"Go on at low speed," I tell Kirill.

"What was that?"

"God knows! It came and went, thank God. And shut up, please. Right now, you aren't a person, got it? Right now, you are a machine, my steering wheel, a lever..."

— from Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

A child is rather horribly perfect

Good science fiction movies for kids are hard to find, but The Last Mimzy may qualify.

Helena and I watched The Last Mimzy this weekend, finally, many, many months after the IT guy at my office (since retired) recommended it. (Actually, we'd watched the beginning on Youtube but had been unable to find all the movie's parts; conveniently, a DVD turned up to be included among Helena's birthday presents.)

You may recognize "mimzy" as "mimsy," a word occurring in Lewis Carroll's "Jaberwocky," which served as inspiration for Lewis Padgett's 1943 short story, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves":

How can an immature human understand the complicated system of social relationships? He can't. To him, an exaggeration of natural courtesy is silly. In his functional structure of life-patterns, it is rococo. He is an egotistic little animal, who cannot visualize himself in the position of another, certainly not an adult. A self-contained, almost perfect natural unit, his wants supplied by others, the child is much like a unicellular creature floating in the blood stream, nutriment carried to him, waste products carried away —

From the standpoint of logic, a child is rather horribly perfect. A baby may be even more perfect, but so alien to an adult that only superficial standards of comparison apply. The thought processes of an infant are completely unimaginable. But babies think, even before birth. In the womb they move and sleep, not entirely through instinct. We are conditioned to react rather peculiarly to the idea that a nearly-viable embryo may think. We are surprised, shocked into laughter, and repelled. Nothing human is alien.

But a baby is not human. An embryo is far less human.

The story is rather philosophical (as all the best SF is), and uses a mathematical paradigm to demonstrate its thesis. The film diverges greatly from its source material, and at times comes across as more new-age-y than scientific. But it embodies a similar, even broader, spirit to the story, and it is nonetheless thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Full text of "Mimsy Were the Borogoves."
William Shatner reads "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (in 6 parts).

The subjugation of apparent anarchy

New York had always been a city destined for the rule of dandies, thieves, and men who resembled hardboiled eggs. Those who made its politics were the people who poured gasoline on fires, rubbed salt into wounds, and carried coals to Newcastle. And its government was an absurdity, a concoction of lunacies, a dying man obliged to race up stairs. The reason for this condition was complex rather than accidental, for miracles are not smoothly calculated. Instead, they are the subjugation of apparent anarchy to a coherent design. Just as music must be like a hive of bees, with each note that strains to go its own way gently held to a thriving plan, a great empire depends for its driving force upon the elements that will eventually tear it apart. So with a city, which if it is to make its mark must be spirited, slippery, and ungovernable. A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls — whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise.

— from Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin.

Nothing under my skin but light

It was Helena's birthday yesterday, and just like every year, my birthday came 24 hours later. The thing is, she turned 10, and that fact is hitting me much harder than my turning forty-something again. It hits me with amazement and dread and inspires a rash of pinprick emotions.

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light —
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

— Billy Collins

She's not a kid anymore. She's real.

A thousand white cats

Hugh Close, The Sun's rewrite editor, had the boundless energy of a hound, and was always perched upright, like a Labrador waiting for a stick to be thrown into a cool lake. He had a red mustache, and red hair that was sculpted to his head like clay. He could see puns in everything, and one could not speak to him without suffering an embarrassing disinterment of double entendres. His suits were gray; his shirts had collars with bars; he could read a thousand words a minute upside down and backward (the words, that is, not him); he knew all the Romance languages (including Romanian), Hindi, Chuvash, Japanese, Arabic, Gullah, Turqwatle, and Dutch; he could speak any of these languages in the accent of the other; he generated new words at a mile a minute; he was the world's foremost grammarian and a maser of syntax; and he drove everyone mad. But The Sun was unmatched in style and linguistic precision. Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment. (In fact, he did not like cats, because they could not talk and would not listen.)

— from Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin.

Seven things

Claire has tagged me with seven bookish questions. (See other answers by Mee, BIP, Nicola, ds, Vasilly, and Lu.)

