A House For Mr. Biswas - Closing

The cremation, one of the few permitted by the Health Department, was conducted on the banks of a muddy stream and attracted spectators of various races. Afterwards the sisters returned to their respective homes and Shama and the children went back in the Prefect to the empty house.

Muqadama-e-Shair-o-Shairi

http://www.iqbalcyberlibrary.net/Urdu-Books/969-416-202-030/

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 486

And in one afternoon the family reverence for Indiaa had been shattered: Owad disliked all Indians from India. They were a disgrace to Trinidad Indians; they were arrogant, sly and lecherous; they pronounced English in a peculiar way; they were slow and unintelligent and were given degrees only out of charity; they were unrealible with money; in England they went around with nurses annd other women of the lower classes and were frequently involved in scandals; they cooked Indian food badly (the only true Indian meals Owad had in England were the meals he had cooked himself); their Hindi was strange (Owad had repeatedly caught them out in solecisms); their ritual was debased; the moment they got to Englaand they ate meat and drank to prove thier modernity; (a brahmin boy had offered Owad curried corn beef for lunch); and, incomprehensibly, they looked down on colonial Inndians. The sisters said they had never really been the missionaries, mecchants, doctors and politicians they had known; and they grew grave as they realized their responsibilities as the last representatives of Hindu culture.

Reading Targets '09

• India After Gandhi - Raamchandra Guha
• My Experiments with the Truth - M. K. Gandhi
• Hindutva - Savarkar
• The Upanishads
• The Ramayana
• Deewan-e-Ghalib
• Ali Pur Ka Eli - Mumtaz Mufti
• History of Karachi
• India Wins Freedom
• Biography of Abul Kalam Azad
• Biography of Jawaharlal Nehru
• The Constitution of India
• Divine Comedy - Dante
• Wide Saragasso Sea - Jean Rhys
• Book and the Brotherhood - Iris Murdoch
• The Obscene Bird of Night - Jose Donoso
• 2666 - Roberto Bolano
• Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
• Netherland: A Novel - Joseph O'Neil
• Information - Martin Amis
• A Sport and A Pastime - James Salter
• Humboldt's Gift, Henderson The Rainking  - Saul Bellow
• Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Kings Plays - Shakespeare
• Review of Classical Urdu Poetry
• Urdu Sha’iri Ka Siyasi Aur Tarikhi Pasmanzar - 1707 to 1857 A.C (The Political and Historical Background of Urdu Poetry) Adabi Publishers, Karachi.
• Hamare Ahed Ka Adab Aur Adeeb, Qamar Kitab Ghar, Karachi.
• Jadeed Urdu Adab Ke Do Tanqecdi Jaezay (Two Critical Studies of Modern Urdu Literarture), Urdu Academy Sind, Karaclii.
• Hamare Adabi Aur Lisani Masail (“Our Literary and Linguistic Problems”), Majlis -e- Matbuaat -o- Tahqiqaat -e-Urdu, Karachi.
• Yeh Log Bhi Ghazab Thay (personality sketches), Feroze Sons Lahore.
• Ghalib Ki Cheh Ghazlen (“Six Ghazals of Ghalib), Urdu Academy Sindh, Karachi.  

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 470

Anand, while hating the brandy and water, drank for its literary associations: he had read of the mixture in Dickens.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 454

Mr Biswas was worried about Shama. Sitting plumply next to Miss Logie on the front seat, her elaborate georgette veil over her hair, Shama was showing herself selfpossessed and even garrulous. She was throwing off opinions about the new constituion, federation, immigration, India, the future of Hinduism, the education of women. Mr Biswas listened to the flow with surprise and acute anxiety. He had never imagined that Shama was so well-informed and had such violent prejudices; and he suffered whenever she made a grammatical mistake.

