Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

Let us establish this quite clearly: a butler's duty is to provide good service.

As I remember, Giffen's appeared at the beginning of the twenties, and I am sure I am not alone in closely associating its emergence with that change of mood within our profession--that change which came to push the polishing of silver to the position of central importance it still by and large maintains today. This shift was, I believe, like so many other major shifts around this period, a generational matter; it was during these years that our generation of butlers 'came of age', and figures like Mr Marshall, in particular, played a crucial part in making silver-polishing so central.

What do you think dignity's all about?
The directness of this inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. 'It's rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,' I said. 'But I suspect it comes down to not removing one's clothing in public.'

I remember coming here years ago, and there was this American chap here. We were having a big conference, my father was involved in organizing it. I remember this American chap, even drunker than I am now, he got up at the dinner table in front of the whole company. And he pointed at his lordship and called him an amateur. Called him a bungling amateur and said he was out of his depth. Well, I have to say, Stevens, that American chap was quite right. It's a fact of life. Today's world is too foul a place for fine and noble instincts. You've seen it yourself, haven't you, Stevens? The way they've manipulated something fine and noble. You've seen it yourself, haven' t you?
I'm sorry, sir, but I can't say that I have.

But, then, I rather fancy it has more to do with this skill of bantering. listening to them now, I can hear them exchanging one bantering remark after another. It is, I would suppose, the way many people like to proceed. In fact, it is possible my bench companion of a while ago expected me to banter with him--in which case, I suppose I was something of a sorry disappointment. Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in--particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

My respect for Mr. Ishiguro grows with every book of his I read. The man is a brilliant writer. His control over the language and the diverse use of style (read Never Let Me Go and compare it with Remains of the Day) are impossible to comprehend. I have often thought how similar the Japanese and English cultures are, but in Mr. Ishiguro we find them synthesized. And in no story have I found this more evident than Remains of the Day. His masterful use of meiosis results in some of the most poignant passages you will ever read.
The narrator of Remains of the Day passes over his life and his current journey with a respectful downplaying that makes you perk up your ears and say, wait! this can't be! this man must be feeling something, he must be screaming inside! And because you are looking for it, you find it. There are many places where you hear the butler Stevens' voice quietly talking over a raging caged goblin that is his soul.
I'm having trouble knowing just what to say about this book. There are so many themes wrapped together in it. Dignity, peace--in one's heart as well as on an international level--, old age and looking back at one's purpose in life. If you are old, reading Remains of the Day (I think) probably makes you feel weak and wish to sit down and perhaps makes you rebel strongly against the weakness of your age and desire to take up anew the standard of your life--whatever it has been--and carry it proudly over one last hill. If you are young, Remains of the Day will probably knock you to your knees and set your teeth to chattering--you'll ask yourself, must I end this way? must I too feel this weight of insignificance and waste when I have walked through the greater portion of my life? It will make you promsie yourself anew to never settle for the mediocre and the pointless, but it will also leave a little bitter taste at the back of your mouth that whispers: you don't have much control over mediocrity or not. It'll seize you no matter what you do. For on the edge of the grave, can any life seem more than half lived?
There is only one point in Remains of the Day where Ishiguro lets his narrator reveal his heart's passion. In one sentence, a sentence so cliche and simple you would pass over it in any other book without a thought, the butler Stevens tells us all his insecurities about how he has lived his life. What if...

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed--why should I not admit it?--at that moment, my heart was breaking. Before long, however, I turned to her and said with a smile.

Did you catch it? It was towards the end there. A whole novel full of controlled, gilded statements and then this one, this one statement about his heart and the whole thing is shattered. What if bantering is the key to human warmth?

An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro

But I do not think it an exaggeration to say that a great many of those living here before the war would be familiar with it, for it did receive much praise at the time for its vigorous brush technique and, particularly, its powerful use of colour. But I am fully aware, of course, that 'Eyes to the Horizon', whatever its artistic merits, is a painting whose sentiments are now outdated.

