Correction - pg. 142

And so, while I loved Altensam more than anything in the world, because Altensam has always been closer to me than anything in the world, because I've always a foreign element there from the outset, and all my life, my whole existence, my deathward existence, had always been determined by that circumstance, causing a monstrous waste of all my energies. The question has always been only, how can I go on at all, not in what respect and in what condition, so Roithamer.

Correction - pg. 134

Now I didn't know why Hoeller had turned out the light just then, had he turned out the light because I had burst out into a laugh, or had he turned out the light without hearing me at all, simply because he had finished working on that huge black bird, actually Hoeller must have stopped working on the bird and left the workshop, unless he was still inside the workshop and had, for whatever reason, turned out the light, to stay in the workshop in the dark?

Gyokuon-hōsō

The adults sat around their radios and cried. The children gathered outside in the dusty road and whispered their bewilderment. We were most surprised and disappointed by the fact that Emperor had spoken in a human voice. One of my friend could even imitate it cleverly. We surrounded him, a twelve-year-old in grimy shorts who spoke in the Emperor's voice, and laughed. Our laughter echoed in the summer morning stillness and disappeared into the clear, high sky. An instant later, anxiety tumbled out of the heavens and seized us impious children. We looked at one another in silence. ... How could we believe that an august presence of such awful power had become an ordinary human being on a designated summer day?

-- A Portrait of the Postwar Generation

The Day He Himsef Shall Wipe My Tears Away - Opening

Deep one night he was trimming his nose that would never walk again into sunlight atop living legs, busily feeling every hair with a Rotex rotary nostril clipper as if to make his nostrils as bare as a monkey's, when suddenly a man, perhaps escaped from the mental ward in the same hospital or perhaps a lunatic who happened to be passing, with a body abnormally small and meagre for a man save only for a face as round as a Dharma's and covered in hair, sat down on the edge of his bed and shouted, foaming,

-- What in God's name are you? What? WHAT? WHAT?

Copyright 1977 by John Nathan

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, for anay reason, by any means,
including any method of photographic reproduction, without the permission
of the publisher.

"Happy Days Are Here Again" 1929 WARNER BROS. INC.
Copyright Renewed
All Rights Reserved
Used by Permission

First Edition 1977
First Printing 1977
Grove Press

First Evergreen Edition 1977
Designed by Steven A. Baron

Manufactured in the United States of America

Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York

GROVE PRESS, INC., 196 West Houston Street, New York, N.Y. 10014

FOUR SHORT NOVELS by
Kenzaburo Ōe

Translated and Introduction by
John Nathan

Grove Press, Inc.,
New York

Correction - pg. 89

A man has an idea and then, at the critical point sometime in his life, finds another man who, because of his character and because his state of mind answers to that critical turning point in the other man's life, brings that idea to fulfillment, finally perfects it in reality.

India: A Wounded Civilization - Closing

The stability of Gandhian India was an illusion; and India will not be stable again for a long time. But in the present uncertainty and emptiness there is the possibility of a true new beginning, of the emergence in India of mind, after the long spiritual night. "The crisis of India is not political: this is the only view from Delhi. Dictatorship or rule by the army will change nothing. Nor is the crisis only economic. These are only aspects of the larger crisis, which is that of a decaying civilization, where the only hope lies in further swift decay." I wrote that in 1967; and that seemed to me a blacker time.

August 1975-October 1976

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 182

It seems to be always there in India: magic, the past, the death of the intellect, spirituality annulling the civilization out of which it issues, India swallowing its own tail.

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 138

India is old, and India continues. But all the disciplines and skills that India now seeks to exercise are borrowed. Even the ideas Indians have of the achievements of their civilization are essentially the ideas given them by European scholars in the nineteenth century. India by itself could not have rediscovered or assessed its past. Its past was too much with it, was still being lived out in the rituals, the laws, the magic - the complex instinctive life that muffles response and buries even the idea of inquiry.

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 135

India, without its own living traditions, has lost the ability to incorporate and adapt; what it borrows it seeks to swallow whole. For all its appearance of continuity, for all the liveliness of its arts of dance, music, anad cinema, India is incomplete: a whole creative side has died. It is the price India had to pay for its British period.

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 119

When men cannot observe, they don't have ideas; they have obsessions.

The Indian Canon: Revised

Theological/Philosophical

1. The Vedas
2. The Upanishads
3. The Puranas
4. The Mahabharata
5. The Ramayana
6. The Bhagavad Gita
7. The Brahma Sutras
8. The Thirukkural
   
9. The Sutta Pitaka
10. The Guru Garanth Sahib
11. The Quran
12. The Bible

Literature

1. Ramacaritamanasa - Gosvami Tulsidas
2. Ecstatic Poems - Kabir
3. Cilappatikaram - Llango Adigal
   
4. Manimekalai - Seethalai Sathanar
5. Civaka Cintamani - Tirutakkatevar
   
6. Gitanjali, Ghare Baire - Rabindarnath Tagore
7. Raghuvamsa, Kumarasambhava, Shakuntala - Kalidasa
8. Shah Jo Risalo - Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai
9. Sachal Jo Kalaam - Sachal Sarmast
   
10. Collected Poetry - Shiekh Ayaz
    
11. Heer - Waris Shah
12. Deewan-e-Ghalib - Mirza Asad Ullah Khan Ghalib
13. Karbala - Mir Babar Ali Anis
14. Deewan-e-Farid - Khwaja Ghulam Farid
    
15. Five Plays - Vijay Tendulkar
    
1. Kamala
2. Silence! The Court Is In Session
3. Sakharam Binder
4. The Vultures
5. Encounter In Umbugland
16. Complete Poetic Works - Mohammad Iqbal
1. Bang-e-Dara
2. Bal-e-Jibril
3. Armaghan-e-Hijaz
4. Shikwa
   
17. Complete Poetic Works - Subrmanya Bharati
18. Poetic Works - Sahir Ludhianvi
19. Mavra - Noon Meeem Rashid
20. Poetry - Bulleh Shah
    
21. Poetic Works - Shiv Kumar Batalvi
22. Kagaj Te Canvas, Sunehe - Amrita Pretam
23. Registan Vich Lakarhara - Harbhajan Singh
    