India After Gandhi - pg. 47

This leprous daybreak, dawn night's fangs have manged --
This is not that long-looked-for break of day,
Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades
Set out, believing that in heaven's wide void
Somewhere must be the stars' last halting-place,
Somewhere the verge of night's slow-washing tide,
Somewhere the anchorage for the ship of heartache

India After Gandhi - pg. 41

It was India's historic destiny that many historic races and cultures should flow to her, finding a home in her hospitable sooil, and that many a caravan should find rest here ... Tleven hundred yeaars of common history [of Islam and Hinduismm] have enriched India with our common achievements. Our languaages, our poetry, our literature, our cculture, our art, our dress, our manners and customs, the unnumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour ... These thousand years of our joint life [have] moulded us into a common naitonality ... Whether we like it or not, we have now become an Indian nation, united and indivisible. No fantasy or artificial scheming to separate and divide can break this unity.

MAULANA ABUL KALAM AZAD, CONGRESS Presidential Address, 1940

India After Gandhi - pg. 36

India had withheld Pakistan's share of the "sterling balance" that the British owed jointly to the two dominions, a debt incurred on account of Indian contributions to the Second World War. This amounted to 550 million rupees, a fair sum.

India After Gandhi - pg. 31

The clinical even-handedness of the violence was described by the Punjab correspondent of the respected Madras-based weekly, Swatantra. He wrote of seeing

an empty refugee special steaming into Ferozepur Station late one afternoon. The driver was incoherent with terror, the guard was lying dead in his van, and the stoker was missing. I walked down the platform -- all but two bogies [carriages] were bespattered with blood inside and out; three dead bodies lay in pools of bloood in a third class carriage. An armed Muslim mob had stopped the train between Lahore and Ferozepur and done this neat job of butchery in broad daylight.

There is another sight I am not likely to easily forget. A five-mile long caravan of Muslim refugees crawling at a snail's pace into Pakistan over the Sutlej Bridge. Bulock-carts piled high with pitiful chattels, cattle being driven alongside. Women with babies in their arms and wwretched little tin-trunks on their heads. Twenty thoussand men, women and children trekking into the promised land -- not because it is the promised land, but because bands of Hindus and Sikhs in Faridkot Staate and the interior of Ferozepur district had hacked hundreds of Muslims to death and maade life impossible for the rest.

India After Gandhi - pg. 20

The resolution to mark the last Sunday of January as Independence Day was passed in the city of Lahore, where the Congress was holding its annual session. It was here that Jawaharlal Nehru was chosen president of the Congress, in confirmation of his rapidly rising status within the Indian national movement. 

India After Gandhi - pg. 5

Three months later, speaking at Albert Hall on "Our Duty To India" -- with his hinsman the duke of Marlborough presiding -- Churchill argued that "to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmans [who in his opinion dominated the Congress party] would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence." If the Britissh left, he predicted, then the entire gamut of public services creaated by them -- the judicical, medical, railway, and public works departments -- would perish, and India would "fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages." 

India After Gandhi - Opening

Prologue

UNNATURAL NATION

BECAUSE THEY ARE SO MANY, and so various, the people of India are also divided. They appear to have always been so. In the spring of 1827, the poet of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib set out on a journey from Delhi to Calcutta. Six months later he reached the holy Hindu city of Banaras. Here he wrote a poem called "Chirag-i-Dair", with these timeless lines:

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 433

Mr Biswas went past Dehuti too look at the body. Then he did not wish to see it again. But always, as he wandered about the yard among the mourners, he was aware of the body. He was oppressed by a sense of loss: not of present loss, but of something missed in the past. He would have liked to be alone, to commune with his feeling. But time was short, and always there was the sight of Shama and the children, alien growths, alien affections, which fed on him and called him away from that part of him which yet remained purely himelf, that part which had for long been submerged and was now to disappear

.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 404

From the exporter came the rancid smell of copra and the heavy smell of sacked sugar, a smell quite different from the fetid, sweet smell of the sugar factories and buffalo ponds Mr Biswas remembered from his boyhood. From the importer came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the smell of dust, straw, the urine and droppings of horses, donkeys and mules. At every impediment the gutters  had developed a wrinkled film of scum, as white as the skin on boiled milk, with a piercing, acrid smell, which, blended  and heated  by the afternoon sun, rose suffocatingly from the road and pursued Mr Biswas as he turned off into the sudden black shadow of an archway between the tenement and the exporter's. 