1. What propelled your love affair with books — any particular title or a moment?
Not a title or a particular moment, but the situation of new motherhood. I'd always been a reader, but under this challenging circumstance my mindset shifted. I read while breastfeeding, 35 hours a day it felt like. I read to stave off boredom, to escape, to step out of my self, to stay awake, to bring myself to stillness and sleep, to consider other lives, to exercise my vocabulary, to stretch my imagination, to engage with the world. I guess that was always the case, but now I gave it more focus and intensity, and a habit was formed.

2. Which fictional character would you like to be friends with and why?
Larry Darrell, from The Razor's Edge, by W Somerset Maugham. We could loaf together.

3. Do you write your name on your books or use bookplates?
No. I used to, as a child and teenager; I don't know why I stopped. These days I try to give books away; I guess I don't feel I own them enough to label them mine. I still write my name in reference books, as these get passed around the office and I want them to come back to me.

4. What was your favourite book read this year?
The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. Jesuit philosophy, anthropological linguistics, first contact with alien cultures. My favourite things! I'll be revisiting this book in the years to come.

5. If you could read in another language, which language would you choose?
Arabic. I suspect there's a treasure trove of literature that's never been translated, that the West has never heard of. But more compelling than that, it's linguistically interesting. I've taken classes twice but failed to retain much.

6. Name a book that made you both laugh and cry.
The book I'm reading now — Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin — I don't cry easily at books. And I'm laughing too, not just a chuckle at a witty turn of phrase, but heartily and out loud, and often unexpectedly at the sudden slapstick of a situation. And I'm only halfway.

7. Share with us your favourite poem?
"anyone lived in pretty how town," by e.e. cummings.

The Liebster Award, helping others discover other blogs. I'd like to ask Ana, Cipriano, Dwight, Melwyk, Mental Multivitamin, Sara, Tom, and anyone else:

1. What book (a classic?) do you hate?
2. To what extent do you judge people by what they read?
3. What television series would you recommend as the literariest?
4. Describe your ideal home library.
5. Books or sex?
6. How do you decide what to read next?
7. How much do you talk about books in real life (outside of the blogging community)?

A kick like a mule

The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.

— from Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin.

Expression itself held down and stilled

They walked along the line of machinery until they were discovered by a workman who was emerging from one of the long passages inside. He said nothing as he approached. But in his expressionless face and jewel-like eyes he was expression itself held down and stilled. Peter Lake had heard Beverly say that the greater the stillness, the farther you could travel, until, in absolute immobility, you achieved absolute speed. If you could hold your breath, batten yourself down, and stop every atom from its agitation within you, she had said, you could vault past infinity. All this was beyond his comprehension.

— from Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin.

The colour of infinity

— No-one's trying to kill him at all. He's just paranoid, isn't he? Nora says irritably. He's just a red herring. And the old people — I bet they're just paranoid as well.

"Ah, yes, but that doesn't mean that someone's not out to get them."

— You'll never make a crime writer.

"This isn't a crime story. This is a comic novel."

Emotionally Weird, by Kate Atkinson, is a weird novel. There's a story within a story, and it took quite some time for me to figure that was the case (and not that we were simply jumping forward or backward to another time period). And it took me a while longer to determine which story was inside which. Further, throughout the inner story — Effie's college life — we are treated to excerpts of a few more manuscripts (one of them more prominently). So structurally it's a bit weird, but fun.

It does not hold together as crime story, or mystery, but then it's not one (see above) — despite the mysterious goings on, the dog, the woman, and other red herrings. So if you're familiar only with Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie stories (as I was), check your expectations at the door.

The language is often breathtaking. At times it veers off toward becoming a parody of itself, but even this is somewhat fitting as the protagonist of the inner story is struggling to complete her creative writing assignment, and even though I had to look up a lot of words (a lot of them being very Scottish), the language is always light.

