time of the wolf (w&d haneke)

We had just arrived in London. A muggy summer afternoon in Whitechapel. Walking past the Genesis, I see that Time of the Wolf is on, re-released for some macabre reason. I contact Rob’s son, who says he’s not sure. A minute later he sends me a message saying he’s watched the trailer and it looks boring. Then he gives in and decides to come, munching popcorn through Haneke.

Is it boring? As ever with Haneke, it is a bit, but that’s kind of the point. The end of the world will be boring, interspersed with moments of sheer terror and classical music. When the daughter listens to the tape of a sympathetic survivor, I realised how much I must hace stolen from this film in the writing of Truck. My blog informs me that this is the third time I have seen the film (and the second time I have claimed to have stolen from it). It still feels fresh, unpredictable, treading a line between tedium and high tension. Rob says it’s not his greatest work, but his son seemed, in spite of the boredom factor, to have been sucked in by it. As was I and will probably watch another decade down the line, when it will feel just as novel, just as dull, just as radical. If we still have cinemas, ten years down the line. 

pd - a few weeks later Rob's son chose to go and see White Ribbon which apparently he loved.

stasiland (anna funder)

Funder’s non fiction book is an anecdotal investigation into the legacy of the DDR. An Australian living in Berlin ten years after the wall fell, she takes on a journey into her own curiosity about the ghost country she inhabits. What was it like to live there during the days of communism? Funder uses her easy-going naivety to reach places a more formal investigator might not. The result is a series of encounters with the winners and losers of the regime. Those who helped to shape its repressive regime and those whose lives were devastated by it. She gets drunk with rock stars and speaks to the people are who literally trying to piece together the crimes of the Stasi, from the shredded paper they left behind. Perhaps because she’s such an outsider, a female antipodean, people seem willing to open up to her and her account is at once shocking, amusing and melancholic.

aliss at the fire (jon fosse, tr. damion searls)

When Fosse won the Nobel prize last year, a few people got in touch. Being the one of the few English directors to have worked on a Fosse play, there was a kind of perceived reflected glory. When I directed Winter I had a brief email exchange with Fosse, my second correspondence with a Nobel prize winner. He was warm and open. Which is pretty much the oposite of his work, which is closed and cold, or if not cold, like a figure in a big coat huddled over a fire which isn’t giving off much warmth. Aliss at the Fire is the first of his novels I have read, albeit the tone is very similar to his plays. An intense and mysterious examination of human interactions, interactions which span the generations. Fosse comes from a world where the dead grandparents walk side by side with their living heirs. It’s a worldview which ties into one held by so many cultures that have been shunted into the shade by the rampant god of capitalism. We encountered it in a Mexican graveyard, for example. Part of Fosse’s appeal is that in a society where human ties are frayed to breaking point, he spells out the incontrovertible truths of our tragic connections. We are all children of someone who is a child of someone and so on and so forth. Aliss at the Fire spins out its slender cross-generational tale like a ghost story, one where the terrifying thing isn’t the jump scare: it’s the proximity of someone who is dead, the way they are just outside the window, looking in. 

the company (d altman; w. neve campbell & barbara turner)