It is not, I fancy, a feeling many people will come to experience. The likes of the Tortoise--the likes of Shintaro--they may plod on, competent and inoffensive, but their kind will never know the sort of happiness I felt that day. For their kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeavour to rise above the mediocre.

We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost. It's just that in the end we turned out to be ordinary men. Ordinary men with no special gifts of insight. It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times.

When I am an old man, when I look back over my life and see I have devoted it to the task of capturing the unique beauty of the world, I believe I will be well satisfied. And no man will make me believe I've wasted my time.

Can an entire generation be condemned? What is a nation to do when it gambles for greatness--and this probably means a good deal of evil--and fails? What did the aging generations of post WWII Japan and Germany do? How could they walk the streets? They who pushed their nations on in their conquests? They who stood in support of everything those regimes stood for? Most of this generation is gone now, but what must their waning years have been like? To have to live out the rest of your life knowing that it is the universal decision of the world to condemn your generation as evil--how does one live with that?
And then there is Art. What if an artist allows (or even uses) his art to push on and support such endeavors? Is the art to be disregarded? Should his paintings be burned? Should the memory of his greatness be wiped away? Reading An Artist of the Floating World puts you in the shoes of an aging Japanese artist in post-war Japan as he watches his children and the younger generation tip-toe around him and what his generation has done. Not only do you get the feel that this man has been subjected to a great indignity (which perhaps he did earn) but he is simultaneously experiencing the indignity of a mind and body collapsing about him. You want a startling narrative of aging...An Artist of the Floating World will give it to you. Can a man of such a generation have pride in himself and his life? Can he live without pride?

The Violent Bear It Away

Flannery O'Connor

Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

Children are cursed with believing.

I only meant to drown him, the boy said. You're only born once. They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled in the water. He shook his head violently as if to scatter his thoughts.

I had never read Flannery O'Connor but had her recommended to me by many people, almost always because she was Catholic. But I truly don't know what to say about The Violent Bear it Away. Like all Southern fiction for me, it feels as though I should live through a desert of some forty or fifty years before I read it, and come to it with a great weight of life and dry, yellow memory.
O'Connor's stories are deceivingly calm like summer afternoons in the South. They lull you into a lazy fog of simplicity, but lurking beneath is an intricate and delicately knit structure of thought and idea as complex as any metropolis. They are stories of 'and's rather than commas and yet these 'and's provide the same depth and intellectualism as commas but make it seem smoother and more droning.
As you may be able to gather, The Violent Bear it Away has left me dizzy and sweating and wishing I could sit in a rocking chair for the duration.

The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje

Drawn by desire of Lord Suffolk, by his student Lieutenant Kirpal Singh, 10 May 1941

I am a man who did not enjoy poetry until I heard a woman recite it to us.

Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote, I fell in love.
Words, Caravaggio. They have power.

Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you.
The rest of the time I feel it doesn't matter
if I ever see you again. It isn't the morality,
it is how much you can bear.

He has been disassembled by her.
And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?

Hana is quiet. he knows the depth of darkness in her, her lack of a child and of faith. He is always coaxing her from the edge of her fields of sadness. A child lost. A father lost.
"I have lost someone like a father as well," he has said. But she knows this man beside her is one of the charmed, who has grown up an outsider and so can switch allegiances, can replace loss. There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not. If she asks him he will say he has had a good life--his brother in jail, his comrades blown up, and he risking himself daily in this war.

I am a man who fasts until I see what I want.

They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.

