Shelf

The atmosphere in these books transports me to a dreamworld. I keep looking for more such books, because I keep looking for dreams; I keep looking for dreams because I want to write them down in the most beautiful way possible. Here are the tantalizing first few sentences of some of the dreams that have inspired me.

Bohumil Hrabal
* Too Loud a Solitude: For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I’ve come to look like my encyclopedias—and a good three tons of them I’ve compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.
* I Served the King of England: When I started to work at the Golden Prague Hotel, the boss took hold of my left ear, pulled me up, and said, You’re a busboy here, so remember, you don’t see anything and you don’t hear anything. Repeat what I just said. So I said I wouldn’t see anything and I wouldn’t hear anything. Then the boss pulled me up by my right ear and said, But remember too that you’ve got to see everything and hear everything. Repeat it after me. I was taken aback, but I promised I would see everything and hear everything. That’s how I began. Every morning at six, when the hotelkeeper walked in, we were lined up like an army on parade, with the maitre d’, the waiters, and me, a tiny busboy, along one side of the carpet, and along the other side the cooks, the chambermaids, the laundress, and the scullery maid. The hotelkeeper walked up and down to see that our dickeys were clean and our collars and jackets spotless, that no buttons were missing, and that our shoes were polished. He’d lean over and sniff to make sure our feet were washed, and then he’d say, Good morning, gentlemen, good morning, ladies, and after that we weren’t allowed to talk to anyone.

David Albahari
* Bait: “Where should I begin,” says Mother. At the same moment I reach out my hand and press the button on the tape recorder.
* Götz and Meyer: Götz and Meyer. Having never seen them, I can only imagine them. In twosomes like theirs, one is usually taller, the other shorter, but since both were SS noncommissioned officers, it is easy to imagine that both were tall, perhaps the same height. I am assuming that the standards for acceptance into the SS were rigorous, below a certain height you most certainly would not qualify.
* Snow Man: The driver was waiting for me at the airport, just as I’d been told he’d be. I could see him even before I came through: as I stood by the carousel, as I looked for a free luggage cart, as I handed the customs officer the filled-out forms. The exit door slid open and shut automatically, but each time, regardless of where I was, I could see the driver standing the same place, wearing some sort of uniform with a brimmed cap, holding a sign with my name written on it in blue chalk.

Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter: Dear Aissatou, I have received your letter. By way of reply, I am beginning this diary, my prop in my distress. Our long association has taught me that confiding in others allays pain.

John Banville, The Sea: They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.

Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, “At One O’clock in the Morning“:
. . . Dissatisfied with everything, dissatisfied with myself, I long to redeem myself and to restore my pride in the silence and solitude of the night. Souls of those whom I have loved, souls of those whom I have sung, strengthen me, sustain me, keep me from the vanities of the world and its contaminating fumes; and You, dear God! grant me the grace to produce a few beautiful verses to prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men, that I am not inferior to those whom I despise.

Thomas Bernhard, Frost: First Day. A medical internship consists of more than spectating at complicated bowel operations, cutting open stomach linings, bracketing off lungs, and sawing off feet; and it doesn’t just consist of thumbing closed the eyes of the dead, and hauling babies out into the world either. An internship is not just tossing limbs and parts of limbs over your shoulder into an enamel bucket. Nor does it just consist of trotting along behind the registrar and the assistant and the assistant’s assistant, a sort of tail-end Charlie. Nor can an internship be only the putting out of false information; it isn’t just saying: “The pus will dissolve in your bloodstream, and you’ll soon be restored to perfect health.” Or a hundred other such lies.

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives: November 2. I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no intitation ceremony. It was better that way.

Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions

Italo Calvino
* Marcovaldo; or, The Seasons in the City: The wind, coming to the city from far away, brings it unusual gifts, noticed by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands.
* The Watcher and Other Stories, “Smog”: That was a time when I didn’t give a damn about anything, the period when I came to settle in this city. Settle is the wrong term. I had no desire to be settled in any sense; I wanted everything around me to remain flowing, temporary, because I felt it was the only to save my inner stability, though what that consisted of, I couldn’t have said. So when, after a whole series of recommendations, I was offered the job as managing editor of the magazine Purification, I came here to the city and looked for a place to live.