Altman’s ballet film is a curio and a great example of how the mish-mash of filmmaking means that a potentially potent project fails to come off. The film is set in Chicago and uses dancers from the Joffrey ballet company. There are roles for two choreographers who play themselves, Lar Lubovitch and Robert Desrosiers, the latter to great comic effect. There are numerous dance sequences, lovingly filmed, giving the film a strong visual aesthetic. The sequence of Neve Campbell’s dance in the open air theatre, as the storm closes in, is particularly effective. This is filmmaking with a sense of risk which echoes the risk the dancers and the audience seem to be taking. However… the film stars Neve Campbell and she’s also given a story credit, alongside the screenwriter. Campbell dances alongside the rest of the ballet company, with some panache. (It doesn’t look like she’s being body-doubled, a la Portman in Black Swan, but I may be wrong). She also plays a low-key, introspective character, who gets involved in a low-key fashion with James Franco’s young and tender sous-chef. If these character notes sounds wooly, they’re positively concrete in comparison to the narrative, which feels like one of the wooliest narratives ever concocted. Apart from getting together with Franco, and hurting her shoulder when she falls awkwardly, and dancing, absolutely nothing happens to Campbell’s character. There’s no journey, no development, no story to speak of. Which might not have mattered, except for the fact that The Company reminds us of the importance of narrative. As a filmmaker, Altman was a master of creating a world, in a neo-documentary style, and immersing the viewer in that world. Which is something he achieves in The Company. Anyone who has had any dealings with a ballet company will recognise the authenticity of the portrayal. But the portrayal alone begins to become less and less compelling as the film goes on. Because you need a narrative to construct a reason to watch that portrayal. You need stories to knit the fly-on-the-wall elements to life. The script makes a half-hearted attempt to do this at times, with stray storylines about a dancer who’s got nowhere to stay, a storyline which never develops; and Malcolm McDowell’s somewhat laboured character of the great, yellow-scarfed ex-dancer who’s now the autocratic head of the company, but none of these strands are in any way developed, just as Campbell’s character remains frustratingly nebulous. The film collapses in on itself through the lack of narrative. What we’re left with are sketches for a movie: Altman’s capacity to film dance (which was clearly the aspect he enjoyed most in the making of the film); Altman’s documentary-style approach which might have made for a great film about a ballet company but didn’t; and the story of the naif ballerina, Campbell’s alter-ego, which never really got off the page. A glorious failure perhaps, a great example of what film can be when all the pieces of the puzzle are present, but no-one can be bothered to put them together. 

time of the wolf (w&d michael haneke)

There’s a moment in Time of the Wolf where Eva, the daughter, asks to listen to some music a man is playing on a tinny tape recorder. Beethoven. I suppose I must have stolen that moment. And many others as well. Although I was never particularly aware of the impact the film must have had on me. Until I saw it for the second time, last night. The first time, if memory serves me well, and I’m far from convinced that it does, was in the flat of Mr C, when he still owned the flat in Kilburn, before he moved to Archway and then headed East. It was always a pleasure to work in that flat, with it’s kitchen/ living room and marble worksurface. It was a productive space, from within whose walls emerged the first film we made, a blend of Cortazar, Woman of the Dunes and other random influences.

Haneke’s film must have made its points. It was, as ever, far preferable to see it on the  big screen in Cinemateca. Haneke’s films are like way stations. Each one defining in their pared back austerity the state of the world and the state of your life. Last night, there were no more than half a dozen people in the cinema. They don’t know what they’re missing. An old man at the end said, as we left, that the film grabbed you from the start. He was right. The start which seems like a homage to Funny Games, as a middle-class people-carrier noses its way through the countryside with no idea of what it is about to confront.

However, in spite of the film’s savage opening, this is a gentler, more humane piece of storytelling than Funny Games. We assume that everything’s going to go all Cormac McCarthy on us (ie The Road) with horses eating one another and humans too. But somehow the savagery is kept in check. It’s internal, even, curiously for Haneke, poeticised. There remains the suggestion that beneath it all he’s a  repressed Romantic, searching out the humane within the disjointed chaos of a world which has, more or less, forgotten what it means to be humane. There’s something about the messianic figures who arrive bearing torches which suggests that Haneke believes there might be hope after all; that one way or another once we rid ourselves of all the junk that weighs us down we’ll remember what it means to belong to a community. And learn to breathe again.  

the housekeeper and the professor [yoko ogawa]

When Christopher Nolan’s film Memento appeared, it contained a device which seemed breathtaking in its simplicity and full of an unquantifiable dramatic potential. The device is that of a man whose memory is reduced to a very brief span of just a few minutes. He writes notes which he uses to remind himself of the things he will need to try and remember when he “wakes up” again with his memories once again eradicated. The one problem with Nolan’s idea (developed with his brother) is that it is so dazzlingly original that it cannot really be repeated, as everyone will just say – they already did that in Memento.

Which leads to the question of how successful that film was in Japan and whether Ogawa likes the cinema. Because her novel, published long after Memento was released, employs exactly the same device. Given that this is a novel and its timespan has greater scope that that of a movie, the maths Professor who suffers from the disease has an 80 minute memory span, allowing him to develop quite a profound relationship with his housekeeper, the narrator, and her son, who is known as Root, because his haircut reminds the Professor of the sign for Square Root.

