My 2015 Reading Journal: October 2015

Open Letter Series
Based on true story of the founders of the Spiritualist religious movement
Originally published in 2015
Tunisian author
Review: I read this book for two reasons. First, I read and love all Open Letter publications to date. Secondly,I plan on attending a release party for this book in a couple of days and received a complimentary copy prior to the event which will include a reading by the translator and other activities with the spiritualist theme. Yikes! Imagine my surprise when I encountered this poorly written novel. The story is based on fact, the Fox sisters from Rochester and their being the impetus for the Spiritualist Movement. I do not know whether the problem is with the author's writing or the translation. However, the choppy, awkward narrative was very difficult to read. I am disappointed in this, the first publication which elicits only frustration.

Summer Sub Club with Beth
Bulgarian author
An Open Letter Publication
Originally published in 2011, translation published in 2015
Link to article in "The New Yorker": http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-bulgarian-sadness-of-georgi-gospodinov
Epigraphy:

"Myth is the nothing that is everything" - F. Pessoa, Mesagem
There is only childhood and death. And nothing in between..." - Gaustine, Selected Autobiographies
"The world is no longer magical. You have been abandoned.." - Borges, 1964
"...And I enter the fields and spacious halls of memory, where are stored as treasures the countless images..." - Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X
"Only the fleeting and ephemeral are worth recording." - Gaustine, "The Forsaken Ones"
"I feel a longing to fly,to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl. I would like to have wings, a tortoise-shell, a rind, to blow out smoke, to wear a trunk, to twit my body, to spread myself everywhere, to be in everything, to emanate with odors, to grow like plants, to flow like water...to penetrate every atom t descend to the very depths of matter--to be matter." - Gustave Flaubert, "The Temptations of St. Anthony"
"...missing...memory and desire..." - T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"
"Purebred genres don't interest me much. The novel is no Aryan." - Gaustine, "Novel and Nothingness"
"If the reader prefers, this book may be taken as fiction..." - Ernest Hemingway, "A Moveable Feast"

Quotes:

p.21..."The tears stream down his face, down my face, they mix with the flour dust on the face, water, salt , and flour, and knead he first bread of grief. The bread that never runs out. The bread of sorrow, which will feed us through all the coming years. Its salty taste n the lips. My grandfather swallows. I swallow too. We are three years old."....gf's memory of being accidentally left behind at a mill
"the wicked man flees though no one pursues"
p.39..."His reappearance, like all resurrections, only upset the normal course of life."
p.43..."I can't offer a linear story, because no story, and no labyrinth is ever linear."
p.52..."I did not know so much death dozed beneath language."
p.53..."The absence of children in greek mythology is striking."
p.74..."...a man who finds himself in hell is freed from the fear that something worse could befall him."
p.82...."A History of Boredom in the 1980s needs to be written. This is the decade that produced the most boredom. The afternoon of the century."
p.102..."In December we heard about AIDs for the first time. Which, in 1981, put an end to the '60s. All sexual revolutions were called off for health reasons. Since they had never really started here in Bulgaria, we didn't take their end as anything particularly tragic."
p.105..."Yes, unlike the '60s, which were truly sexy, colorful, they knew how to dress, the '80s, like communism as a whole, came to an ugly end.
p.108..."Empathy predisposes you to closeness to people, but not in my case, when the weight of others' sorrows pressed down on me like a sickness."
p.110..."I know that the past is as as fruitless as a barren mare. But that makes it all the more dear to me."
p.119..."The aging of an empath is a strange and painful process. The corridors toward others and their stories, which once were open, now turn out to be walled up. House arrest in your own body."
p.138..."Every cliche (and a cliche is nothing more than an abstraction that has swallowed its own tail) becomes dangerous when it is made literal."
p.143..."A whole life can be told in a catalog of moves."
p.155..."The basic question, the litmus test, the divider between good and evil--could what I've thought up be done by an animal?"
p.201..."Meaninglessness has entered the uncertain Troy of the body via a wooden horse
p.211..."The saddest place in the world, as the Economist called it in 2010, as if there is truly a geography of happiness."
p.225..."The labyrinth is someone's fossilized hesitation."
p.225..."The most oppressive thing about the labyrinth is that you are constantly being forced to choose. It isn't the lack of an exit, but the abundance of 'exits' that is so disorienting

Notes:

Life for a Bulgarian is akin to that lived by the Minotaur in the labyrinth
Ability to live another's life via his/her memory: Pathological empathy, or Obsessive-Empathic Somatic Disorder
80% of Bulgarians never left the country prior to 1989
Life pre-1989 was like having lived in a basement
"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"
p.55...invisible fruit ink
p.56..."I am books."'...
p.66..."Come see what mythology has become.
Labyrinths:

inner ear
life
life in Bulgaria
stories
Blind Man's Bluff
the internet, we are "Min-avatars" on Facebook
an amphitheater, concentric circles...story of bull recognizing it
Sheherazad's 1001 Arabian tales

Colony Collapse Disorder...apian, humans
Death has lost its face.....now it is from a distance
Retell "The Old Man and The Sea" from the point of view of the fish
Phobia of being asked "How are you?"...triviality

Review: Brilliant! Before reading this brilliant piece of literature, I recommend pondering the notion that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", and familiarizing yourself with the legend of the Minotaur. Both are central to this collection/series/story. Can you fathom being able to enter someone else's memory and then experiencing the memory as if it is yours? The experience of reading this literary wonder was akin to being in an intellectual and emotional labyrinth. And lest you be misled, this is also a tribute to Bulgarian life, pre-1989, which is likened to living in a basement for almost an entire lifetime. I laughed out loud and cringed with sadness because of this wonderful writer's use of language. If it is this powerful in a translation, I am envious of those who are priveleged to read it in the original.

My 2015 Reading Journal

Monday, October 26, 2015

"Hard Eight" by Janet Evanovich ****

Sunday, October 25, 2015

"Skipping Christmas" by John Grisham ***

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

"Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters" by Hubert Haddad **

Monday, October 19, 2015

"Mr. Mercedes" by Stephen King ****

Sunday, October 11, 2015

"The Physics of Sorrow" by Georgi Gospodinov *****

Friday, October 2, 2015

"The Son" by Jo Nesbo. *****