Edward Carey, Observatory Mansions: I wore white gloves. I lived with my mother and father. I was not a child. I was thirty-seven years old. My bottom lip was swollen. I wore white gloves though I was not a servant. I did not play in a brass band. I was not a waiter. I was not a magician. I was the attendant of a museum.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
* Wordsworth Classics translation: You may depend upon my bare word, reader, without any further security, that I could wish this offspring of my brain were as ingenious, sprightly, and accomplished as yourself could desire; but the mischief of it is, nature will have its course: every production must resemble its author, and my barren and unpolished understanding can produce nothing but what is very dull, very impertinent, and extravagant beyond imagination.
* translated by the great Edith Grossman: Idle reader: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine.

Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City: Go and fetch, will you please, a copper incense brazier, a family heirloom gorgeously encrusted now with moldy green, and light in it some pungent chips of aloeswood. Listen while I tell a Hong Kong tale, from before the war. When your incense has burned out, my story too will be over.

François Cheng, The River Below: In the beginning there was the cry in the night. Autumn 1930. China with its five thousand years of history, and I with almost six years of life on earth, for I was born in January 1925. My parents had just taken me to the country for the first time, fleeing the city of Nanchang, its heat still oppressive, its streets tumultuous with the spectacle of executions.

Philippe Claudel, By a Slow River: It’s very difficult to find the beginning. So much time has gone by that words will never bring back—and the faces too, the smiles, the wounds. Even so, I must try. I have to cut open the belly of the mystery and stick my hands deep inside, even if none of that will change a thing.

Lydia Davis
* The End of the Story: The last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last, I was sitting on the terrace with a friend and he came through the gate sweating, his face and chest pink, his hair damp, and stopped politely to talk to us.
* Break It Down: Stories

Stephen Dixon
* Interstate: A Novel
* Sleep: Stories
* Gould: A Novel in Two Novels
* Old Friends: A Novel

Gabriele Eckart, Hitchhiking: Twelve German Tales

Péter Esterházy, The Book of Hrabal: The Chapter of Fidelity. The two angels spoke to each other in the language of (what else?) angels. They had assumed the guise of young men; one of them was called Blaise, the other Gabriel, but everyone, including the Good Lord, just called him Cho-Cho.

Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke: Tuesday morning I awoke at that pale and lifeless hour when night is almost gone but dawn has not yet come into its own. Awakened suddenly, I wanted to take a taxi and dash to the railroad station, thinking I was due to leave, when, in the next minute, I realized to my chagrin that no train was waiting for me at the station, that no hour had struck. I lay in the murky light while my body, unbearably frightened, crushed my spirit with fear, and my spirit crushed my body, whose tiniest fibers cringed in apprehension that nothing would ever happen, nothing ever change, that nothing would ever come to pass, and whatever I undertook, nothing, but nothing, would ever come of it.

Julien Gracq
* Reading Writing, “Literature and Painting”: We know of hardly any painters who are born to their art already armed head to toe with their own technique, masters of their palette, touch, impasto, glazes. All of them seem to have arrived at their craft, which constitutes their signature, gradually, slowly, sometimes even in the public eye. Because writing and editing are the foundations of the scholarly institution, literature reveals an entirely different picture: a number of writers, beginning with their very first book, already write the way they will write their entire life.
* The Shape of a City: The shape of a city, as we all know, changes more rapidly than the heart of a mortal.

Dashiell Hammett, The Continental Op, “The Golden Horseshoe”: “I haven’t anything very exciting to offer you this time,” Vance Richmond said as we shook hands. “I want you to find a man for me—a man who is not a criminal.”

Henry James, Stories of Artists & Writers, “The Figure in the Carpet”: I had done a few things and earned a few pence—I had perhaps even had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the patronising; but when I take the little measure of my course (a fidgety habit, for it’s none of the longest yet) I count my real start from the evening George Corvick, breathless and worried, came in to ask me a service.

Ha Jin, In the Pond: Shao Bin felt sick of Dismount Fort, a commune town where he had lived for over six years. His wife, Meilan, complained that she had to walk two miles to wash clothes on weekends.

Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak: On Tuesday I received a note from Jack Toledano asking me to meet him today at the Star and Garter in Putney at the usual time, wrote Damien Anderson. I am used to these notes. Jack does not need to specify the time. If I cannot make it he goes for a walk himself, but I always try to be there because there is nothing better than going for a walk with Jack Toledano. London is a walker’s paradise, he says, but you have to know where to go. Paris is for the flâneur, he says, but London is for the walker. The only way to think, he says, is at a desk, the only way to talk is on a walk. Perhaps think is the wrong word, he says, and wahat I mean is the only way to make something which will cause others to think is at a desk with a typewriter in front of you. I am quite incapable of thought, he says, but with a typewriter in front of me and a nice thick wad of A4 at my right hand I can, if all goes well, simulate thought and stimulate thought.

Franz Kafka
* The Castle: It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.
* The Blue Octavo Notebooks, “The First Notebook”: Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Paul LaFarge, The Facts of Winter, by Paul Poissel, translated by Paul LaFarge: NOTE TO THE READER: The Facts of Winter is not the best-known of Paul Poissel’s works, but it is certainly the most fantastical. The book is a series of dreams, all dreamed by people in and around Paris during the winter of 1881, which is to say that it is a fictional account of the imaginary lives of people who may or may not be real, and who in any case who lived a quarter of a century before the book was written, in 1904.

Pär Lagerkvist, The Dwarf: I am twenty-six inches tall, shapely and well proportioned, my head perhaps a trifle too large. My hair is not black like the others’, but reddish, very stiff and thick, drawn back from the temples and the broad but not especially lofty brow. My face is beardless, but otherwise just like that of other men. My eyebrows meet. My bodily strength is considerable, particularly if I am annoyed. When the wrestling match was arranged between Jehoshaphat and myself I forced him onto his back after twenty minutes and strangled him. Since then I have been the only dwarf at this court.

Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror: May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened and having for the time being become as fierce as what he is reading, should, without being led astray, find his rugged and treacherous way across the desolate swamps of these sombre and poison-filled pages; for, unless he brings to his reading a rigorous logic and a tautness of mind equal at least to his wariness, the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve his soul as water does sugar.

Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier: The bishop summoned the undersigned to his presence yesterday evening. He offered me snuff. Thanks all the same, but it makes me sneeze, I said.

Vladimir Makanin, The Loss: A Novella and Two Stories, “The Loss”: Everyone knew that Pekalov was a drunk and was broke and that naturally his project all along had been utterly stupid, just as it continued to be. But still the bastard grabbed everyone who came along by the sleeve and bellowed, “Well, boys, who’s coming with me? Ya know I’m digging a tunnel under the Ural River!”

Alberto Manguel, With Borges: For several years, from 1964 to 1968, I was fortunate enough to be among the many who read to Jorge Luis Borges.

Javier Marías
* The Man of Feeling: I don’t know whether I should tell you my dreams. They are old dreams, old-fashioned dreams, more suited to an adolescent than to a grown man. They are once elaborate and precise, leisurely, but highly colored, like those dreamed by an over-imaginative but basically simple soul, a very orderly soul. They are dreams that become somewhat tedious after a while because the person dreaming them always wakes before the end, as if the dream impulse had worn itself out in the representation of all those details and lost interest in the final result, as if dreaming were the only truly ideal and aimless activity left. So I do not know how my dreams end, and it might be inconsiderate of me to tell you about them, knowing that I can offer neither conclusion nor lesson. But they strike me as both inventive and vivid. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I am writing out of the particular form of timelessness—the place of my eternity—that has chosen me.
* When I Was Mortal:
– “When I Was Mortal”: I often used to pretend I believed in ghosts, and I did so blithely, but now that I am myself a ghost, I understand why, traditionally, they are depicted as mournful creatures who stubbornly return to the places they knew when they were mortal.
– “Fewer Sruples”: I was so strapped for cash that, two days earlier, I’d gone for a screen test for a porno film and was amazed to see how many other women aspired to one of those roles with absolutely no dialogue, or, rather, only exclamations. I’d gone there feeling shy and embarrassed, telling myself that my daughter had to eat, that it was no big deal and that it was unlikely that the film would be seen by anyone I knew, although I know that everyone always ends up finding out about everything that happens. I doubt, though, that I’ll ever be important enough in future to merit being blackmailed about my past. Besides, there’s quite enough material for that already.
– “Spear Blood”: I said goodbye forever to my best friend without knowing that I was, because the following night, after far too long a delay, he was found lying on his bed with a spear through his chest and with a strange woman by his side, also dead, but without the murder weapon impaled in her body, because the weapon was one and the same and they must have first stuck it in her, then pulled it out again in order to mingle her blood with that of my best friend. The lights were all on and the television too, and had doubtless remained so for the whole of that day, my friend’s first day without life or the world’s first day without his worldly presence in it after thirty-nine years, the light bulbs incongruous in the harsh morning sun and perhaps less so against the stormy afternoon sky, but Dorta would have hated all that waste. I don’t quite know who pays the bills for the dead.