This, I don't think, has much to do with Ondaatje's book but it came to my mind when reading The English Patient. There is a tendency in the US to paint our history with a golden brush. I am thinking specifically of the World Wars. For some reason, perhaps because my knowledge of this time in our history comes from Hollywood, World War II has never seemed as evil, as vile, as terrifying, or as scream-inducing as the (non) wars since the 50s.
But in reading The English Patient it occured over and over to me that that war, above all wars, must have been hell. It seems that the purity of our mission in that war works as a protective diaper to hide us from all the shit. As if because we had a clear enemy and that enemy was evil people didn't feel as much pain when they died, didn't scream as loud when their arms were blown off, didn't wallow in hospitals without skin for as long, and didn't grown in response to shredded nerves.
Time doesn't only provide an insulating factor; it allows truth to become maleable. With the loss of specificity that much time brings, also comes a simplicity and clarity that could not have been there. And so when we think about our current wars, it wants a good deal of chin-rubbing. Do we just look back on wars we won and call them glorious triumphs against the forces of evil, while the wars we lose we shake our heads and condemn the generations that started them as misguided imperialists or war-mongers. The Spanish-American war--that generation is laughable. Few history books have completmentary things for them. Korea and Vietnam (we must admit Korea has fallen into Vietnam's shaddow and doesn't seem to be mentioned by anyone at all anymore) we shake our heads and draw down our mouths in grim frowns of disappointment. How could our fathers and their fathers have been so misguided? And what will we look like when our children and the generations that come after them glance back at this page?
If we don't win (keeping in mind that winning may be as delicate a thing as the correct semantic argument--forgive my cynicism) we'll be subject to the same tight faces of chagrin. If we win...will it get white-washed with the same brush of righteousness that has coated every other war America has been victorious in? The victors do write history afterall.
As to The English Patient? Excellent. Strangely, it is a love story without feeling like one. I'm not sure who is or was falling in or out of love with who, but all the characters in The English Patient are full of love. Think about that when you read it. There are many pebbles and stones in Ondaatje's field, so take your heavy duty plow to this one.

Invitation to a Beheading

Vladimir Nabokov

So we are nearing the end. The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there were still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and--O horrible!

Everything has duped me as it fell into place, everything. This is the dead end of this life, and I should not have sought salvation within its confines. It is strange that I should have sought salvation. Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw. I have discovered it. I have discovered the little crack in life, where it broke off, where it had once been soldered to something else, something genuinely alive, important and vast--how capacious my epithets must be in order that I may pour them full of crystalline sense...it is best to leave some things unsaid, or else I shall get confused again. Within this irreparable little crack decay has set in--ah, I think I shall yet be able to express it all-the dreams, the coalescence, the disintegration--no, again I am off the track--all my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples. Oh, if only I had known that I was yet to remain here for such a long time, I would have begun at the beginning and gradually, along a high road of logically connected ideas, would have attained, would have completed, my soul would have surrounded itself with a structure of words....Everything that I have written here so far is only the froth of my excitement, a senseless transport, for the very reason that I have been in such a hurry. But now, when I am hardened, when I am almost fearless of...

To finish writing something, whispered Cincinnatus half questioningly but then he frowned, straining his thoughts, and suddenly understood that everything had in fact been written already.

I realized in reading Invitation to a Beheading that John Barth's Floating Opera has the same basic element: the agony of an imminent but postponed demise. Death lurking around the corner. But where Barth was on the whole whimsical or at least sarcastic, Nabokov is downright evil. Every time I encounter his work I get the distinct feeling he is reaching into my mind and attempting to make things into mush there.
Invitation to a Beheading should terrify you. If it doesn't that probably means you are transparent and not real like Cincinnatus. Be careful.

The Pearl

John Steinbeck

Juana dragged herself up from the rocks on the edge of the water. Her face was a dull pain and her side ached. She steadied herself on her knees for a while and her wet skirt clung to her. There was no anger in her for Kino. He had said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man. Although she might be puzzled by these differences between man and woman, she knew them and accepted them and needed them. Of course she would follow him, there was no question of that. Sometimes the quality of woman, the reason, the caution, the sense of preservation, could cut through Kino's manness and save them all. She climbed painfully to her feet, and she dipped her cupped palms in the little waves and washed her bruised face with the stinging salt water, and then she went creeping up the beach after Kino.

