This website welcomes its latest contribution, entitled “Sequence of a life”; it’s all about this life’s narrative. Think of it as an internal audit, with an inventory of people and places. Will you read it ’til the end?
One happy, unintended consequence of aforementioned audit is the partial re-discovery of Adrian leBlanc; now a journalist living on the East Coast, she has just published her first book, Random Family.
Which leads to another, as Adi was responsible for my induction into Milan Kundera’s novels. Kundera, Skvorecky and Klima have much to answer for. Delving into The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Engineer of Human souls, Love and Garbage at an impressionable age leads to a lifetime of loathing and self-censorship. Henceforth, this anti-canon becomes the canon, all else is consigned to the dustbin of kitsch; nothing that is without seriousness and irony is permitted. This is the tyranny of the émigré novel.
Lest we forget, however: as educators, Kundera et al cannot be faulted. I resolve to once again embrace
Kafka, Broch, Musil, Gombrowicz. I call them the “pleiad” of Central Europe’s great novelists. … Without knowing them, not much of the modern novel can be understood. Briefly, these authors are modernists, which is to say that they are impassioned by a search for new forms. Kundera, in an interview
My (second) favourite bookshop in the whole wide world has ceased to exist. The Waterstones along Charing Cross Road is no more; when before it stocked wisdom and ideas from Adorno to Zizek, the premises are now humbled into selling suitcases (”The London Luggage Co.”), the implication being that it is more profitable to sell empty suitcases than words randomly strung together, albeit sometimes in coherent fashion. This follows the sad demise of Compendium Bookshop in 2000. This monumental presence on the cultural scene is remembered in the pages of Radical Philosophy: “Compendium … in the end was a victim of the very forces it had always opposed: the commodification of culture and the growth of big capital”.
Alexandra Richie’s Faust’s Metropolis and Anthony Beevor’s Berlin remind me of happier moments. Click to see photos, even more photos (in a German site) and an overview of the city should you be interested.
