NOTE: Forgive me if I’m repeating myself — I could have sworn that I posted about this book when I read it in SEPTEMBER, but it seems like I didn’t? But I’m feeling such deja vu as I’m typing, I feel like I *must* have said this before? It’s that point of the semester, friends.
I learned about this book from Josh Cook’s brilliant newsletter, Yesterday Today Tomorrow Forever, which is just, like, the essence of top-notch bookselling, distilled into a monthly digest. I wish I could better articulate the difference between a critic’s rave, an academic’s enthusiasm, and a bookseller’s recommendation — I’m convinced that there are fascinating distinctions, but I can’t currently explain them in a way that does them justice. For sure though, the indie bookseller is the one who will point you to the best obscure, experimental, weird stuff, and probably also the best literature in translation.
So TOAF is definitely weird and experimental. Knowing that it was a book about a failed attempt to write a novel, I think I had some expectations about what that would be like, and they were rapidly proved totally wrong. I didn’t quite know what to make of what I was reading, and it’s a short book, so it almost seemed like I would never figure it out, and then there was a line at the end where boom, it clicked into place. “Bewilderment of time passing.” Boom. This is a brilliant representation of the strangeness of working on something, and meanwhile, time is passing, yet you have nothing to show for it. Years go by, your circumstances change, you move to a new city, have a different girlfriend, and what? Still no book. Useless pages. It’s really strange, when you look at it. And Gladman pursues that strangeness, tracking the when and where of the process, as if it could explain. She also writes a little about the thing she was trying to write, but appropriately enough, this is rather hard to follow (or it was for me). This book isn’t a clever to way actually write that other book. That other book remains a failure. And there is something really incredible about that recognition. That’s it. It’s over. So it goes. What else is there to say?
Kasia Reads 