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 387

The children ran to the kitchen and seized the pitch-oil Shama had bought for the lamps. They poured the pitch-oil haphazardly on the bush and set it alight. In minutes the bush blazed and bezcame a restless sea of yellow, red, blue and green. They exchanged theories about the various colours; they listened with pleasure to the chatter and crackle of the quick fire. Too soon the tall flames contracted. The sun set. Charred leaves rose in the air. After dinner they had the sad task of beating down the fire at the edge of the trench. The brown sea had turned black, with red glitters and twinkles.

Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - Closing

No one had my keys and no one was ever waiting for me.

Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - pg. 269

It's always a bad thing when someone takes your name and notices it and remembers it, whether it's the authorities or a bunch of criminals, let alone when the authorities are the criminals. 

Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - pg. 157

They were in the thick of the crowd on the fast dance floor, gyrating wildly, each seemingly in urgent need of an exorcist, and both were scaring the life out of the people nearby, who doubtless saw them as foreign elements (she because of her age, he because he was dangerous), the music did not allow for any normal dance-hold or even for proximity, and so De la Garza was not subjected to torture by the erect cones or horizontal ice picks that he and I had both experienced already, indeed it was he -- and this was what most alarmed Tupra and myself and obliged us to intervene  without further delay or  ceremony -- who was now flailing Mrs Manoia, almost literally, no, literally, and the most surprising thing was that she envinced no pain -- that, at least, was my impression, I've no idea what Tupra thought -- from the unintended lashes that the prize prick kept dealing her as he danced, I mean, you had to be a complete prick to dance in that crazy way, only a short distance away from his partner, performing Travolta-like  turns, presenting Flavia as often with the back of his neck as with his face, completely oblivious to the fact that, with all these fast, abrupt movements, the empty hairnet, with no ponytail, no longer hair to fill it and no weight no constrain or hamper it, could easily turn into a whip, a lash, an unruly riding crop; if there had been some metal ornament on the end, it would have been just like the bolas a gaucho uses to catch cattle or the knut deployed by cruel Cossacks, but, fortunately, he had not adorned it with aglets or bobbles or bells or spikes, any of which would have made mincemeat of Flavia; I shuddered nonetheless, because such ornamental ideas could so easily have entered his vacant head, it would have been just like an idiot of his calbre, disguised as he was as a rapper, as a Napoleonic bullfighter, as the painter-cum-majo, Melendez, in his self-portrait in the Louvre, and as a fortune-telling gypsy with the obligatory hoop earring tinkling  and bobbing (all these things at once, a total mishmash).  

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 375

Less than a week later Hari died. It was only then that Anand learned that Hari had known for some time that he was going to die soon. W. C. Tuttle, ferociously brahminical in an embroidered silk jacket, did the last rites. The house went into mourning for Hari; no one used sugar or salt. He was one of those men who, by a negativeness that amounts to charity, are thought of kindly by everyone. He had taken part in no disputes; his goodness, like his  scholarship, was a family tradition. Everyone had been used to seeing Hari as the officiating pundit at religious ceremonies; everyone had been used to receiving the consecrated foods from him every morning. Hari,  in dhoti, his forehead marked with sandalwood paste; Hari doing morning and evening puja; Hari with his religious texts on the elaborately carved book-rest: these had been fixed sights in the Tulsi house. There had been no one to take Seth's place. There was no one to take Hari's.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 341

Up to this time the city had been new and held an expectation which not even the deadest two o'clock sun could destroy. Anything could happen: he might meet his barren heroine, the past could be undone, he would be remade. But now not even the thought of the Sentinel's presses, rolling out at that moment reports of speeches, banquets,  funerals (with all names and decorations carefully checked), could keep him from seeing that the city was no more than a repetition of this: this dark, dingy cafe,  the chipped counter, the flies thick on the electric flex, the empty Coca Cola cases stacked in a corner, the cracked glasscase, the shopkeepes picking his teeth, waiting to close.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 303