24. Nuskha-Hai-Wafa - Faiz Ahmed Faiz
    
25. Yayati - Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar
26. Mrityunjay - Shivaji Sawant
27. Poetic Works - Arun Kolatkar
28. Plays - Girish Karnad
    
29. Shabdangal - Vaikom Muhammad Basheer
30. Dharmapuranam, Legends of Khasak - O. V. Vijayan
31. Samskara - U. R. Ananthamurthy
32. Shei Shomoy - Sunil Gangopadhyay
33. Peshawar Express - Krishan Chandar
34. Train To Pakistan - Khushwant Singh
    
35. Baz Nama - Khushhaal Khan Khattak
36. Aag Ka Darya - Qurat-ul-Ain Haider
37. The Guide - R. K. Narayan
38. All About H. Hatterr - G. V. Desani
39. The Autobiography Of An Unknown Indian - Nirad C. Chaudhuri
    
40. An Anthology of Progressive Writer's Movement
41. India Trilogy: - V. S. Naipaul (non-fiction)
1. An Area Of Darkness
2. A Wounded Civilization
3. A Million Mutinies Now
42. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

Political

1. Arthashastra, Nitishastra - Chanakya
2. Tuzk-e-Babri - Zaheer Uddin Babar
3. The Story of My Experiments with Truth - M. K. Gandhi
4. 1857 - The First War of Independence, Hindutva - V. D. Savarkar
5. 1930 Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League Allahabad - Mohammad Iqbal
6. The Discovery of India - Jawaharlal Nehru
7. India Wins Freedom - Abul Kalam Azad
8. Who Were Shudras?, Pakistan or Partition Of India - B. R. Ambedkar
9. The Constitution of India

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 107

Meditation and stillness can be a form of therapy. But it may be that the true Hindu bliss - the losing of the self - is more easily accessible to Hindus. According to Dr. Sudhir Kakar, a psychotherapist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, who is himself Indian and has practised both in Europe and in India, the Indian ego is "underdeveloped," "the world of magic and animistic ways of thinking lie close to the surface," and the Indian grasp of reality "relatively tenuous." "Generally among Indians" - Kakar is working on a book - but this is from a letter - "there seems to be a different relationship to outside reality, compared to one met with in the West. In India it is close to a certain stage in childhood when outer objects did not have a separate, independent existence but were intimately related to the self and its affective states. There were not something in their own right, but were good or bad, threatening or rewarding, helpful or cruel, all depending on the person's feelings of the moment."

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 96

History and social inquiry, and the habits of analysis that go with these disciplines, are too far outside the Indian tradition. Naxalism was an intellectual tragedy, a tragedy of idealism, ignorance, and mimicry: middle-class India, after the Gandhian upheaval, incapable of generating ideas and institutions of its own, needing constantly in the modern world to be inducted into the art, science, and ideas of other civilizations, not always understanding the consequences, and this time borrowing something deadly, somebody else's idea of revolution.

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 72

But it was a middle-class burden, the burden of those whose nationalism - after the years of subjection - required them to have an idea of India. Lower down, in the chawls and the squatter' settlements of the city, among the dispossessed, needs were more elemental: food, shelter, water, a latrine. Identity there was no problem; it was a discovery. Identity was what the young men of the Sena were reaching out to, with the simplicities of their politics and their hero figures (the seventeenth-century Shivaji, warrior chieftain turned to war god, the twentieth-century Dr. Ambedkar, untouchable now only in his sanctity).

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 69

The noon sun hurt; the empty Sunday road shimmered. The bus seemed a long time coming; but at last, trailing a hot brown fog, it came, a red Bombay double-decker, the lower part of its metal sides oily and dust-blown, with horizontal scratches, and oddly battered, like foil that had been crumpled and smoothed out.

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 38

It was the genius of Gandhi: intuiting just where the Hindu virtues of quietism and religious self-cherishing could be converted into selfless action of overwhelming political force. Jagan allowing himself to be beaten, finding in the violence offered him a confirmation of his own virtue, saw himself as a satyagrahi, "fighting for the truth against the British." The stress was on the fight for the truth rather than the fight against the British. Jagan's was a holy war; he had a vision of his country cleansed and purified rather than a political vision of his country remade.

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 35

This was how, in pre-Indepenedence India, the hero of Mr. Sampath saw the course of Indian history: rebirth and growth as a cleansing, a recurrent Indian miracle, brought about only by the exercise of self-knowledge. But in independent India rebirth and growth have other meanings and call for another kind of effort. The modern world, after all, cannot be caricatured or conjured away; a pastoral past cannot be established.

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 21

And during the rest of that day's drive North Bihar repeated itself: the gray-black hut clusters; the green paddy fields whose luxuriance and springlike freshness can deceive earth-scanners and cause yields to be overestimated; the bare-backed men carrying loads on either end of a long limber pole balanced on their shoulders, the strain showing in their brisk, mincing walk, which gave them a curious feminine daintiness; the overcrowded buses at dusty towns that were shack settlements; the children wallowing in the muddy ponds in the heat of the day, catching fish; the children and men pounding soaked jute stalks to extract fiber which, loaded on bullock carts, looked like thick plaited blond tresses, immensely rich. Thoughts of human possibilities dwindled; North Bihar seemed to have become the world, capable of the life that was seem.

India: A Wounded Civilization: pg. 17

Out of a superficial reading of the past, then, out of the sentimental conviction that India is eternal and forever revives, there comes not a fear of further defeat and destruction, but an indifference to it. India will somehow look after itself; the individual is freed of all responsibility. And within this larger indifference there is the indifference of a friend: it is madness, Srinivas concludes, for him to think of himself as the artist's keeper.

India: A Wounded Civilization - pg. 4

India, Hundu India, is eternal: conquests and defilements are but instants in time.