Stories are like houses. Some are made of mud bricks and some are made of wood and some are made of stone and are great big castles. Stories are good as they are; there are times we want a lean-to of a story and there are times we need a Victorian mansion. But Steinbeck has the faculty of using building materials more precious than most. The Pearl is a story made of delicate but solid granite timbers. Each sentence holds the weight of the world in it and each sentence will bear all the force you can push against it with.
The Pearl is like a parable and like a fable but has got more story than either.

Zorba the Greek

Nikos Kazantzakis
Tr. Carl Wildman

A little child had fallen into a well, said the story. There it found a marvelous city, flower gardens, a lake of pure honey, a mountain of rice pudding and multi-colored toys. As I spelled it out, each syllable seemed to take me further into that magic city. Once, at midday, when I had come home from school, I ran into the garden, rushed to the rim of the well beneath the vine arbor and stood fascinated, staring at the smooth black surface of the water. I soon thought I could see the marvelous city, houses and streets, the children and the vine arbor loaded with grapes. I could hold out no longer; I hung my head down, held out my arms and kicked against the ground to push myself over the edge. But at that moment my mother noticed me. She screamed, rushed out and caught me by my waistband, just in time...

Now whatever is this red water, boss, just tell me! An old stock grows branches, and at first there's nothing but a sour bunch of beads hanging down. Time passes, the sun ripens them, they become as sweet as honey, and then they're called grapes. We trample on them; we extract the juice and put it into casks; it ferments on its own, we open it on the feast day of St. John the Drinker, it's become wine! It's a miracle! You drink the red juice and, lo and behold, your souls grows big, too big for the old carcass, it challenges God to a fight. Now tell me, boss, how does it happen?

You can't understand, boss! he said, shrugging his shoulders. I told you I had been in every trade. Once I was a potter. I was mad about that craft. D'you realize what it means to take a lump of mud and make what you will out of it? Ffrr! You turn the wheel and the mud whirls round, as if it were possessed while you stand over it and say: I'm going to make a jug, I'm going to make a plate, I'm going to make a lamp and the devil knows what more! That's what you might call being a man: freedom!

Why don't you laugh? Why d'you look at me like that? That's how I am. There's a devil in me who shouts, and I do what he says. Whenever I feel I'm choking with some emotion, he says: 'Dance!' and I dance. And I feel better! Once, when my little Dimitraki died, in Chalcidice, I got up as I did a moment ago and I danced. The relations and friends who saw me dancing in front of the body rushed up to stop me. 'Zorba has gone mad!' they cried, 'Zorba has gone mad!' but if at that moment I had not danced, I should really have gone mad--from grief. Because it was my first son and he was three years old and I could not bear to lose him. You understand what I'm saying, boss, don't you--or am I talking to myself?

Well, as I was saying, this Hussein Aga was a saintly man. One day he took em on his knee and placed his hand on my head as though he were giving me his blessing. 'Alexis' he said, 'I'm going to tell you a secret. You're too small to understand now, but you'll understand when you are bigger. Listen, little one: neither the seven stories of heaven nor the seven stories of the earth are enough to contain God; but a man's heart can contain him. So be very careful, Alexis--and my my blessing go with you--never wound a man's heart!

My father was a real Palikari. Don't look at me, I'm only a breath of air beside him. I don't come up to his ankles. He was one of those ancient Greeks they always talk about. When he shook your hand he nearly crushed your bones to pulp. I can talk now and then, but my father roared, neighed and sang. There very rarely came a human word out of his mouth.
Well, he had all the vices, but he'd slash them, as you would with a sword. For instance, he smoked like a chimney. One morning he got up and went into the fields to plow. He arrived, leaned on the hedge, pushed his hand into his belt for his tobacco pouch to roll a cigarette before he began to work, took out his pouch and found it was empty. He'd forgotten to fill it before leaving the house.
He foamed with rage, let out a roar, and then bounded away towards the village. His passion for smoking completely unbalanced his reason, you see. But suddenly--I've always said I think a man's a mystery--he stopped, filled with shame, pulled out his pouch and tore it to shreds with his teeth, then stamped it in the ground and spat on it. Filth! Filth! he bellowed. Dirty slut!
And from that hour, until the end of his days, he never put another cigarette between his lips.
That's the way real men behave boss.