The house faced east, and the memories that remained of these first four years in Port of Spain were above all memories of morning. The newspaper, delivered free, still warm, the ink still wet, sprawled on the concrete steps, down which the sun was moving. Dew lay on trees and roofs; the empty street, freshly swept and washed, was in cool shadow, and water ran clear in the gutters whose green bases had been scratched and striped by the sweepers' harsh brooms. Memories of taking the Royal Enfield out from under the house and cycling in a sun still cool along the streets of the awakening city. Stillness at noon: a square of blue above the unmoving curtain. In the afternoon, the steps in shadow; tea in the back verandah. Then an interview at a hotel, perhaps, and the urgent machinery of the Sentinel. The promise of the evening; the expectation of the morning.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 281

The organization of the city fascinated Mr Biswas: the street lamps going on at the same time, the streets swept in the middle of the night, the rubbish collected  by the scavenging carts early in the morning; the furtive, macabre sounds of the nightsoil removers; the newsboys, really men; the bread van, the milk that came, not from cows, but in rum bottles stopped with brown paper. Mr Biswas was impressed when Dehuti and Ramchand spoke proprietorially of streets and shops, talking with the ease of people who knew their way about the baffling city. Even about Ramchand's going out to work every morning there was something knowing, brave and enviable. 

Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - pg. 82

... he persuaded purely by dint of persuasion and would rarely hatch any plot based on false information or lies, or so it seemed to me: his reasonings reasoned, his enthusiasms enthused and his dissuasions really did dissuade, and he needed nothing more, apart from, very occasionally, his silence, which doubtless silenced those with whom he kept silent.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 258

The early morning breeze dropped. It became hazy. The heat rose steadily and no relieving shower came in the early afternoon. Then the haze thickened, clouds turned from white to silver to grey to black and billowed heavily across the sky: a watercolour in black and grey..

It became dark.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 214

The site Mr. Biswas had in mind was about two hundred yards from the barracks, screened from it by the trees and separated from it by a shallow damp depression which ran with muddy water after rain. Trees also screened the road. But when he thought of the land as the site of his house, the trees did not seem unfriendly; and he liked to think of the spot as a 'bower', a word that had come to him from Wordsworth by way of the Royal Reader.

Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - pg. 48

'Fear is the greatest force that exists, as long as you can adapt to it and feel at home and live on good terms ith it, and not waste energy battling to ward it off. Because you can never entirely in that battle; even in moments of apparent victory, you're already anticipating its return, you live under constant threat, and then you become paralyssed, and fear immediately takes advantage of thhat. If, on the other hand, you accept fear (that is, if you adjust to it, if you get used to it being there), that gives you incomparable strength and you can then take advantage of that strength and use it. Its possibilities are infinite, far greater than those inherent in hatred, ambition, unconditionality, love, the desire for revenge; they're all unknown quantities.

Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - pg. 41

To fall silent, yes silent, is the great ambition that no one achieves. No one, not even after death. It is as if nothing had stopped resonating since the very beginning, not even when we can no longer recognise or trace theliving, who are perhaps still alive, we live alert to and troubled by unnumerable voices whose origin we do not know, they are  so ditant and muffled, or have they just been dug down too deep? Perhaps they are the feeble echoes of unrecorded lives, whose cries have been seething in their impatient minds since yesterday or for centuries now: 'We were born at such a place,' they exclaim out of their infinite waiting, 'and we died at such a place.' And far worse things too.

Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - pg. 6

Even though each night that I negotiate and traverse and survive casts an everdenser cloud over me, and still I cannot see her, do not see her.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 184

5

GREEN VALE

Whenever afterwards Mr  Biswas thought of Green Vale he thought of the trees. Tey were tall and straight, and so hung with long, drooping leaves that their trunks were hidden and appeared to be branchless . Half the leaves were dead; the other, at the top, were a dead green. It was as if all the trees had, at the same moment, been blighted in luxuriance, and death was spreading at the same pace from all the roots. But death was forever held in check. The tonguelike leaves of dead green turned slowly to the brightest yellow, became brown and thin as if scorched, curled downwards over the other dead leaves and did not fall. And new leaves came, as sharp as daggers;  but  there was no freshness to them; they came into the world old, without a shine, and only grew longer before they too died.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 155