In contrast to the Nolan, Ogawa uses the device to develop a gentle, sad but affecting tale of the way in which the human instinct towards kindness and affection can succeed in transcending even the annihalatory process of time. In spite of his illness, the Housekeeper succeeds in developing a rich relationship with the Professor, which changes both her and her son’s life. The idiot savants of this world know far more than us ordinary mortals will ever be able to forget. Underpinning this is the Professor’s belief that mathematics, the art of which he studies, precedes and will postdate humanity. The mathematical laws offer a transcendent vision to those who learn to study them. The Professor communicates through maths and as the Housekeeper gets to grips with the science, along with Root, their relationship flourishes.

So, now it can be said, if anyone were to use this narrative device again: you can’t use it because Nolan and Ogawa have already used it. It is perhaps worth noting the way in which two separate cultures have chosen to use the same trick. Ogawa’s version is less viscerally dramatic, perhaps, but in her hands it shows the way in which the ability of humans to connect can transcend even the most extreme of obstacles. Whereas Nolan’s use of the device was rather more nihilistic.

tibet, tibet [patrick french]

As the title suggests, this book is of primary interest to Tibetophiles. Those intrigued by a mysterious land which sits in the sky and seems to effortlessly generate myths. French addresses this issue from the off, referring to the line from an obscure and second rate British poet called Henry Newbolt, who, in 1904, wrote a poem which coined the phrase: "the mind's Tibet". Writing as someone who's had a fascination with Tibet all his life, he explores the way in which the myths the country generates contribute to our failure to understand the current political realities of Tibet.

The book is framed around a journey which French took at the start of the twenty first century into Tibet. With a raft of contacts and a grasp of the necessary languages, he succeeds in travelling alone through the country, escaping the usual attentions of the Chinese state guides. In his travels he meets peasant horsemen, former political leaders, prostitutes, lorry drivers, state apparatchiks and the Dalai Lama. The book is full of French's encyclopaedic knowledge of Tibet history, myths and customs, but it comes alive when he meets real people who are searching for a way to live under the cement umbrella of Chinese rule. In so doing he obtains an accurate picture of events which lead up to the Chinese invasion and the brutal repression which followed it through the sixties and seventies, a repression intricately connected with China's own history.

The book skirts over much of this history, as well as British and US involvement in the country. What French's book ends up presenting is a paradox. On the one hand there's a Tibet whose history and people have been systematically attacked by the Chinese over the course of the last fifty years. On the other is a country which remains indelibly Tibetan; a place which the march of history might scratch but will, it seems, never be able to break. Although given this book was published almost a decade ago, perhaps this is an optimistic point of view.

piano (jean echenoz)

The randomness of the reading process leads me via a Guardian recommendation to Echenoz, about whom I knew nothing, and having now read the brief Piano, am none the wiser. This slight book starts promisingly with its Paris-based description of a concert pianist who suffers from stage fright and has to be literally pushed on-stage by his curious, down-to-earth minder. Who are these people? What is their real connection? Why does Max, the pianist, live with his sister and dream every night of a woman he last saw thirty years ago? These and a succession of banal but potentially significant questions suggest that this is going to be an enigmatic, quirky read. The reader, enjoying the depiction of another side of Paris life, suspects that a layer of profundity is about to be revealed, or at the very least, hinted at. Especially when it is made clear that Max is going to die at some point. A treatise on death? A meditation on the life well lived? The critics' remarks on the front and back of the book claim this is so, but if that's the case it went over my head. Rarely has a reading experience felt more like literary wallpaper. Not an unpleasant wallpaper to find oneself perusing for the couple of hours it takes to read the book, quite soothing in fact, but wallpaper nonetheless.

I feel as though I ought to give Echenoz another go, and if all his books are this slight it might be possible to read the complete works in a weekend. It would seem he's a highly respected figure and the good folk on the comments section of the Guardian books page (no sign of Pelevin) seemed most enamoured of him. Which is not, when you think about it, necessarily something that should influence one's judgement. The book did, briefly, make me want to return to Paris at least one more time. But it didn't excite my curiosity about heaven or hell, which in the world according to Echenoz might be considerably closer than Paris. And whilst I'd normally be a sucker for a detour to Iquitos, in this case even I found the detour gratuitous and wondering whether the writer conceived the whole book as an excuse to visit the Amazon city? If so, hats off to him and I hope he got more out of it than this reader got out of Piano.

this blinding absence of light [tahar ben jelloun]

This is a book about a soldier who found himself involved in an abortive attempt to assassinate the King of Morocco, and as a result was incarcerated in a space without light, without room to stand up, with a meagre diet, watching his companions die one by one, for almost twenty years.