From the framing story, generally more serious and (intentionally, I think, maybe even mockingly) capital-L Literary in tone:

I have my mother's temperamental hair — hair that usually exists only in the imagination of artists and can be disturbing to see on the head of a real woman. On Nora it is the colour of nuclear sunsets and of over-spiced gingerbread, but on me, unfortunately, the same corkscrewing curls are more clownish and inclined to be carroty.

From the inner story — the college novel — that story intended to be "comic":

The old woman had skin that was the texture and colour of white marshmallows and in a poor light (which was always) you might have mistaken her hair for a cloud of slightly rotten candyfloss. Although fast asleep, she was still clutching a pair of knitting needles on which hung a strange shapeless thing, like a web woven by a spider on drugs.

Reviews
New York Times
Salon

These and other reviews can't fully agree on what Emotionally Weird is all about.

One of Effie's assignments is an essay on Middlemarch, and the criticism Henry James levels against it: "Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole." Henry James was wrong, of course. And I get the feeling that this entire novel is intended as a response to James, an exercise in Eliot's realism, a defense of it, but in its execution at once proof that ultra-realism is no longer suited to narrating today's realities.

Emotionally Weird is very realistic: a lot of nothing happens. There are many conversations — some interesting, some boring — with too many people. A lot of what happpens, as in life, has nothing to with anything else. It shows just how difficult it is to tease the narrative thread out of real life.

Emotionally Weird also has some wonderful details, especially to do with colour, and clothing, and how academics talk, but, despite how the Doctor Who references made me smile, it — and not Middlemarch — leaves me indifferent.

I wouldn't recommend this book to most readers I know, except to some who've had a particular kind of college experience.

"Today the Tay was the colour of infinity and made me feel suddenly depressed."

Impossibly pale, lucid, and silver

His eyes were like razors and white diamonds. They were impossibly pale, lucid, and silver. People said, "When Pearly Soames opens his eyes, its electric lights." He had a scar that went from the corner of his mouth to his ear. To look at it made the beholder feel a knife on his own skin, cutting deep and sharp, because Pearly Soames' scar was like a white trough reticulated with painful filaments of cold ivory. It had been with him since the age of four, a gift from his father, who had tried and failed to cut his son's throat.

Of course, it's bad to be a criminal. Everyone knows that, and can swear that its true. Criminals mess up the world. But they are, as well, retainers of fluidity. In fact, one might make the case that New York would not have shone without its legions of contrary devils polishing the lights of goodness with their inexplicable opposition and resistance. It might even be said that criminals are a necessary component of the balanced equation which steadily and beautifully eats up all the time that is thrown upon its steely back. They are the sugar and alcohol of a city, a red flash in the mosaic, lightning on a hot night. So was Pearly.

— from Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin.

I'm looking forward to the weekend and maybe (please?) some days off where I can immerse myself in this book. I'm finding it hard to give myself over to it when I have only 10-minute spurts of congested reading time on the metro (both it and my head being congested). But there are such flashes of gorgeous. Pearly gorgeous.

An advertisement, an experience, a souvenir

"What the Book" is an interactive exhibit designed by Barbara deWilde. Visitors choose to agree or disagree with seven statements that relate to the function of physical books and ebooks.

A video on deWilde's blog explains how it works. Much of the text of the video is reproduced on the AIGA website.

Devising the statements was the most challenging part of the design:

The content had to touch upon physicality and its effect on functionality within James Bridle's temporal model of the book. In his model, the book is first an advertisement, next a reading experience and finally a souvenir. Printed books work well at all points along the timeline. Ebooks, however, make lousy advertisements, so-so reading experiences and terrible souvenirs.

(Actually, I'm not sure I agree.)

I believe it is no longer on display at the AIGA National Design Center, but the online version of the poll is still active.

Do you agree or disagree?:

• I silently judge people by their bookshelves.
• I would love to be picked up in a bookstore.
• A book has made me so angry I've thrown it against the wall.
• I would never give an ebook as a gift.
• Decorating with books is perverse.
• The Internet is as important as sex.
• I want to own nothing.