India: A Wounded Civilization - Opening

1
Sometimes old India, the old, eternal India many Indians like to talk about, does seem just to go on.

This is a Borzoi Book
published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Copyright 1976, 1977 by V. S. Naipaul
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Convention. Published in the United States by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto,.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Manufactured n the United States of America

First Edition

A mis placed de javu in Palo Alto

Correction - pg. 27

We rarely meet a man like Roithamer, I must admit, and probably never again in our lifetime, a man who, having recognized his capacity for it, does all he can to achieve the record performance of his being and who, once he has embarked on his scientific discipline, intensifies this discipline every day and every moment until he brings it to the utmost point of concentration within himself and must go on concentrating it to the utmost possible intensity, having suddenly no longer any alternative to perfecting his possibilities, anything else has become impossible for him, he must keep his eye fixed undeviatingly on his highest possibilities, unable to see anything apart from these, where such an extraordinary talent for life and therefore for science as Roithamer's is involved, such an enduring and lifelong concentration means an enduring and lifelong incarceration within that extraordinary talent for life and for science, because from a certain moment onward, such a man can no longer live for anything other than his genius for reaching his aim which, once he has clearly perceived it, suddenly outweighs everything else and becomes his only motive, all at once such a man's entire being is concentrated in his resistance to everything that might stand in the way or even merely distract him from the gradual achievement and ultimate fulfillment of his aim; resisting everything, concerning himself with nothing except whatever will advance his aim, such a man goes his increasingly lonely and painful way, a way such a man must invariably go alone and without help from anyone, as Roithamer realized quite early in life, suddenly he had left behind everything, especially everything to with Altensam and its surroundings, consequently all his relatives, physical and spiritual, in whom he had suddenly recognized the greatest impediment to his aim, he had given up what the others, siblings and other relativses, either were not ready to give up or incapable of giving up, the habit of the habit of Altensam, the habit of the Austrian habit-mechanism, the habit of the familiar, of all one is born to, he gave it all up, everything the others did not give up, all he had to do was to think of giving up, leaving behind, everything the others did not give up and leave behind, all the had to do was to observe what the others did or did not do in order to do it or not do it himself, their omissions, a simple trick in which he had been able to achieve great facility from earliest childhood, by constantly observing everything around him, by a persistent testing and receiving and rejecting of everything other than himself, his character, his mind, because he had always been different from everything else and everybody else and so, by his constant observation of everything else and everyone else he had arrived at an even higher degree of lucidity, he could see that he had to take a different direction form all the others, travel a different road, lead a different life, a different existence from theirs and all others, as a result of which, in fact, quite different possibilities had opened up for him from those of the others and from those otherwise constituted, under whose dominance he had come with time, more and more, in a very special quite idiosyncratic innate rhythm of his own in which he had schooled himself, Roithamer had understood early in life what the others had not understood until much later or had never understood at all, the most salient feature of his relationship to the others is always their total failure to understand and the resulting non-stop incomprehension on their part, they always understood each other among themselves, but they never had understood him, and they still do not understand him even now, after his death.

Correction - pg. 15

Whoever enters here has to give up everything he ever thought prior to entering Hoeller's garret, he must make a clean break with all of his past thinking and start completely afresh, at once, thinking only Hoeller garret thoughts, to stay alive even for a moment in Hoeller's garret it's not enough merely to keep on thinking, it must be Hoeller-garret-thoughts, thinking solely about everything with Hoeller's garret and Roithamer and the Cone.

Correction - Opening

Hoeller's Garret

After a mild pulmonary infection, tended too little and too late, had suddenly turned into a severe pneumonia that took its toll of my entire body and laid me up for at least three months at nearby Wels, which has a hospital renowned in the field of so-called internal medicine, I accepted an invitation from Hoeller, a so-called taxidermist in the Aurach valley, not for the end of October, as the doctors urged, but for early in October, as I insisted, and then went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller's house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret, to begin sifting and perhaps even arranging the literary remains of my friend, who was also a friend of the taxidermist Hoeller, Roithamer, after Roithamer's suicide, I went to work sifting and sorting the papers he had willed to me, consisting of thousand of slips covered with Roithamer's handwriting plus a bulky manuscript entitled "About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone."

Correction
THOMAS BERNHARD



TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
SOPHIE WILKINS

ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK 1979

For Carol Brown Janeway, heroic editor,
and Patrick O' Brien, M.D., companion in furor Bernhardiensis,
to whom this translation is indebted for invaluable attentions and moral support.
S. W.

This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A Knopf, Inc.

Copyright 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.


All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random house, Inc., New York. Originally published in Germany as Korrektur by Suhrkamp Verlag, Fraankfurt. Copyright 1975 by Suhrkamp Verlag.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First American Edition

A body needs at least
three points of support,
not in a straight line,
to fix its position,
so Roithamer had written.

Impressions Of Africa - Closing

We made an uneventful crossing, and on the 19th of July we took leave of each other on the quayside at La Joliette, after a cordial exchange of handshakes, in which only Tancred Bucharessas could take no part.

The Indian Canon

• The Vedas
• The Upanishads
• The Puranas
• The Mahabharata
• The Ramayana
• The Bhagavad Gita
• The Sutta Pitaka
  
• Guru Garanth Sahib
• The Quran
• The Bible
  
• Gitanjali - Rabindarnath Tagore
  
• Raghuvamsa & Kumarasambhava - Kalidasa
  
• Shah Jo Risalo - Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai
  
• Heer - Waris Shah
  
• Deewan-e-Ghalib - Mirza Asad Ullah Khan Ghalib
• Baz Nama - Khushhaal Khan Khattak
  
• The Story of My Experiments with Truth - M. K. Gandhi
  
• The Discovery of India - Jawaharlal Nehru
• India Wins Freedom - Abul Kalam Azad
• Who Were Shudras? - B. R. Ambedkar
• The Constitution of India
  
• Bal-e-Jibril - Dr. M. Iqbal
  
• 1857 - The First War of Independence - V. D. Savarkar
• India: A Wounded Civilization - V. S. Naipaul
  
• Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
• All About H. Hatterr - G. V. Desani
• The Guide - R. K. Narayan
  

Impressions Of Africa - pg. 213

There, for half an hour, Talu, producing a falsetto voice of no little purity, strove humbly to copy the examples given by Carmichael, who, extremely surprised to discover the monarch's unexpected facility, displayed a zeal both indefatigable and sincere.

Apples and Pears - Closing

So Sander does a Wolfgang lying on the floor looking out of the
side of his eyes at Gretje reading, trying to magic her into looking at hiom. A
quick drawing of Wolfje, hands behind head, bored, ankle on knee, beside Sander
fucking Grietje. Laugh, pouts Wolfje, but I won't be bored when the Nipper
comes. He'll be my brother. Don't ever tell him I'm not his brother. I'll talk
with him while Grietje and Sander and Adriaan are busy with their things. We'll
start talking as soon as he's borned.