See boss, what a cunning creature is woman! She can even twist God round her little finger!

We are little grubs, Zorba, minute grubs on the small leaf of a tremendous tree. This small leaf is the earth. The other leaves are the stars that you see moving at night. We make our way on this little leaf examining it anxiously and carefully. We smell it; it smells good or bad to us. We taste it and find it eatable. We beat on it and it cries out like a living thing.
Some men--the more intrepid ones--reach the edge of the leaf. From there we stretch out, gazing into chaos. We tremble. We guess what a frightening abyss lies beneath us. In the distance we can hear the noise of the other leaves of the tremendous tree, we feel the sap rising from the roots to our leaf and our hearts swell. Ben thus over the awe-inspiring abyss, with all our bodies and all our souls, we tremble with terror. From that moment begins...

A brother tells stories to his younger sister, great stories of marvelous imagination that conceive the world in all the brightest colors. She believes these stories.
A people tell lies to themselves in order to explain the wonders of the universe. The rain is not precipitation but the tears of the gods. The raging storms of the sea are Poseidon's wrath and no function of entropy. They understand these stories and understand their world.
A culture joins together to tell a collective lie to its children and this lie becomes the central story of a great winter festival. The children believe this lie at the pressure of their parents; they are bribed to believe it and is this wrong?
Is it wrong to understand the world in a way that is different from the "factual scientific" understanding that is forced on us now? What is more truthful: that the Narcissus evolved because of its specific environment or that it is a young man turned into a flower because of his pride? Truth doesn't always have to be factual reality. They are not the same. It's a fact that I am composed of atoms and cells and you can read about how all this works in a textbook. It's the truth that there's magic in these bones and you can read about that in a book, too.
Facts like the ones we are so proud of as a nation and culture now are only our temporary understanding of Nature and the world we live in. The truth is not found in these facts. Truth is found in myths and is more permanent.
Do you see your thumb as a miracle or a collision?

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He is ugly and sad, she said to Fermina Daza, but he is all love.

They continued to put his soap in the bathroom, his monogrammed pillowcase on the bed; his place was always set at the table, in case he returned from the dead without warning, as he tended to do in life. But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate, after having renounced not only their family name but their own identity in exchange for a security that was no more than another of a bride's many illusions. They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality.

He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.

But it was a useful lesson, and not for him alone. Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

No, not rich, he said. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

I think I am going to die.
She did not even blink when she replied.
That would be best, she said. Then we could both have some peace.
Years before, during the crisis of a dangerous illness, he had spoken of the possibility of dying, and she had made the same brutal reply. Dr. Urbino attributed it to the natural hardheartedness of women, which allows the earth to continue revolving around the sun, because at that time he did not know that she always erected a barrier of wrath to hide her fear. And in this case it was the most terrible one of all, the fear of losing him.

With surprising skill, she rolled a cigarette from the little box of tobacco that he had brought her. She smoked it slowly, with the lit end inside her mouth, not speaking, and then she rolled another two and smoked them one right after the other. Sip by sip, Florentino Ariza drank two thermoses of mountain coffee.

There are many profound lines in Love in the Time of Cholera but there are also many uncomfortable itches that do not get scratched. First and most annoying, the mystery of the first chapter is dropped from the story. What Garcia Marquez spends almost fifty pages developing, he drops in the next 300. Really the story could begin at chapter two. We forgive him this though for the sake of the rest of the story.
For Love in the Time of Cholera is an exciting story. Garcia Marquez takes that imagining of the heart and turns it into reality. What if love is a lingering disease, one of those that cripples and maims but does not kill? Most stories, in order to bow to plot and drama give you love the lightning cancer cut it out or it will eat your brain and heart and spine version, but Garcia Marquez delivers love the disease that is slower than old age.

