nocturama
Chapter Eight was supposed to be finished by the end of February, but no: Chapter Eight is the beast that will not die. Must finish—must finish soon. These months are spiraling away, and I don't want this economy, and it doesn't want me.
Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald. What a strange book this was. The English rendering of the prose is pitch-perfect, retaining the long tidal rhythms of German sentences, and the entire novel has a similar flow as it crests over three hundred pages without a single chapter break or even a white space, excepting the photographs. It's very European: heavy on memory and meditation, long musings on the philosophy of architecture, that sort of thing. You can feel the menace rising from the beginning, and while the story does eventually deliver what it promises, the book is never driven by events. It's all thoughts and impressions. I enjoyed it; I admire it; I would recommend it to others; but I didn't love it quite as much as all the rhapsodizing critics did. It's a question of taste, I think: how much reserve can you take in a narrator?