Apples and Pears - pg. 100

Sweetbrier agrees, wrily, that no phalanstery anything like Fourier's is possible without an Erhonian revolution, canceling machines. To return movement to walking, horseback riding, and the true dance. To return music to the instrument and occasion. To return the casual to the deilberate, the planned, the expected. To return reading to daylight and the lamp. To return love to passion as it arises. To return work to communal duty, to the sense of usefulness. To have the beginning and end of everything kept in sight and in the discourse of the whole phalanstery. To take happiness from money and restore it to the harmony of work and its reward, ambition and its achievement. To put mind and hand in concert. To reorganize society after its disastrous dispersal by train, automobile, airplane.

Apples and Pears - pg. 63

Xronos and Eros, our age and youth, were in their proper paideuma Time and Love. They are both, wavilinear. Love, like time, is a medium, for nothing would be beautiful, no day sweet, or time a gift rather than a burden, without euphoria and benevolence, wavelengths in love's spectrum. Leonardo: the beauty of things lightens our hearts.

Apples and Pears - pg. 33

Nature is the extension of seed generating a membrane of cells whose destiny was to be metamorphic, synergetic, inventive, adaptive. Michelet's symbol for this viscous progress was the copulation of Isis and Osiris in the womb, one organism differentiated into male and female. The same blood pulsed through their embranchments of veins as thin and as blue as the phloem of violet petals. Osiris' ink fingertip, gelatinous palp sheathed in transparent skin around transparent bone, found Isis' clitoral tip pelagic under its pelllicle as fine as a gnat's wing, as rich a nucular perplexity as the bud of his standing met. Their mouths joined, rosepetal tongues twined and rolling. Elf ears. Eyes of gazelle fawns. His finger floats away, her calyx hand guides his peniculus in, and the three-month-long orgasm begins at the meeting of thrust and hunch, a suffusion of light through honey, spreading like music along every course and nest of nerves.

Apples and Pears - pg. 13

Culture makes experience possible. Experience does not deposit culture, its symbols, or its tone. Experience follows culture as an orchestra a score. Culture is tacit, unconsciously learned, invisible to the fish in its water. All events are echoes.

Apples and Pears - Opening

Joop Zoetemelk Gagne
le Maillot Jaune

12 MESSIDOR
The mountain ash, or rowan, Virgil's onus but not Ovid's fraximus, is by family a rose and by ancient rumor a bitch.

• 
  

It all goes back, this complex friendship, to the year Picasso died, while I was finishing De Boventonen van Stilleven and beginning the commentary on Fourier, and to Paris the July Joop Zoetmelk won the Tour de France. Its plangencies cross philosophy at angles one might, with luck, trace. Fourier thought that our dream of a golden age that never was is a vision of his Periode Amphiharmonique. In our time we long not for a lost past but for a lost future.

"The Bowmen of Shu" has been published before in Blast 3 and in a finely printed limited edition by The Grenfell Press; "Fifty-Seven Views of Fujyama" was first published in Granta, in England, and later in the United States by The Hudson Review; parts of "Apples and Pears" have appeared before, in early drafts: "Joop Zoetemelk Gagne le Maillot JAUNE" in Antaeus , and a section provisionally titled "Apples and Pears" in Conjunctions.

Copyright 1984 by Guy Davenport
Printed in the United States of America

The drawings on pp. 8 and 10 are by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; all other drawings by Guy Davenport.

NORTH POINT PRESS . SAN FRANCISCO . 1984

Impressions Of Africa - pg. 27

The magpie ended this performance of its own accord and with a few flaps of its wings, reached the bust of Immanuel Kant; on top of the stand, to the left, was a little perch on which the bird landed.
Immediately, a strong light illuminated the skull from within, and the casing, which was excessively thin, became completely transparent from the line of the eyebrows upwards.
One divined the presence of countless reflectors, placed facing in every direction inside the head. So great was the violence with which the bright rays, representing the fires of genius, escaped from their incandescent source.
Repeatedly the magpie took flight, to return immediately to its perch, thus constantly extinguishing and relighting the cranial dome, which alone burned with a thousand lights, while the face, the ears and the nape of the neck remained in darkness. Each time the bird's weight was applied to the lever, it seemed as though some transcendent idea was born in the thinker's brain, as it blazed suddenly with light.

Impressions Of Africa - Opening

At about four o'clock on that 25th June, everything appeared to be ready for the coronation of Talu VII, Emperor of Ponukele and King of Drelshkaf.
Although the sun was low in the sky, the heat was still over-powering in that part of Africa, near the equator, and the thundery atmosphere, untempered by the slightest breeze, weighed oppressively on every one of us.

IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA
a novel
By RAYMOND ROUSSEL

Translated by
Lindy Foord and Rayner Heppenstall

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Originally publisehd as Impressions d`Afrique by
Alphonse Lemerie, Paris 1910 (4th impression
1932) Re-issued by Jean Jacques Pauvert, 1963;
Jean-Jacques Pauvert
This translation, Rayner Heppenstall, 1966

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 67-13139


Printed in Great Britain

Nadja - Closing

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

Nadja - pg. 55

She is still a young woman and extremely jovial. She continues speaking with a great deal of animation to someone who seems to be a workman of her acquaintance and who listens to her, apparently, with delight. We too engage her in conversation. Extremely cultivated, she has no objection to Nietzsche, and Rimbaud. Quite spontaneously she even mentions the surrealists and Louis Aragon's Paysan de Paris, which she has been unable to finish, the variations on the word Pessimism having thrown her off. All her remarks indicate a great revolutionary faith. Upon my request, she gives me her poem which I had found in the book and a few others as well, all of which I had found in the book and a few others as well, all of which are interesting.

Nadja - pg. 17

He has familiarized me with that tremulous ennui which almost any spectacle induced in him; no one before Huysmans could, if not exemplify this great victory of the involuntary over the ravaged domain of conscious possibilities, at least convince me in human terms of its absolute inevitability and of the uselessness of trying to find loopholes for myself. How grateful I am to him for letting me know, without caring about the effect such revelations produced, everything that affects him, that occupies him in his hours of gravest anxiety, everything external to his anxiety, for not pathetically "singing" his distress like too many poets, but for enumerating patiently, in the darkness, some quiet involuntary reasons he still found for being, and for being -- to whose advantage he never really knew -- a writer!

Nadja - Opening

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I "haunt". I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended.