There was no scent as pleasant as that of barely roasted poui: faint, yet so lasting it seemed to come afar, from some immeasurable depth captive within the wood: as faint as the scent of the pouis Raghu roasted in the village like this, in a yard like this, in a bonfire like this: bringing sensations, not pictures, of an evening meal being cooked over a fire that shone on a mud wall and kept out the night, of cool, new, unused mornings, of rain muffled on a thatched roof and warmth below it: sensations as faint as the scent of the poui itself, but sadly evanescent, refusing to be seized or to betranslated into a concrete memory.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 143

Shama was a puzzle. Within the girl who had served in the Tulsi Store and romped up and down the staircase of Hanuman House, he wit, the prankster, there were other Shamas, fully grown, it seemed, just waiting to bereleased: the wife,  the housekeeper, and now the mother.

Reading Priorities

1. A House For Mr. Biswas
2. Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream
3. The Upanishads
4. India After Gandhi

Destroyer: City of Daughters

Oh, City of Daughters,
is that what you wanted to be?
Oh, City of Daughters,
is that what you wanted to be?
Oh, City of Daughters,
is it not safe to say you've come when called?
A minor point of contention:
It's the pointlessness of the invention.
Trust, there's no need to remind us
we're all dying alone tonight!

In a City of Daughters.
Sister, I confess, I have forgotten just what it is that you wanted to be.
Fluffing and a-folding those clothes that you were sold in
to servicing what it is you always wanted to be.
In Vancouver, things are simple when they fit you to a "T".
Once again, you have refused the new pornographies
A minor bone of contention:
It's the soullessness of the convention.
Rock 'n' Roll sure came through for you.
Why would anybody want it to?

What is it about music that lends itself so well
To business-as-fucking-usual?
A minor source of contention:
the resourcelessness of the convention.
Rock 'n' Roll sure came through for you.
Why would anyone want it to
when we can burn the living
proof, go!

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 79

The silence outside was broken. The tall gate in the corrugated iron fence at the side of the courtyard banged repeatedly, and the courtyard was filled with the shuffle and chatter of the children back from school. They passed to the side of the house, under the gallery formed by the projecting loft. A child was crying; another explained why; a woman shouted for silence. From the kitchen came sounds of activity. At once house felt peopled and full.

Destroyer: Every Christmas

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 65

Dehuti, never pretty, was now frankly ugly. Her Chinese eyes looked sleepy, the pupils without a light, the whites smudged. Her cheeks, red with pimples, bulged low and drooped around her mouth. Her lower lip projected, as though squashed out by the weight of her cheeks. She sat on a low bench, the back of her long skirt caught tightly between her calves and the backs of her thighs, the front draped over the knees. Mr Biswas was surprised by her adulthood. It was the way she sat, knees apart, yet so decorously covered; he had associated that only with mature women.  

Destroyer: Foam Hands

True love regrets to inform you
There are certain things you must do
to perceive his face in the stains on the wall

I didn't know what time it was at all
I didn't know what time it was at all
Foam hands

Since you've been gone
Since you've been gone
Me and the King have been steadily growing apart
He lives down the hall

I didn't know what time it was at all
I didn't know what time it was at all
Foam hands

I'm not the kind
To tell you what is true
And what is totally out of control

I didn't know what time it was at all
I didn't know what time it was at all
Foam hands
Foam hands
Foam hands
Foam hands

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 45

He seldom went there except when Tara's husband, prompted by Tara, held a religious ceremony and needed Brahmins to feed. Then Mr. Biswas was treated with honour; stripped of his ragged trousers and shirt, and in a clean dhoti, he became a different person, and he never thought it unseemly that the person who served him so deferentially with food should be his own sister. In Tara's house he was respected as  a Brahmin and pampered; yet as soon as the ceremony was over and he had taken his gift of money and cloth andleft, he became once more only a labourer's child -- father's occupation: labourer was the entry in the birth certificate F. Z. Ghany had sent -- living with a penniless mother in one room of a mud hut.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 21