Our slouch towards commitment

What if I didn't leave Bob? What if our slouch towards commitment ended at the altar? What would it be like if I occupied the wife-shaped space next to Bob? My life as a wife. In a Barratt's starter-home, with an avocado bathroom and a three-piece suite in leather. If we ever had a child (a curious idea) I thought we should call it Inertia. Although our occasional dull missionary encounters didn't seem passionate enough to produce anything as real and lasting as a child, even one called Inertia, and Bob (more likely to consult Mr Spock than Dr Spock) wasn't fit to be in charge of a push-and-pull lawnmower let alone a baby in a pram.

I did so hope that Bob was a dress rehearsal, a kind of mock-relationship, like a mock-exam, to prepare me for the real thing, because if I tried to imagine Bob in a grown-up life I could only visualize him slumped on the leather sofa, watching Jackanory with a huge joint in his hand.

— from Emotionally Weird, by Kate Atkinson.

It turns on detail

There's an interesting piece by Mark Lawson in The Guardian about the long and popular tradition of European crime fiction and introducing his new radio series:

Retracing these journeys, I have made a 15-part series for BBC Radio 4, Foreign Bodies, which uses celebrated fictional detectives — from Christie's Poirot to Nesbø's Harry Hole — to explore the history of modern Europe. Cop novels are a useful tool for such a survey because the police procedural turns on detail. Novelists working in crime-free narratives have no need (and often no wish) to specify a character's job, clothes, income or family background. But because observation and evidence are crucial to the investigation of a crime – the motive for which will often rest on who someone was or what they possessed or desired – crime writers routinely provide a mass of social detail: menus, train timetables, fashion labels, shops, newspaper stories. As a result, good crime novels become a case-file of their times. The introduction of the welfare system and unemployment benefit, for example, can be traced through the comments of posh employers in Christie's mysteries. And reporters preparing to cover the impending referendum on Scottish independence would be well advised to read Ian Rankin's DCI Rebus books, which systematically depict the country's re-examination of its identity over the last 25 years.

I think this goes some way to explaining the mass appeal of crime novels. Some say we read in order to live other lives. Reading crime novels then, with their finer level of detail, may be a more immersive experience (whether for the purpose of education, entertainment, or escape).

(Certainly the attraction to my latest criminal addiction — Marek Krajewski — has less to do with the police case at hand than it does with the minutiae of 1930s Poland: the meals, the bars, the beer and the vodka, office life, marriage bureaus, tenements. All reliably filtered through an investigator who, though he often breaches ethics and good taste, has the mental discipline of a chess enthusiast and a Latin scholar.)

While Sherlock Holmes remains the detective archetype, Lawson identifies Georges Simenon (and his creation, Maigret) as the greatest influence on European crime fiction:

In Rome, Andrea Camilleri — creator of the Sicilian policeman Inspector Montalbano — pointed out to me the complete set of Maigret books on his shelves. In Berlin, one of the leading German crime-writers, Jakob Arjouni, also kept a complete Simenon close to his desk. PD James cites Simenon as a master as well, confirming a literary afterlife that perhaps validates the view of André Gide that the Belgian writer should have won the Nobel prize for literature.

Perhaps because Simenon expresses more temperament, and Maigret acts on instinct — the approach to crime is more believable than that taken by Doyle, more "human" than Holmes. My fascination with Simenon's books is by now well documented, and continually being validated.

In case of emergency

This weekend I was sucked into the vortex that is eBay, a world I haven't visited this past decade and which I'd almost forgotten existed.

The world is full of beautiful and mysterious things, I learned, and there is a treasure trove of obscure editions of Simenon titles in New South Wales, Australia.

This was what he missed

Mock got up from his chair and cast his eye over the assembled men. This was what he had been missing for the past three years. Briefings, focus, pertinent questions, suggestions exchanged and spiced with political discussions. One could not discuss politics in Breslau any more. Only one set of values was permitted, and only the Austrian Corporal honoured. Mock breathed a sigh of relief. How he missed this smoke-filled world of meetings and swearing, and the quest for corpses! In distant Lwów he had found what he had longed for back in his sterile office, where he analysed information and wrote endless reports and statements.

[...]