Copyright 1960 Grove Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Originally published in 1928 by Librairie Gallimard, Paris, France.
Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

Le Con D’Iréne - Closing

Where the rock's shy foot, where the discouraged plant will no longer spread the seduction of its seed, where the ice-axe strikes only sparks, there I have found my pasture, above the blue kingdom of the flies. I am an animal of the heights. I can't say as much for bread. Let those who search for nourishment bother me no longer with their hideous whispering.

Le Con D’Iréne - Opening

Don't wake me, for God's sake, you bastards, don't wake me, watch out I bite I see red.

IRENE's CUNT
A work attributed to
Louis Aragon
First published anonymously in 1928
This edition published in 1996
by Creation Books
83 Clerkenwell Road
London EC1, UK
A velvelt book
Copyright Creation Books 1996
Translated by Alexis Lykiard
Translation copyright Alexis Lykiard 1995
Cover girl:
Kembra Pfahler
Photographed by:
Nick Zedd
Design:
Bradley Davis/Sailorboy PCP
A Butcherbest Production

April 14th

I am not sure what to say about today. It is Monday again. It was Monday too, nine years ago on this date. The most wretched day of my life: Sun glared, our classes finished, the afternoon at the Hostel#4... I wonder how many people went back to that plot of land in that corner of your city. We were all there. All of your friends... It was good knowing you.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - Closing

I couldn't get any more out of him. He doesn't like metaphysical discussions.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - pg. 153

'I don't agree, You're all the more interesting because you haven't so far got your commission. You don't know how to derive the best advantage from a favorable situation. A sensitive young lady cannot but feel that since you wear a private's cloak you must be something between a hero and a martyr.'

Desroyer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Sea of Tears)

aIt was back amongst the living,
your smile was giving me a thrill.
Enough to come so close to closing the deal (the steal of a century...)
A century stolen from our hearts to a house on the hill.

But if that is what it takes,
if that is what it takes,
if that is what it takes
to be a stone, a stone's throw from your throne,
no man has ever hung from the rafters of a second home.
No man has ever hung from the rafters of a second home.

It's true,
I needed you more back when I was poor:
the wealthy dowager (the patroness), she guessed it
the answer wasn't "yes."
But her maxims were fine, the ethos that flew about her mind
like swallows in search of a
burned-down bell tower church.

But if that is what it takes,
if that is what it takes,
if that is what it takes
to be a stone, a stone's throw from your throne,
no man has ever hung at the temporary age of 24, both feet on the floor,
listening to the bonafide stasis of sound,
the eaves dripping yesterday's
ill-timed August rain,

if there is such a thing as ill-timed August rain...

A Hero Of Our Own Times - pg. 131

He spoke quickly and affectedly, being one of those who have high-falutin phrases which they consider appropriate for every contingency, while they have no appreciation of beauty unadorned. Pompously they feign unusual emotions, sublime passions, and exceptional suffering. They love to produce an effect, and romantically minded provincial girls are apt to adore them. As they approach middle age, they may become respectable country gentlemen or else take to drink, or even aspire to both vocations. Such men may have excellent qualities, but they never have a poetic vein.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - 57

It became plain to me that neither fame nor happiness depend in any way on a mastery of the sciences: for really happy people are apt to be nit-wits; as for fame, it comes to be successful you need merely have a keen eye for the main chance.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - pg. 35

"Believe me, Allah is for all races one and the same, and if it be His will that I should love you, what can forbid you to love me in return?" She looked at him fixedly, as if struck by this new idea. Her expression was diffident, and showed a desire to be convinced. What eyes she had, eyes like stars, like burning coals.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - pg. 3

It was a glorious place, that valley. Mountains on all sides, inaccessible reddish cliffs, hung with green ivy and crowned with clumps of oriental plane; yellow slopes streaked with ravines; and there, at a great height, the golden fringe of the snows; while below was the Aragva (joined here by another river whose name I cannot recall),thundering forth from a black gorge filled with mist, to become a silver thread which glittered like the scales of a snake's skin.

By Night In Chile - Closing

And then the faces flash before my eyes at a vertiginous speed, the faces I admired, those I loved, hated, envied and despised. The faces I protected, those I attacked, the faces I hardened myself against and those I sought in vain.


And then the storm of shit begins.

Fellow

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides--
You may have met Him--did you not
His notice sudden is--

The Grass divides as with a Comb--
A spotted shaft is seen--
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on--

He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn--
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot--
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone--

Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me--
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality--

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone--

By Night In Chile - pg. 81

Respecting the tradition, I starred with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmeon of Croton, Zeno os Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilocus of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Tesos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favorites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and then the nitrate and steel industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Diaz Casanueva won the National Literature Prize and Fidel Castro came on a visit and manyy people thought he would stay and live in Chile for ever and Piere Zujovic the Christian Democrat ex-minister was killed and Lafourcade published White Dove and I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn't much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pains, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Herodotus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long queues for food and Farewell's estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women's affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaux that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to beborn, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and the colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a cameraman recorded his own death on film, and then Allende's naval aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d'etat, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president commited suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last.

By Night In Chile - pg. 54

..., because everything was foundering, as the poet says, and then I was walking alone through the streets of Santiago, thinking of Alexander III and Urban IV and Boniface VIII, while fresh breeze caressed my face, trying to wake me up properly, but still I cannot have been properly awake, for deep in my brain I could hear the voices of the popes, like the distant screeching of a flock of birds, a clear sign that part of my mind was still dreaming or obstinately refusing to emerge from the labyrinth of dreams, that parade ground where the wizened youth is hiding, along with the dead poets who were living then, and who now, against the certainty of imminent oblivion, are erecting a miserable crypt in my cranial vault, building it with their names, their silhouettes cut from black cardboard and the debris of their works, and although the wizened youth is not among them, since in those days he was just a kid from the south, the rainy border-lands, the banks of our nation's mightiest river, the fearsome Bio-Bio, all poets whose works implacable time was demolishing even then, as I walked away from Farewell's house through the Santiago night, and continues to demolish now, as I prop myself up on one elbow, and will go on demolishing when I am gone, that is, when I shall exist no longer or only as a reputation, and my reputation resembling a sunset, as the reputations of others resemble a whale, a bare hill, a boat, a trail of smoke or a labyrinthine city, my reputation like a sunset will contemplate through half-closed eyelids time's little twitch and the devastation it wreaks, time that sweeps over the parade ground like a conjectural breeze, drowning writers in its whirlpools like figures in a painting by Delville, the writers whose books I reviewed, the writers whose work I criticized, the moribund of Chile and America whose voices called out my name, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of us as you walk away from Farewell's house with a dancer's sprightly gait, think of us as your steps lead you into the inexorable Santiago night, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of our ambitions and our hopes, think of our mute, inglorious lot as men and citizens, compatriots and writers, as you penetrate the phantasmagoric folds of time, time that we perceive in three dimensions only, alhtough in fact it has four or maybe five, like the castellated shadow of Sordello, which Sordello? a shadow not even sun can obliterate.