Mr. Biswas grew. The limbs that had been massaged and piled twice a day now remained dusty and muddy and unwashed for days. The malnutrition that had given him the sixth finger of misfortune pursued him now with eczema and sores that swelled and burst and scabbed and burst again, until they stank; his ankles and knees and wrists and elbows were in particular afflicted, and the sores left marks like vaccination scars. Malnutrition gave him the shallowest of chests, the thinnest of limbs; it stunted his growth and gave him a soft rising belly. And yet, perceptibly, he grew.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 15

Fate had brought him from India to the sugar-estate, aged him quickly and left him to die in a crumbling mud hut in the swamplands; yet he spoke of Fate often and affectionately, as though, merely by surviving, he had been particularly favoured.

A House For Mr. Biswas - Opening

PART ONE

I

PASTORAL

Shortly before he was born there had been another quarrel between Mr. Biswas's mother Bipti and his father Raghu, and Bipti had taken her three children and walked all the way in the hot sun to the village where her mother Bissoondaye lived.

FIRST PUBLISHED 1961 BY

ANDRE DEUTSCH LIMITED

105 GREAT RUSSELL STREET

LONDON WC1

COPYRIGHT 1961 BY V.S. NAIPAUL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

BY EBENEZER BAYLIS AND SON LTD

WORCESTER AND LONDON

The Legends Of Khasak - pg. 95

Outside, the night lay inebriated with its vastness. The wind was on the palms of Khasak. Beyond the reaches of the village late wayfarers waved their fibre torches, pulses of flame and ember. Like stricken spaceships signalling distress with their incandescent antennae, they continued their desolate journey.

The Legends Of Khasak - pg. 84

Madhavan Nair was remembering his Guru. In the village of Mannoor an unlettered knife-smith went blind. He sat listening to the grind of the honing stone as his apprenntice fashioned the knives. The blind one listened to the great dark; people came to him, scores of them, with their afflictions. He discooursed on texts he had never seen, and told his devotees to go back to their homes and see beyond the delusion of seeing ... 

To Do List

• Defense Invite
• Meeting
• Library

The Legends of Khasak - pg. 42

The mullah stepped out of the mosque, leaning on his stick. His way home lay past the school. He crossed the yard and paused awhile at the gate of the mosque. He thought of the stranger in the seedling house with sympathy and love. Innocent wayfarer, what bondof karma brings you here?

Then the lamp in the seedling house went out

.

To Do List

• OPT Sign
• Legneds of Khasak Finish
• Library Visit

Nazi Literature In The Americas - Closing

What an ugly business, I said, for something to say. Naturally, said Romero, it was Chilean business. I looked at him standing there in the entranceway; he was smiling. He must have been going on sixty. Look after yourself, Bolano, he said, and off he went.

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 195

His passage through literature left a trail of blood and several questions posed by a mute. It also left one or two silent replies.

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 145

A labyrinth where Ernst and Leni went on fucking, unable to uncouple, like a pair of dogs on fire in a valley of sheep. In a valley of blind sheep? A valley of hypnotized sheep? My voice is hypnotizing them, though Rory Long.

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 138

In spite of the blows he had received, Ginsberg included four of O'Bannon's poems in a Beat anthology, which was published a year later in New York.

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 134

Death found him composing the posthumous works of his heteronyms.

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 121

The following sentence from Toynbee expresses one of the pivotal themes of Sibelius's introductory text: "The historian's view is conditioned, always and everywhere, by his own location in time and place; and, since time and place are continually changing, no history, in the subjective sense of the word, can ever be a permanent record that will tell the story, once for all, in a form that will be equally acceptable to readers in all ages, or even in all quarters of the  Earth."

Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - Opening

3 Dance

Let us hope that no one ever asks us for anything, or even enquires, no advice or favour or loan, not even the loan of our attention, let us hope that others do not ask us to listen to them, to their wretched problems and their painful predicaments so like our own, to their incomprehensible doubts and their paltry stories which are so often interchangeable and have all been written before (the range of stories that can be told is not that wide), or to what used to be called their travails, who doesn't have them or, if he doesn't, brings them upon himself, unhappines is an invention', I often repeat to myself, and these words hold true for misfortunes that come from inside not outside and always assuming they are not misfortunes which are, objectively speaking, unavoidable, a catastrophe, an accident, a death, a defeat, a dismissal, a plague, a famine, or the vicious persecution of some blameless person, History is full of them, as is our own, by which I mean these unfinished times of ours (there are even dismissals and defeats that are self-inflicted or deserved or, indeed, invented). 