The soldier is the narrator. As much as the book is about his suffering, it is more about the techniques he developed for survival. Shutting himself from his past, and any notion of hope, he finds himself using mysticism to aid him in his struggle. This takes the form of out of body experiences, allowing him the ability to occasionally spy his corporeal self as it battles against the cruelties faced. However, whilst the body suffers, the mind retains its freedom, in large part through the narrator's refusal to fall into the trap of despair which the authorities have concocted.

As such, it's one of those books which document an experience beyond the true grasp of our understanding. An experience which can only be accessed through grave misfortune, or a sense of religious or spiritual vocation the like of which cannot exist within a day-to-day context, and is therefore never to be met. This is not to say that the book is any sense other-wordly: the ability of the narrator to find his spirituality within the context of death, disease and co-existence with his fellow inmates means that he remains an engaging voice.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Ben Jelloun's book is that it is not a work of non-fiction, but a novel. The author's capacity to enter into the voice of the actual prisoner is uncanny. This is a novel on the very borders of fact; the articulation of a voice from the underworld, which has miraculously surfaced and found its way back into the world.

white [marie darrieussecq]

Although I cannot remember the details of Medem's Lovers of the Arctic Circle, I'm sure it had a fair amount in common with White. Even if White is set in the Antarctic, it's still a tale of pre-determined love coming to pass under the influence of snow and ice. Darriussecq's novel is short and filled with intimate detail: the loos which incinerate shit, the effects of the cold on human perception, the depth of the ice and the height of the ice-cap over the Antarctic soil. The two imminent lovers, Edmee and Peter, both make their own way to the ice-station, their back stories elliptically filled in, little hints of fractured histories and suggestions of lost trauma. All of which is overseen by a chorus of ghosts. Whose ghosts remains unclear: whilst details of Scott and Admundsen's missions are frequently referred to, their destiny has no impact of the protagonists, who bide their time on the base waiting for the union which the ghosts know is coming to pass.

White is poetic, romantic, pretentious in the finest of French traditions, and somewhat slight. It discloses what might be termed 'a voice': of the books I have read of late it perhaps has something in common with Pelevin's Omon Ra. It's an exploration of human behaviour under extreme conditions, and succeeds in doing this convincingly, even if the futuristic narrative already feels faintly absurd. As such, with its holophones and voyage to Mars, it might one day belong to that tradition of books which postulate a future which never came to pass.

2666 (bolaño)

At one point in my university career, I read Foucault’s The Order of Things. (Les Mots et Les Choses). I don’t think it was part of the syllabus, I’d just become sufficiently possessed by the Foucault bug that I decided it had to be read. At a subsequent tutorial I sat down and said to the professor, Joanna Hodge, that I’d finished it. She looked at me, and I looked at her. There was a sort of silence, a sort of hmmm-filled silence. Which contained, it seemed to me, the knowledge that there was no real place to begin to discuss The Order of Things, a work so vast in its erudition, imagination and theoretical potential that it seemed to defy the initial stages of overview and reflection. The words to achieve this lay not within our grasp.

I’d like to think that we didn’t talk about the book at all, recognising the futility of any attempt, but I can’t remember the rest of the tutorial. I’d also like to think that when sentient beings sit down at their university tutorials to discuss 2666, a similar hmmm-shaped silence will pervade the preliminaries. Because this book is a monster. Una bestia, as they might say here. Fortunately I’ve had plenty of time to wrestle with the monster, because it demands time and effort of its readers.

Shortly before leaving England, Mr Blue called me and told me to switch the radio on. Someone was talking about the book. I switched it on too late, but was informed that the man on the radio had opined this was not a book to read on a plane. So I read it on the plane. And on the beach. And whenever I could find any down time between London and South America. I entered the strange land of Bolañismo, and lived to tell the tale, lugging the book around like a failsafe.

The first challenge of this book is that, unlike The Savage Detectives, it’s 5 books in one. None of which, save perhaps the last, have a traditional beginning or end. Which might make them all middle, but I’m not sure that’s right. The 5 books – sub-headed as The Parts About The Critics; Amalfitano; Fate; The Crimes and Archimboldi are connected by threads which are geographical and thematic. All are partially set in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa; four of them feature the auto-didact German author Archimboldi. In all of them the smell of murder and sexual violence is never very far away; in the part about The Crimes it’s pervasive.