Villa Incognito

Tom Robbins

What are we talking about when we talk about the soul? Well, pop culture to the contrary, the soul is not an overweight nightclub singer having an unhappy love affair in Detroit. The soul doesn't hang out at a Memphis barbershop, fry catfish for supper, and keep a thirty-eight Special in its underwear drawer. Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise.
On the other hand, Stubblefield continued, the soul is most definitely not some pale vapor wafting off a bucket of metaphysical dry ice. For all of its ectoplasmic associations, it steadfastly contradicts those who imagine it to be a billow of sacred flatulence or a shimmer of personal swamp gas.
Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why, when we ponder--as sooner or later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They're mistaken.

It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute.

There is a difference between an author and a writer. By virtue of being published, Robbins is an author. By virtue of the first line of Villa Incognito he is both a hack and an aspiring genius. There are many moments in Villa Incognito when Robbins rouses himself to what would be great heights but he inevitably ruins these moments by letting us see how hard he is trying, and it is very hard.
There is something about all of Villa Incognito that rings sour in my ear. Like the last quote above, which is the first of the book, you always have the feeling that Robbins is trying to make up for something by giving you outrageous subject matter. The dancing bears will receive applause as long as they are mutant bears or cross-dressing bears, or have unusually large genitalia, never mind if they dance badly. Tom Robbins dances badly.

The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien

That can be answered, he said. There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.

He disappeared the next morning on his bicycle and when he came back very dusty and travel-worn at the end of three days, he told me that everything was all right and that four barrels of better porter could be expected on Friday. It came punctually on that day and was well bought by the customers in the public house that night. It was manufactured in some town in the south and was known as 'The Wrastler'. If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win. The customers praised it highly and when they had it inside them they sang and shouted and sometimes lay down on the floor or on the roadway outside in a great stupor. Some of them complained afterwards that they had been robbed while in this state and talked angrily in teh shop the next night about stolen money and gold watches which had disappeared off their strong chains. John Divney did not say much on this subject to them and did not mention it to me at all. He printed the words--Beware of Pickpockets--in large letters on a card and hung it on the back of shelves beside another notice that dealt with cheques. Nevertheless a week rarely passed without some customer complaining after an evening with 'The Wrastler'. It was not a satisfactory thing.

The 'Codex' (first so-called by Bassett in his monumental De Selby Compendium) is a collection of some two-thousand sheets of foolscap closely hand-written on both sides. The signal distinction of the manuscript is that not one word of writing is legible. Attempts made by different commentators to decipher certain passages which look less formidable than others have been characterised by fantastic divergencies, not in the meaning of the passages (of which there is no question) but in the brand of nonsense which is evolved. One passage, described by Bassett as being 'a penetrating treatise on old age' is referred to by Henderson (biographer of Bassett) as 'a not unbeautiful description of lambing operations on an unspecified farm'. Such disagreement, it must be confessed, does little to enhance the reputation of either writer.

Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.

My second foray into Flann O'Brien. He is still unique. The Third Policeman was not quite as enjoyable a read as At-Swim-Two-Birds but I put this down to the former's more mundane topic. Surely hell is intriguing--The Inferno is always more Popular than Paradisio--but when hell is policemen on bicycles who are more concerned with headlamps and bike pumps, hell loses all of its draw and becomes the most terrifying thing it could be: eternally boring.
On a completely different note, O'Brien technique of manufacturing his own world of footnotes and scholarship is one that I admire greatly and have seen imitated in authors like David Foster Wallace. O'Brien carries on a very technical discussion of the great (and imaginary) philosopher De Selby. One footnote carries over filling almost two full pages. The dead pan with which O'Brien achieves this--beautiful. I don't think this style would work unless someone approached it both with the seriousness and ridiculousness of O'Brien. The theories propounded by De Selby, which we hear of through the footnotes, are so incredible, they bring a depth and readability to the story that makes them anything but footnotes. That truly would be hell: The Third Policeman without footnotes.