For Carmen Lopez M,

who will, I hope, want 

to go on listening to me

And for Sir Peter Russell,

to whom this book is indebted

for his long shadow,

and the author,

for his far-reaching friendship

The publication of this book has been assisted  with a translation subvention from the Director of Books, Archives, and Libraries of the Cultural Ministry of Spain.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced 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.

Manufactured in the  United States of America

New Direction Books are printed on acid-free paper.

First published clothbound in 2006

Design by Semadar Megged

New Direction Books are published by James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

The Legends of Khasak - Opening

I Search of the Sarai

When the bus came to its final halt in Koomankavu, the place did not seem unfamiliar to Ravi.

First published in Malayalam by Current Books 1969

First published in English by Penguin Books India 1994

Copyrigt O. V. Vijayan 1991, 1994

All rights reserved

This is a work fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. 

Typeset in Palatino by Digital Technologies and Printing Solutions, New Delhi

Printed at Presstechlitho Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi

For my father

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and witout limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above mentioned publisher of this book.

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 52

In 1961, a sepulchral silence, which Fontaine's publisher made no effort to break, greeted with the publication of the fourth volumes (555 pages), which tackles the five sections ("Presence to Self," "The Facticity of the For-Itself and the Being of Possibilities," "The Self and the Circuit of Selfness") of the first chapter ("Immediate Structures of the For-Itself") of Part II ("Being-for-Itself") and the second and third sections ("The Ontology of Temporality" and "Original Temporalty and Psychic Temporality: Reflection") of the second chapter ("Temporality").

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 47

As a young man Salvatico advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguyans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation; polygamy; the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinian race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in orderto effect a progressive lightening of the national skin color, darkened by years of promiscuity with the indigenous population; life-long  writer's grants; the abolition of tax on artist's incomes; the creation of the largest air force in South America; the colonization of Antarctica; and the building of new cities in Patagonia.

Random Book List (to-read) - December

• Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
• A Sport and A Pastime - James Salter
• Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - Javier Marias
• Legends of Khasak - O. V. Vijayan
• An Autobiography of Mohit Sen
  
• Makbara - Juan Goytisolo

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 40

Although unedited and unrevised, The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in Europe has the power of a work based on extreme experience, as well as containing various colorful observations on lesser-known aspects of Ignacio Zubieta's life, over which we shall pass in discreet silence.

2666 - Opening

1 THE PART ABOUT THE CRITICS
The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question was D'Arsonval.



For Alexandra Bolaño and Lautaro Bolaño


An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom
- Charles Baudelaire

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2004 by the heirs of Roberto Bolaño
Translation copyright 2008 by Natasha Wimmer
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas and McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
Originially published in 2004 by Editorial Anagrama, Spain
Punblished in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Grioux
First American edition, 2008
Published simultaneously as a hardcover and a three-volume slipcased paperback edition


An excerpt from "The Part About the Crimes" first appeared in Vice.

"Canto nottorno di un patore errante dell'Asia," by Giacomo Leopardi, is quoted in Jonathan Galassi'a translation.

Endpapers: Sea sponges, from Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, courtesy of the National Library of the Netherlands.

This work has been published with a subsidy from the Directorate-General of Books, Archives, and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and with assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts in the form of an NEA Translation Grant.

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 36

The collection was entitled Cross of Flowers. None of the poems was more than thirty lines long. The first was entitled "Cross of Veils" the second "Cross of Flowers" and so on (the second last was "Cross of Iron" and the last "Cross of Ruins"). Their content, as the titles quite clearly suggest, was autobiographical, but had been subjected to hermetic verbal procedures which rendered the poems obscure and cryptic for reader attempting to retrace the arc of Zubieta's life or penetrate the mystery that would always surround his exile, his choices and his apparently futile death.

