Memoirs of a Survivor

If I was asked to say what this book was about I would most likely answer “I dunno really, I feel real bad inside for not knowing.” Perhaps after all, one has to end the read by characterising it as a sort of cloud or emanation, but invisible, like the vapour you know is present in the air of the room that you sit in, makes part of the air that you know is there when you look out of a window – your eye is traversing air, so your intellect tells you when you look at a sparrow pecking insects off a twig; and you know that the air is part of the water vapour which at any moment – as a slap of cold air comes in from somewhere else – will condescend as mist or fall as rain. This book was everywhere, in everything, moved in my blood, my mind. This book was nothing that could be described once and for all, or pinned down, or kept stationary; this book is an illness, a tiredness, boils; this book is a pain, forty three years old at the time of writing, locked into a necessity to – sweep away dead leaves; this book is the price or unreliability of hoping that one likes it, the way it might not work, the difference between the critics thoughts, those if us that like it and those of us that don't, the book is finally what you experience...and is in a space in my brain, moved the players in my brain, just as much as there is in my ordinary brain where one hour followed another and life obeyed the unities, like a certain kind of play.
As this winter endures there is a bad state of affairs in the words in this book as in this review, with me. Or perhaps it was only that I was reading what went on in this book less clearly. Instead of understanding the book, or the story, where there was a plot that opened the tale from chapter to chapter, or even paragraph to paragraph, so I was not understanding the opportunities and possibilities, but limited to the next turn of the page, the opening of the next page - the sense of words, words always opening out and away kept within a framework of order within which I read – the sense of words, of text always opening out and away kept within a framework of a novel within which I am reading, as part of it – now is seems as if a perspective has shifted and I am seeing no meaning when I read this novel, nor am I able to read through it fast as I revisit sentence after sentence and could visit them all and get exhausted. At any rate, this feeling of surprise, of expectancy, has gone, and I could even say this stream of conscious drivel of a book, until recently so full of alternatives and possibilities, had absorbed into me something of the claustrophobic air of the realm of the ‘personal' with its rigid necessity. And yet the disorder had never been so great. Sometimes it seemed to me that this book has been set up, carefully, correct to the last detail, simply in order to be knocked flat; as if this book had been taken over and decorated to display one hundred manners, modes, epochs – but quite arbitrarily, not consecutively and in an order to give sense of stream of consciousness boredom, set up too perfect – but then knock flat. I cannot give an idea as to the boredom of this book. Perhaps I should not have finished this book at all, it is so heaped with prose as I have just written, overwrought and pretentious. Other books of this type at least have a story to tell but this is a literary refuse dump; boring words fill the pages. Some of the words neatly set out on the pages, but tedious and dull. Once in the middle of this formal style of stream consciousness boredom – lifeless as if it had been written for a joke, the remains of my patience wore thin, I read a book on China, I even read a ponderous history of the Warsaw uprising, I even began a light comedy novel from my home town, I even baked potatoes. I knew that I had to soldier on, and if I wanted to keep my life sane at least reach the end. Already I am a corpse, with blood staining the carpet around me.