The part about The Crimes is the book’s anchor in so far as it secures Santa Teresa as the mooring point for the book’s diverse stories, but also in so far as its relentless description of brutal murder after brutal murder weighs the book down. It is true: this part is not airport fare. Rarely has reading felt like such an oppressive process. Bolaño traces, over the course of almost a decade, a procession of murders of women in the city. His account is based on the real-life sequence of murders which took place there. (About which there are now two films, one featuring J-Lo). Whether what the reader reads is an account of the real murders or not is another point of disconcertion. Did the writer really research every crime? Knowing where the bodies were found and how each woman was allegedly killed? And if not, how could he make it up? The elision between truth and fiction is disturbing. Furthermore, it feels as though the writer is in some way punishing his readers. Because the natural (humane) inclination of the reader is to expect some kind of resolution to the brutality, some assertion of hope, but none is forthcoming; the murders seem more a condition of life, like weather, than an aberration. This is how the world is, and the reader needs to accept it, or cast the book aside.

There are a great deal of literary references in the book, as always with Bolaño. Some of which I got, many of which I missed. The name De Sade does crop up, and at one point a Mexican general asserts that the fullest flowering of pornography occurred slightly before the time of The French Revolution. There is something Sadistic about the Part About the Crimes (with more than a hint of 120 Days Of Sodom). Furthermore it’s interesting where it’s located within the book. The opening three sections have already engendered a sense of fear for any female who goes out in Santa Teresa – a fear which the text plays on with the re-introduction of Amalfitano’s daughter in the part about Fate. So the extended description of the murders is not written to scare the reader, or invoke pity for the victims, which has already been done – rather it might be said to be there as an instrument the author uses in order to bludgeon the reader to death.

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On which note, and because I both have the time and the book (it seems to me) demands that the time is taken, I shall pause, and head off to rehearse in the low-rise, Latino backstreets of Jacinto Vera, a kind of amiable mirror image to the hellish vision of Santa Teresa. And later attempt to talk a little about the other side of the book, the untethered strands which float away from the Mexican shipwreck, occupying warmer, Baltic, climes.

+++

As ever, Bolaño writes about writers. Besides Santa Teresa, the book is also constructed around a mysterious, reclusive German writer, Benno von Archimboldi. The opening part, about The Critics, describes the quest of three academics who specialise in Archimboldi’s work to locate the writer, a quest which also takes them to Santa Teresa. Quite what the links are between Archimboldi and Santa Teresa is a question which will no doubt preoccupy academics studying Bolaño, who will find themselves heading to Mexico looking for the answers, and sometimes it feels as though the whole book has been written to manufacture this conceit. Bolaño writes brilliantly about writing, a subject closer to his heart, perhaps, than any other. His literary range is gigantic, his tread traversing peaks that many readers will never have heard of. There’s a kind of parlour game to be played, trying to spot the references, many of them contemporary. Is there a hint of McCarthy in Fate’s crossing of the border? There certainly appears to be suggestions of Pynchon in the book’s vast internationalism, but perhaps the connection merely goes with the territory. The similarities between Alan Pauls’ perverse, deranged British artist and the one who stalks the pages of the opening part about The Critics seems too co-incidental not to be some kind of homage, and on page 60 there is an indubitable reference to Rodrigo Fresan and his novel Kensington Gardens. This is not to mention the contributions of Goethe; Bely; Doblin; Shakespeare and the host of other writers who participate in one way or another. It’s no surprise that perhaps the most idyllic, least threatening, scene in the whole book takes place in a contented publishing house, where the employees happily swap notes about writers through the ages. As though the world of literature in some ways acts an antidote to the savagery of humanity.

The depiction of Archimboldi himself, so presaged by the book’s preceding six hundred pages, reflects Bolaño’s tenderness towards the literary. The foreboding giant doesn’t really live up to psychotic expectations. Here there’s an indication of the other side of the book’s tender nature; which is to create a space for the inarticulate, or the losers. Flawed character after flawed character is allocated their idiosyncrasies (none more so than the paranoid eccentric Amalfitano) and these are treated with great respect. Whilst Bolaño is a writer capable of articulating great menace, and literary caprice, he is also something of a patron saint of lost causes, the ones whose stories are seemingly lost to the world, recovered at the last.