Nazi Literature In The Americas - pg. 21

The failure of her marriage plunged Luz into despair.
She took to drinking in dives and having affairs with some
of the most unsavory individuals in Buenos Aires. Her
well-known poem "I Was Happy with Hitler", misunderstood
by the Right and the Left alike, dates from this period. Her mother
tried to send her to Europe, but Luz refused. At the time she
weighed more than two hundred pounds (she was only five foot
two inches tall) and was drinking a bottle of whisky a day.

In 1953, the year in which Stalin and Dylan Thomas died, she
published the collection Tango of Buenos Aires, which, as
well as a revised edition of "I Was Happy with Hitler," contained
some of her finest poems: "Stalin," a chaotic fable set among
bottles of vodka and incomprehensible shrieks; "Self Portrait,"
one of the cruelest poems written in Argentina which is no mean
claim; "Luz Mendiluce and Love," in the same vein as her
self-portrait, but with doses of irony and black humor, which make
it somewhat less grueling, and "Apocalypse at Fifty," a promise to
kill herself when she reached that age, which those who knew her
regarded as optimistic: given her lifestyle, Luz Mendiluce would
be lucky to reach the age of thirty.

Music Quiz

IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OKAY" YOU SAY?
Lightning Hopkins - I've been a bad man

WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Twin Peaks - Falling (Julie Cruise)

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Last Month Of The Year - The Fairfield Four

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
See See Rider - Lightning Hopkins

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Blistered - Johnny Cash

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Dreams Never End - New Order

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Rollin' Woman Blues - Lightning Hopkins

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Bridge Over The Ash - Fairport Convention

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Stay Out Of Trouble - Kings Of Convenience

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
The Chain - Scott Bomar

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Spinal Column - Stereolab

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Keep On The Sunny Side - The Whites - O'Brother Where Art Thou

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Pink Love - Blonde Redhead

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
Big Sky - Rachel Loy


WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Offend In Every Way - White Stripes

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Man Of Constant Sorrow - John Hartford

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
This Could Go Wrong - French Kicks

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
No Quarter - Led Zeppelin

WHAT'S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
Garageland - The Clash

HOW WILL YOU DIE?
Talked Myself Right Into It - Lynyrd Skynyrd

WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
An Actor's Revenge - Destroyer

WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Cello Sonata In D. Minor Op. 40 - Dimitry Shostakovich

WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
Fiddle About - The Who

WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
Straight A's in Love - Johnny Cash

WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
get up jake - The Band

DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
Planet Of Women - ZZ Top

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
winter wonder land - Animal Collective

WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
untitled iii (remix by loneswordsmen) - Calexico

Nazi Literature In The Americas - Opening

EDELMIRA THOMPSON DE MENDILUCE
Bueonos Aires, 1894--Buenos Aires, 1993
At fifteen, Edelmira Thompson published her first book, To Daddy, which earned her a modest place in the vast gallery of lady poets active in Buenos Aires high society.

Boy, somebody hurt you

Boy
Somebody hurt you
Boy
I wish I knew who
Could look
Into your sad eyes
And make
Such a sweet thing cry

You're lonely like only the broken can know
Aching for love but afraid to show
See how I miss you

Boy
Someone might hurt you
But it would never be me
I'd wrap you inside me
Be free or just hide for awhile

'Cause I'm lonely like only the broken can know
Aching for love but afraid to show
Lonely like only the broken can be
Breaking my own heart to make you see
See how I miss you

Please don't run away from the things that are real
And don't be afraid of whatever you feel
I'm feeling it too
I'm feeling it too

Boy
If you go looking
For things like in younger days
There won't be an answer
Only love can change your ways

Your lovely like only the broken can know
Aching for love but afraid to show
Lonely like only the broken can be
Breaking your own heart to make me see

See how I miss you
Boy, somebody hurt you
Boy, somebody hurt you
Boy, somebody hurt you
Boy, somebody hurt you
Boy, somebody hurt you
Boy, somebody hurt you
Boy