#dalkey archive

—Me, raised on Looney Tunes, the Muppets, Mel Brooks, live theatre, and pre-20th century literature.

Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse

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What do you think happens when you die? Like, assuming that your consciousness is a self-contained capsule of memory and awareness that can exist outside of your corporeal form (one might even call it the "spirit"), do you think that it (you) will even notice when it is separated from the body? Or will it simply continue on without a hitch? One thing seems certain: without any new input, your consciousness will likely trigger a feedback loop and generate some strange conglomerate of past memories that will be recontextualized into new experiences (almost exactly like generative AI), but this could only go on for so long until your consciousness becomes aware that something feels off.

Personally, this idea terrifies me, and there is indeed an unmistakable sense of cosmic dread that runs through this novella, but Fosse has managed to create a compelling vision of how imperceptible the veil between life and death might be while also making an equally compelling case for the intrinsic beauty of life in every stage of its cycle. It is through this process of the consciousness coming to terms with its own fate that Morning and Evening proves how a certain level of discomfort is absolutely necessary to experience any sort of joy in life, and by the end of that process, all I could do was cry.

Midnight Is Not In Everyone’s Reach by António Lobo Antunes

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The best art is often times the art that challenges your perceptions and forces you to meet the artist halfway. In the realm of music I have often developed Stockholm syndrome in my attempts to grapple with perplexing styles, and through that effort I have turned many albums from ear antagonists into lifelong friends. The same can be said about books.

I say this because as much as I ended up loving Midnight Is Not In Everyone's Reach upon completion, I cannot understate the challenge I faced in getting there.

The narrative form of this book is very experimental and surreal. It reads more like fragmented shards of poetry than a cogent story. In short, it is about a woman who returns to her childhood beach house to say goodbye to the ghosts of her family before following the path of her older brother who committed suicide, and just like the narrator in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, she becomes consumed by lingering memories that interject and overlap, causing past and present conversations to weave themselves into a dizzying collage, and the novel quickly becomes less about a singular protagonist and more of an intimate portrait of familial trauma and grief.

Sounds cool, I know, but this non-linearity of events becomes a deterrent, as if the form of the novel itself were a trauma response set in place to safeguard those memories from surfacing. Even on a sentence-by-sentence basis the words often assemble themselves in nonsensical strings of (perceived) non-meaning, which caused me to repeatedly question what this book could possibly tell me that was worth the effort of prying it open, but what kept me going through those moments of doubt was Antunes's careful repetition of motifs to string together fragments of memory into distinct profiles of emotion and character. What appeared nonsensical and formless at first began to reveal its structure, like a free jazz ensemble, which is purposely obtuse but clearly the result of skilled musicianship and collective harmony—a beautiful thing in and of itself.

"'Tis a great world and a short life!" replied Burlingame. "A pox on all steps but great ones!"

One of my aims this year is to try to read as many books as I can from the teetering TBR, and I do feel I’m doing reasonably well so far. Today’s book is one I picked up in May 2019 and I have no idea why I was drawn to it; but I was casting around for a suitable train book to read on my recent trip to the capital, and I thought it might be ideal – which it was! The title is “Eleven Prague…