The room was filled with the sound of chairs scraping against the floor, pages turning and cigarettes hissing as they were extinguished in the damp ashtray. Mock filled his lungs with air. This was what he missed. For the first time in his life he thought with gratitude about Kraus, who had wanted to banish him but instead had awoken in him something nobody would ever be able to eradicate: the happy excitement of an investigator who could display on his the standard the slogan investigo, ergo sum — "I detect, therefore I am."

— from The Minotaur's Head, by Marek Krajewski.

This is what I've been missing. I finally got my hands on a copy of this, the fourth Eberhard Mock investigation to be available in English, though it seems there are two more books in the series that predate this one but have yet to be translated.

It shouldn't matter if they're read out of order, as each books covers a different period of Mock's life and career, seemingly in no particular order. The Minotaur's Head features the most mature incarnation of Mock yet. It starts in 1939, though most of the story occurs in 1937, so you can be assured a backdrop of heightened pre-war German–Polish tensions.

Less grisly than the other books — maybe I've gotten used to it, or maybe I just haven't gotten to that part yet. Oh, except for the opening chapter — that was pretty gruesome.

Grandmother had never had a tail

John Turturro reads Italo Calvino's short fairy tale, "The False Grandmother."

Hidden in the murk

The Other, by Thomas Tryon, is a great, creepy story.

I summed up this book previously, and rather than run the risk of telling spoilers, I'll stick to the jacket copy here:

Holland and Niles Perry are identical thirteen-year-old twins. They are close, close enough, almost, to read each other's thoughts, but they couldn't be more different. Holland is bold and mischievous, a bad influence, while Niles is kind and eager to please, the sort of boy who makes parents proud. The Perrys live in the bucolic New England town their family settled centuries ago, and as it happens, the extended clan has gathered at its ancestral farm this summer to mourn the death of the twins' father in a most unfortunate accident. Mrs. Perry still hasn't recovered from the shock of her husband's gruesome end and stays sequestered in her room, leaving her sons to roam free. As the summer goes on, though, and Holland's pranks become increasingly sinister, Niles finds he can no longer make excuses for his brother's actions.

The setting is bucolic, idyllic; the summer is hot, lazy; the telling is lyric, lulling you, not into a sense of security, but into a passive but uncomfortable state where you know things couldn't possibly be secure, things aren't what they seem, there are things people don't know.

From a review in The Brooklyn Rail: "That these questions [re feeling, becoming, sensing] could become the niggling knife in plain scenes of familial conversation, beauty parlor gossip, and kitchen cooking is the quiet brilliance of Tryon’s novel."

A hint of something lurking beneath.

With a goodly harvest, almost more than he could manage, he footed his way back along the mud shelf to the loading platform. He dropped the cattails in a heap and lay on his belly beside them, head hanging over the platform edge, eyes staring meditatively down at the water. It was pleasant there in the shadows. It smelled of coolness, like a fern garden; like the well once had before they sealed it up. From upside down, one piling, gloved with green algae and slime, and larger than the rest, seemed to rear back as though resisting the gray mud that mired it. He squinted, looked hard, saw: primordial ooze, spawning strange being down below, a race of quasi-lunged, half-legged creatures dragging themselves along the bottom; a world sunless, gloomy, nocturnal, where sunken logs lay, sodden and heavy, poor dead drowned things, and with them, hidden in the murk, savage bloated creatures, mouths wide as shovels, thick lips nuzzling threads of water-whitened ganglia, picking clean of flesh skeletons through whose empty eye-sockets coldly glowing eels would like night trains, while overhead, through the ruined roof, pterodactyls soared the vacant sky.

He drifted, dreamed; and dreamed some more.

I was describing this book to my sister — she said it sounded familiar and was trying to place it, and when she asked the author's name it fell into place. Thomas Tryon. Everyone read Thomas Tryon in the 70s. She'd gone through a phase herself as a teenager gobbling up everything he'd written.

Dan Chaon (who falls smack between me and my sister in terms of generation) is similarly enthusiastic in reminiscing in the book's afterword about discovering The Other. He explains:

The novel is really about the moment when the weapons of childhood are revealed to be no more than a box of tricks. It's a parable of the terror many us come to around age twelve or thirteen, a deeply disturbing epiphany.