En tonces… as they say down here. These are the last words of Bolaño, apparently, the great tome which was completed, or nearly completed, shortly before his death. Already the book would appear to be being canonised, in a manner which probably wouldn’t entirely displease him. He knew his worth, mas o menos. What does 2666 reveal in the end? Allowing that generalities are only assertions founded on stories which contain other stories which contain still more stories and so on. It tells us that great books don’t have to be neat and tidy. In fact, it probably helps if they’re not. Bolaño wrote two of them, and his second is fractured, like a broken body. Literature is not a precise science. It’s some kind of search, for some kind of something. Not for nothing is the detective novel his chosen model in both the Savage Detectives and 2666, where the reader is the detective, trying to assemble the clues both to solve the terrible crimes, but also to unlock the maverick authorial message. Literature is an offshoot of the world of literature, and though it is not essential to be aware of that, it might help. Culture, no matter how remotely, serves a purpose. The world, the one we know as humans, is a world composed of stories.

the past [w. alan pauls]

I'm going to have to come back to this one.

Some books are so mighty one feels as though one has a cheek even talking about them. Carting The Past around, as one does, a big beefy hardback with an alluring picture of lines on the cover, people have looked at it with curiosity, asked me what its about, and I've tried to avoid the question, whilst highlighting the book. Don't listen to me. Go and read it.

I could and perhaps ought to digress. Because that's the way of The Past. A couple of days ago I was reading one of the countless texts I've read over the course of this year. Another sitcom, set in a university. Again. Two kids, contemporary, arrive at their halls of residence. Which triggered, as writing does, a memory of my own arrival at the halls of residence, twenty odd years ago. The trick with the two characters in the sitcom is that they're both hooked on all things eighties. They're re-living the time I lived through. The quality of the writing did not reflect the poignancy of the idea, in this case.

The Past has also taken me back into my own past. It's a literary trick of which the erudite Mr Pauls will be aware. Reading Rimini and Sofia's chaotic attempts to live both with and without each other, has triggered memories of my own relationship with my wife, which lasted a similar length of time to their marriage. Of course one thinks about these things all the time, every day, in one form or another, but The Past introduced new aspects of memory, a physicality, a sense of aura, a notion of us-ness and un-us-ness.

The skill of a novel, Mr Pauls reveals, is not so much how much it takes us into its narrative, but how far it succeeds in riffing of the reader's. Which it does not know for sure, but about which certain assumptions might be made. If you have ever been in love; if you have ever separated; if you ever wept at what has been; if you have repressed what has been; if you have found yourself trapped in what has been; then this book should be worth your while reading.

Of course it is not everyone's cup of tea. Cocaine and sex and the sickest art you could imagine. And there may be flaws in the novel. As with at least two of the finest books I've ever read (which suggests a pattern), the final section of the book felt less satisfying than what had preceeded, as though having reached a summit at some point which the reader and perhaps even the writer was not aware of, the narrative cannot help but lose itself a little on the way down, as it staggers towards rest. A review I've read comments on the elusiveness of politics within the text, and there's no doubt that the time scale is more like a rubber band being stretched than a step ladder being climbed. But that's the point. The writer is looking at both the ways we change between the ages of youth and middle age; but also, and more importantly perhaps, the ways in which we do not change, we remain unalterable, no matter what has occured in between, sometimes like reality, at others like a dream of the life we must have lead.

As I said at the beginning, I'll have to come back to this one. There are whole treatises waiting to be written and read on The Past. The movie will come out, I hope, stripping the thing to narrative, trying to cling to the writer's caustic humour. Trying to please an audience whom the writer doesn't give a fuck about. Not in the worst sense of that phrase, but in the best. This doesn't read like a writer trying to please anyone in particular, save perhaps a few people he knows, or knew, along the way. This reads like a writer who's going to start a sentence and get to the end no matter what that sentence contains. Sometimes words of distressing insight, sometimes an image too crude to be printed, sometime a laugh-out-loud joke. Writing that doesn't aim to please, which contains a wealth of pleasure, and pain.

I would like to write far more about The Past. I finished it last night. But rather than read me, which at the moment seems unlikely anyway, read the book and let it talk to you. The Past and the past.