By Night In Chile - pg. 50

What's the use, what use are books, they're shadows, nothing but shadows.

By Night In Chile - pg. 33

Far from the idle but agitated and often indiscreet chatter of the Parisian salons, the Chilean writer and the German writer enjoyed a free-ranging conversation, touching on the human and the divine, war and peace, Italian painting and Nordic painting, the source of evil and the effects of evil that sometimes seem to be triggered by chance, the flora and fauna of Chile, which Jünger seemed to have read about in the works of his fellow countryman Philippi, who was at once a true Chilean and a true Germann, all the while drinking cups of tea prepared by Don Salvador himself (which the Guatemalan, when invited to join them, refused almost inaudibly), the tea being followed by two glasses of cognac from the supply that Jünger carried in his silver hip-flask, and this time the Guatemalan did not say no, which made both writers smile discreetly at first, then laugh long and loud, proffering the appropriate witticisms.

By Night In Chile - pg. 24

And I remember Rosamel del Valle.

Edith Piaf: Mon Dieu

Life & Times of Michael K - Closing

And if the old man climbed out of the cart and stretched himself (things were gathering pace now) and looked at where the pump had been that the soldiers had blown up so that nothing should be left standing, and complained, saying, 'What are we going to do about water?,' he, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string. He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it upthere would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live.

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 166

At this moment, I suspect, because such is your nature, you would break into a run. So I would have to run after you, ploughing as if through water through the thick grey sand, dodging the branches, calling out: 'Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory -- speaking at the highest level -- of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. Did you not notice how, whenever I tried to pin you down, you slipped away? I noticed. Do you know what thought crossed my mind when I saw you had got away without cutting the wire? "He must be a polevaulter" -- that is what I thought. Well, you may not be a polevaulter, Michaels, but you are a great escape artist, one of the great escapees: I take off my hat to you!'

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 152

The truth is that you are going to perish in obscurity and be buried in a nameless hole in a corner of the racecourse, transport to the acres of Woltemade being out of the question nowadays, and no one is going to remember you but me, unless you yield and at last open your mouth. I appeal to you, Michaels: yield!

Destroyer: Priest's Knees

I was just another west-coast maximalist exploring the blues,
ignoring the news from the front where they're taking her children away.
Taking them where they wanna go: Tall ships made of snow invading the sun.

Some people call me 'Angel' on their deathbed, in a dream.
That's right, the Czar's father thought things could've gone differntly
last night, but they didn't...

And I couldn't bear to follow you there, where trauma exists in the sky.
20th Century Masters welcome these disasters, and so do I.
But, no!
Oh baby, please don't go up into it!

By Night In Chile - Opening

I AM DYING NOW, BUT I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO say. I used to be at peace with myself. Quiet and at peace. But it all blew up unexpectedly.

Copyright 2000 by Robert Bolaño and Editorial Anagrama
Translation copyright 2003 by Chris Andrews


All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reporduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Published by arrangement with the Harvill Press, London.

Priginally published by Editorial Anagrama as Nocturno de Chile in 2000.

Manufactured in the United States of America
New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP975) in 2003

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporaation,
80 Eighth Avennue, New York 10011

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 104

How fortunate that I have no children, he thought: how fortunate that I have no desire to father. I would not know what to do with a child out here in the heart of the country, who would need milk and clothes and friends and schooling. I would fail in my duties, I would be the worst of fathers. Whereas it is not hard to live a life that consists merely of passing time. I am one of the fortunate ones who escape being called.

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 97

Ducking through the fences, he could feel a craftman's pleasure in wire spanned so taut that it hummed when it was plucked. Nonetheless, he could not imagine himself spending his life driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land. He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of an ant-feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust.

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 88

They finished cutting the field in near-darkness, leaving the baling for the next day. K was reeling with exhaustion. Sitting in the truck he closed his eyes and felt as if he were hurtling through endless empty space. Back in the hut he fell into a dead sleep. Then in the middle of the night he was woken by the crying of a baby. There were discontented murmurs from around him: everyone seemed to be awake. For what seemed hours they lay and listened as the baby somewhere in the tents went through cycles of whimpering, wailing, and shrieks that left it gasping for breath. Aching to sleep, K felt anger mount inside himself. He lay with his fists clenched against his breast, wishing the child annihilated.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - Opening

BELA

I WAS posting from Tiflis. The baggae in my cart considered of one portmanteau, half filled with notes of my Georgian travels. The greater part of these notes, luckily for you, had been lost; but the trunk with the rest of my things, luckily for me, was safe and sound.

Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov

Translated from the Russian
by
EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL

With an Introduction
by

SIR MAURICE BOWRA

LONDON
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK TORONTO
1958

A Hero of Our Own Times, first published in 1840
was included in The World's Classics in 1956

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
BY CHARLES BATEY, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

Berlin Alexanderplatz - Closing

And get on step, and right and left and right and left, marching: marching on, we tramp to war, a hundred minstrels march before, with fife and drum, drrum, brrum, for one the road goes straight, for another it goes to the side, one stands fast, another's killed, one rushes past, another's voice is stilled, drrum, brrumm, drrumm!