Pierre Michon
* Masters and Servants, “The Life of Joseph Roulin”: One of them had been stationed there by the Post Office, arbitrarily or perhaps according to his own wishes; the other had gone there because of the books he had read; because it was The South, where he believed that money might go further, that women were more favorable, and that the skies were excessive, Japanese. Because he was running away. Chance dropped them into Arles, in 1888.
* The Origin of the World: Between les Martres and Saint-Amand-le-Petit lies the town of Castelnau, along the Beune. I was posted to Castelnau in 1961: devils are posted as well I suppose, to their Circles below; and somersault after somersault make their downward way just as we slip gently toward retirement. I hadn’t fallen yet, not exactly, it was my first post, I was twenty.

Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman: Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar. Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded. He was personally responsible for the whole idea in the first place. It was he who told me to bring my spade. He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for.

Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual
– Preamble. To begin with, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: the perceived object—we may be dealing with a perceptual act, the acquisition of a skill, a physiological system, or, as in the present cas,e a wooden jigsaw puzzle—is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element’s existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose that. That means that you can look at a piece of a puzzle for three whole days, you can believe that you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further on than when you started.
– (from Chapter One) On the Stairs, I. Yes, it could begin this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds. What happens behind the flats’ heavy doors can most often be perceived only through those fragmented echoes, those splinters, remnants, shadows, those first moves or incidens or accidents that happen in wat are called the “common areas,” soft little sounds damped by the red woollen carpet, embryos of communal life which never go further than the landing. The inhabitants of a single building live a few inches from each other, they are separated by a mere partition wall, they share the same spaces repeated along each corridor, they perform the same movements at the same times, turning on a tap, flushing the water closet, switching on a light, laying the table, a few dozen simultaneous existences repeated from storey to storey, from building to building, from street to street.

Laura Restrepo, Delirium: I knew something irreparable had happened the moment a man opened the door to that hotel room and I saw my wife sitting at the far end of the room, looking out the window in the strangest way. I’d just returned from a short trip, four days away on business, and I swear that Agustina was fine when I left, I swear nothing odd was going on, or at least nothing out of the ordinary, certainly nothing to suggest what would happen to her while I was gone, except for her own premonitions, of course, but how was I to believe her when Agustina is always predicting some catastrophe; I’ve tried everything to make her see reason, but she won’t be swayed, insisting that ever since she was little she’s had what she calls the gift of sight, or the ability to see the future, and God only knows the trouble that’s caused us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
* The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who staggered and fell. A crowd formed around him and I was spared the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was dragging herself heavily along a high, warm wall, and now and then reached out to touch it as if to convince herself that it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind her? I looked on my map: maison d’accouchement. Good. They will deliver her—they can do that.
* Two Stories of Prague, “The Siblings”: At noon the new tenants had moved into the old house across from the Maltese church, three flights up, and until evening all that was known was that they had brought with them unusually large pieces of furniture, which had nearly got stuck in the tight turns of the winding staircase. And the old, bleary-eyed peddler-woman who sat nearby under the dark stone arcades could hardly get over the thought of the huge oaken wardrobes, and she besought the neighbors to take her word for it that they had been “real upperclass” wardrobes. This assurance brought about an unusual restlessness that kept the many small factions in that particular house in suspense.