The twins' Russian grandmother knows all about it. "We sometimes reach a point in our lives where we can't ever go back again, we have to go on from there. All that was before is past now."

I really look forward to rediscovering this book on my shelf some dark and stormy night years from now, or my daughter finding it and regaling me with the details of the mysterious psychological tricks, by which time I will surely have forgotten the twists, and who suffered from them.

The Other is a box of tricks: magic tricks, tricks of the light, dirty tricks, tricks of mind, literary tricks. Trick or treat, I loved this book.

Excerpt.

A storytelling code of solidarity

The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon, is a kind of road trip — physically through Eastern Europe, but also through the narrator's immigrant experience and his marriage, with the ultimate destination being Chicago a hundred years ago, where Lazarus — Moldovan Jew, survivor of pogroms, alleged anarchist — was shot dead upon entering the home of the chief of police. Only past and present slowly get all mixed up and collide and disintegrate before we're ever fully there.

I think this novel knows that it can't bring the past to life as richly as it deserves, that that's not its strength, so it stops trying after a few chapters. Instead it becomes a novel about trying to write that novel.

I used to tell stories to Mary, stories of my childhood and immigrant adventures, stories I had picked up from other people. But I had become tired of telling them, tired of listening to them. In Chicago, I had found myself longing for the Sarajevo way of doing it — Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners' attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. There was a storytelling code of solidarity — you did not sabotage someone else's narration if it was satisfying to the audience, or you could expect one of your stories to be sabotaged one day, too. Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story and, maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth — reality is the fastest American commodity.

Just as Hemon is both American and something else, this novel is something of a hybrid — over-the-top storytelling with injections of reality, or vice versa. Only sometimes you can't tell which parts are which; that's one of the problems when your particular reality includes things like pogroms or war.

The book also includes photos, which, ironically, while they are a permanent record of reality, seem entirely disconnected from the reality portrayed in the book; they have to be storytold into the narrative, since they are not able to speak for themselves.

This book appealled to my intellect many times over — in fact, I read this novel relatively slowly, pausing to think about what I'd read. Every day a new passage would leap out that demanded to be chewed over, shared with others. However, I never really connected with this novel, despite it bearing all the marks of being something I would love. I admire it greatly, but it turns out I don't care for it much.

The Lazaraus Project online
See also: The Paris Review
Bookslut: An interview with Aleksandar Hemon

Reviews
The Guardian
The Independant
London Review of Books (subscription required)
New York Times
The Telegraph

The distance of the moon

A month of days and lunar nights stretched uninterrupted before us... An animated adaptation of Italo Calvino's "The Distance of the Moon," found in Cosmicomics.


(via io9)

I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, nor she that She, for me. I was eager to return to the Earth, and I trembled at the fear of having lost it. The fulfillment of my dream of love had lasted only that instant when we had been united, spinning between Earth and Moon; torn from its earthly soil, my love now knew only the heart-rending nostalgia for what it lacked: a where, a surrounding, a before, an after.

This was no comfort food

I was having a Big Mac, large fries, and a large Coke. Rora got McEggs and a milk shake. We sat outside and ate quickly, greedily. This was no comfort food; it was food that implied that there had never been and would never be any need for comfort.

— from The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon.

I've been turning to a great deal of comfort food these last weeks, a need brought on by work stress and migraine. A lot of my comfort food consists of (what some would consider to be weird) Polish things, like beet soup (even if it is instant) and cottage cheese mixed with radishes. But I derive genuine comfort from these and other foods, by their association with comforting times, often childhood and being cared for.

But I suppose there are other foods (potato chips come to my mind) that are perhaps similar to the kind of food Hemon alludes to in the above passage. Something that implies abundance and normalcy, possibly waste and the unnecessary; the everyday, like everybody. Which is still a kind of comfort I suppose. Hemon has made me realize that there are different qualities of comfort imbuing my foods.

Are your comfort foods truly comforting, or are they like Hemon's Mc-non-comfort?