THE END

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 598

Death has begun his slow, slow song, and he sings it like a stammerer, repeating each word; when he has finished singing a verse, he repeats the first before he starts anew. His song is like the hiss of a saw. Quite slowly the saw ascends and then plunges down into the flesh, shriling louder, clearer and higher, till it comes to the end of a note, and rests. Then it withdraws, slowly, slowly, hissing, higher and clearer grows the note, it shrills, and then it plunges into the flesh once more.
Slowly Death is singing.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 549

Two angels walk beside him, Sarug and Terah are their names, and they talk together, Franz stands in the crowd, walks in the crowd. He is silent, but they hear him, the wild outcry within him. Bulls walk past on raiding parties, but don't recognize Franz. Two angels walk beside him.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 532

He lay beneath the auto, that was like it is now, there's a mill there, a quarry, it goes on pouring over me, but I'll hold fast, no matter how I hold on, it's no use, it wants to smash me to pieces, even if I am an iron girder, it wants to break me to pieces.
Franz murmurs though his teeth: " Something's coming." "What's coming?" What mill is this, revolving wheels, a windmill, a watermill? "Watch out, Franz, they are looking for you." So they say I killed her, me, he trembles again, his face is laughing again,...

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 502

Some women and girls are walking across Alexanderstrasse and the square, each carrying a fetus in her belly, protected by law. It is hot, annd the women and girls are sweating outside, but the fetus within sits quietly in his corner, the temperature iss just right or him as he walks across the Alexanderplatz, but many a fetus will fare badly later on: he'd better not laugh too soon.

James Wood

That last phrase does what metaphor should do: it acts as a fiction inside the larger fiction, speeding us toward the instant imagining of something (and wittily, too).

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 426

I kiss your little hand, madame, he mastered life, won his life by risking it outright, a funny August we're having this year, just look, it's raining cats and dogs.

Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61

This is a wonderful piece. I have a chance to see it performed live by the Delaware Symphony about three years ago.

Berlin Alexandeplatz - pg. 384

Smart boy Willy has not much cash; but he has a sharp bright mind, even though he is only a beginner in the pickpocket business, and that's why he exploits Franz. He was once an inmate in a house of correction where somebody had told him all about communism, to the effect that it's nothing at all; and that a reasonable man believes only in Nietzsche and Stirner, and does what he pleases; all the rest is bunk. So the sharp, ironical lad gets a lot of fun out of going to political meetings, and heckling the speakers. At the meetings he fishes up people with whom he wants to do busines, or whose legs he simply wants to pull.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 359

In front of Aschinger's, on the side facing a photographer's place, he sees little Mieze standing there on the Alex. Franz takes his stand on the other side, in front of the fence around the construction work, and watches her a long while from behind. She walks to the corner, Franz follows her with his eyes. It's a decisive moment, it's a turning point. His feet start to move. He sees her in profile, at the corner. How small she is! She is wearing saucy brown shoes. Watch out, now somebody's going to pick her up soon. That little blunt nose o' hers! She's looking around. Yes, I came from over there, from Tietz's, but she didn't see me. One of Aschinger's breadwagons is standing in the way. Franz walks along the fence as far as the corner, where the sand-heaps are; they're mixing cement. Now she'll be able to see him, but she doesn't look his way. An elderly gentleman keeps on ogling her, she looks past him and wanders towards Loesser & Wolff's. Franz crosses over to the other side. He keeps ten steps behind her, lingering in the offing. It is a sunny July day, a woman offers him a nosegay for sale, he gives her 20 pfennings and holds the flowers in his hand, but still doesn't come any nearer. Not yet. But the flowers have a nice smell; she put some in the room today, and a canary cage, and some drinks, as well.

[Notes: The way the narrative anchor moves in this passage from global to personal to global to the last line to personal again]

To Do List

• Laundry
• Berlin Alexanderplatz
  

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 322

And now come thou, come hither and I will show thee something. The great whore, the whore of Babylon, that sitteth upon many waters. And I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed inpurple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand. And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATION OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 303

Eva is sitting by Franz's bed, Wischow comes back to it again and again: Who was it, man alive, how did it happen? Franz isn't spilling anything. He has built an iron coffer around himself and there he sits and he'll let nobody in.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 253

Furthermore, the investigation into the question of responsibility for the street-car disaster in Heerstrasse is not yet completed. The examination of the victims and of Redlich, the conductor, is still proceeding. The opinions of the technical experts have not yet been received. Only aafter their receipt will it be possible to enter upon an examination of the question whether there is any culpability on the part of the conductor, because he applied the brakes too late, or whether it was a concatenation of unfortunate circumstances that caused the disaster.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 217

People hurry over the ground like bees. They hustle and bustle around here day and night, by the hundreds.
The street-cars roll past with a screech and a scrunch, yellow ones with trailers, away they go across the planked-over Alxanderplatz, it's dangerous to jump off. The station is laid out on a broad plan, Einbahnstrasse to Konigstrasse. The trains rumble from the railroad station towards Jannowitz Bruck, the locomotive puffs out a plume of steam, just now it is standing above the Pralat, Schlossbrau entrance a block further down.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 109

He says: "If on this earth you want to be, a creature, male and full of glee, be careful and weigh everything, before you let the midwife fling you towards the daylight, there to grow: Earth is a nest of grief and woe. Believe the poet of these verses, who often pines and often curses, while chewing on this iron crust -- quotation pinched from Goethe's Faust: Man only relishes life's glow, in general, as an embryo! ... There is the good old father State, he rags and irks you soon and late. He pricks and pesters you -- you're bled with laws and codes: 'Prohibited!' His first commandment: Man, shell out. His second: Hold your dirty snout. And thus you live in adumbration, your state is that of offuscation. And if you seek to drown your queer, rough anger at some pub with beer, or with some win, respectively, a headache promptly trails the spree. Meanwhile the years knock at the gate, the months erode the hair, elate. Suspiciously the rafters creak, the limbs grow flabby, blighted, weak: gray matter sours in the brain, and thinner grows the good old strain. In short, you see fall coming nigh, you put the spoon down and you die. And now I ask you, friend, a-quiver: just what is man, what is life's river? Did not our great poet Schiller confess: 'It's not the highest men possess'. But I say it's a chicken-ladder at best, up and down and all the rest."

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 47

Thus Fraanz Biberkopf, the concrete-worker, and later furniture-mover, that rough, uncouth man of repulsive aspect, returned to Berlin and to the street, the man at whose head a pretty girl from a locksmith's family had thrown herself, a girl whom he then made into a whore, and at last mortally injured in a scuffle. He has sworn to all the world and to himself to remain respectable. Later, however, his money gave out: and that was the moment he had been waiting for, to show everybody, once and for all, what a real fellow is like.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - Opening

On Car 41 into Town

He stood infront of the Tegel Prison gate and was free now.

THE STORY OF FRANZ BIBERKOPF

ALFRED DOBLIN

TRANSLATED INTO THE AMERICAN BY EUGENE JOLAS

COPyRIGHT 1929 BY S. FISCHER VERLAG, A.G., BERLIN

COPYRIGHT 1931 BY THE VIKING PRESS, INC.

REPUBLISHED BY ARRANGEMENT
WITH THE VIKING PRESS, INC.

Third Printing, 1968
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 58-8957

Life & Times Of Michael K - pg. 37

K licked his lips. "That's not my money," he said thickly. 'That's my mother's money, that she worked for.' It was not true: his mother was dead, she had no need of money. Nevertheless. There was a silence. 'What do you think the war is for?' K said. 'For taking other people's money?'

The Unnamable - Closing

... I know that well, I can feel it, they're going to abandon me, it will be the silence, for a moment, a good few moments, or it will be mine, the lasting one, that didn't last, that still lasts, it will be I, you must go on, I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strainge sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

The Unnamable - pg. 116

That's all hypotheses, that helps you forward, I believe in progress, I believe in silence, ah yes, a few words on the silence, then the little world, that will be enough, for the rest of eternity, you'd think it was I, I speaking, I hearing, I making plans, for the passing hour, for the rest of eternity, whereas I'm far, or in my arms somewhere, or stowed away somewhere, behind walls, a few words on the silence, then just one thing more, just one space and someone within, perhaps, until the end, I believe it, it's evening already, I call that evening, I wish you could see it, I believe it this evening, it's announced and I believe it, you announce, and then you renounce, so it is, that helps you on, thhat helps the end to come, evenings when there is an end, I speak of evening, someone speaks of evening, perhaps it's still morning, perhaps it's still night, personally I have no opinion. They love each other, marry, in order to love each other better, more conveniently, he goes to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again, in order to love again, more conveniently again, they love each other, you love as many times as necessary, as necessary in order to be happy, he comes back, the other comes back, from the wars, he didn't die at the wars after all, she goes to the station, to meet him, he dies in the train, of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again, having her again, she weeps, weeps again, with emotion again, at having lost him again, yep, goes back to the house, he's dead, the other is dead, the mother-in-law takes him down, he hanged himself, with emotion, at the thought of losing her, she weeps, weeps louder, at having loved him, at having lost him, there's a story for you, that was to teach me the nature of emotion, what emotion can do, given favorable conditions, what love can do, well well, so that's emotion, that's love, and trains, nature of trains, and the meaning of your back to the engine, and guards, stations, platforms, wars, love, heart-rending cries, that must be the mother-in-law, her cries rend the heart as she takes down her son, or her son-in-law, I don't know, it must be her son, since she cries, and the door, the house-door is bolted, when she got back from the station she found the house-door bolted, who bolted it, he the better to hang himself, or the mother-in-law the better to take him down, or to prevent her daughter-in-law from re-entering the premise, there's a story for you, it must be the daughter-in-law, it isn't the son-in-law and the daughter, it's the daughter-in-law and the son, how I reason to be sure this evening, it was to teach me how to reason, it was to tempt me to go, to the place where you can come to an end, I must have been a good pupil up to a point, I couldn't get beyond a certain point, I can understand their annoyance, this evening I begin to understand, oh there's no danger, it's not I, it wasn't I, the door, it's the door interests me, a wooden door, who bolted the door, and for what purpose, I'll never know, there's a story for you, I thought they were over, perhaps it's a new one, lepping fresh, is it the return to the world of fable, no, just a reminder, to make me regret what I have lost, long to be again in the place I was banished from, unfortunately it doesn't remind me of anything.

The Unnamable - pg. 110

Notice, I notice nothing, I go on at best I can, if it begins to mean something I can't help it, I have passed by here, this has passed by me, thousands of times, its turn has come again, it will pass on and something else will be there, another instant of my old instant, there it is, the old meaning that I'll give myself, that I won't be able to give myself, there's a god for the damned, as on the first day , today is the first day, it begins, I know it well, I'll remember it as I go along, all adown it I'll be born and born, births for nothing, and come to night without having been. Look at this Tunis pink, it's dawn. If I could only shut myself up, quick, I'll shut myself up, it won't be I, quick, I'll make a place, it won't be mine, it doesn't matter, I don't feel any place for in it, I'll put someone in it, I'll find someone in it, I'll put myself in him, I'll say he is I, perhaps he'll keep me, perhaps the place will keep up, me inside the other, the place all round us, it will be over, all over, I won't have to try and move any more, I'll close my eyes, all I'll have to do is talk, that will make it a good one, I'll know who's talking, and about what, I'll know where I am, perhaps I'll be able to go silent, perhaps that's all they're waiting for, there they are again, to pardon me, waiting for me to reach home, to pardon me, it's the lie they refuse to stop, I'll close my eyes, be happy at last, that's the way it is this morning.

The Unnamable - pg. 90

Yes, if I could, but I can't, whatever it is, I can't any more, there was perhaps a time I could, in the days when I was bursting my guts, as per instructions, to bring back to the fold the dear lost lamb, I'd been told he was dear, that he was dear to me, that I was dear to him, that we were dear to each other, all my life I've pelted him with twaddle, the dear departed, wondering what he could possibly be like, wondering where we could possibly have met, all my life, well, almost, damn the almost, all my life, until I joined him, and now it's I am dear to them, now it's they are dear to me, glad to hear it, they'll join us, one by one, what a pity they are numberless, so are we, dear charnel-house of renegades, this evening decidedly everything is dear, no matter, the ancients hear nothing, and my old quarry, there beside me, for him it's all over, beside me how are you, underneath me, we're piled up in heaps, no, that won't work either, no matter, it's a detail, for him it's all over, him the second-last, and for me too, me the last, it will soon be all over, I'll hear nothing more, I've nothing to do, simply wait, it's a slow business, he'll come and lie on top of me, lie beside me, my dear tormentor, his turn to suffer what he made me suffer, mine to be at peace.

Toaq-o-Daar ka Mosam

Life & Times of Michael K - Opening

The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip.

Copyright 1983 by J. M. Coetzee
All rights reserved

Published in 1984 by The Viking Press
40 West 23rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10010

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint a selection from Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments translated and edited by G. S. Kirk.

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Linotron Bembo