Joseph Roth, The White Cities: Reports from France 1925–39: 1. How to Celebrate a Revolution (1925). They are dancing in the streets of Paris. People are dancing in celebration of a revolution, a revolution that took place such a long time ago that only a historian can have any faith in the notion that it actually took place.

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo: I came to Comala because I was told that my father, a certain Pedro Páramo, was living there. My mother told me so, and I promised her I would come to see him as soon as she died. I pressed her hand so that she’d know I would do it, but she was dying and I was in the mood to promise her anything.

Albert Sánchez Piñol, Cold Skin: We are never very far from those we hate. For this very reason, we shall never be truly close to those we love. An appalling fact, I knew it well enough when I embarked. But some truths deserve our attention; others are best left alone.

W. G. Sebald
* The Emigrants, “Paul Bereyter”: In January 1984, the news reached me from S that on the evening of the 30th of December, a week after his seventy-fourth birthday, Paul Bereyter, who had been my teacher at primary school, had put an end to his life. A short distance from S, where the railway track curves out of a willow copse into the open fields, he had lain himself down in front of a train. The obituary in the local paper was headed “Grief at the Loss of a Popular Teacher” and there was no mention of the fact that Paul Bereyter had died of his own free will, or through a self-destructive compulsion.
* The Rings of Saturn: In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.

Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Lost: My brother squatted on a white blanket and laughed into the camera. That was during the war, my mother said, the last year of the war, at home. Home was the East, and my mother had been born in the East. As my mother spoke the words “at home” she began to cry, as she often did when the subject of my brother came up. His name was Arnold, like my father’s. Arnold was a happy child, said my mother, looking at the photograph. She didn’t say any more, and I didn’t say anything either, and looked at Arnold squatting on a white blanket and being happy.

Helena María Viramontes, Their Dogs Came with Them

Robert Walser
* Jakob von Gunten: One learns very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and none of us boys of the Benjamenta Institute will come to anything, that is to say, we shall all be something very small and subordinate later in life.
* Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912–1932:
– “A Note on Van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne”: In front of this picture one has all kinds of thoughts, and to someone absorbed in it many questions occur, questions at once so simple and so strange and so disconcerting that they seem to be unanswerable. In the picture, many questions find their finest, most subtle, most delicate significance—which is that they cannot be answered. When, for instance, a lover asks his lady, “Can I still have hopes?” and she doesn’t answer, then this absence of an answer sometimes signifies a heavenly Yes. That is how it is with everything that puzzles us, everything great, and here is a picture full of puzzles, full of greatness, full of deep and beautiful questions, and likewise full of deep, majestic, and beautiful answers.
– “Brentano”: He no longer saw a future before him, and the past, however hard he tried to find some clarity in it, seemed a thing incomprehensible. The justifications crumbled away and desires seemed to vanish forever. Travels and wanderings, once his secret joy, had become strangely repugnant; he was scared to take a single step, and at every change of address he trembled, as if something monstrous confronted him. He was neither honorably homeless nor honestly and naturally at home anywhere in the world. He’d have liked so much to be a hurdy-gurdy man or a beggar or a cripple, then he’d have cause to ask people for sympathy or alms, but even more fervently he wished for death. He was not dead, yet dead he was, not beggarly poor, but such a beggar yet still he didn’t beg, he still carried himself with elegance even now, like a tedious machine he still made his bows and spoke empty words, and was dismayed and horrified to be doing so.

Nathanael West, “The Dream Life of Balso Snell”: While walking in the tall grass that has sprung up around the city of Troy, Balso Snell came upon the famous wooden horse of the Greeks. A poet, he remembered Homer’s ancient song and decided to find a way in.

On examining the horse, Balso found that there were but three openings: the mouth, the navel, and the posterior opening of the alimentary canal. The mouth was beyond his reach, the navel proved a cul-de-sac, and so, forgetting his dignity, he approached the last. O Anus Mirabilis!

Monique Wittig, Les Grérillères: When it rains the women stay in the summer-house. They hear the water beating on the tiles and streaming down the slopes of the roof. Fringes of rain surround the summer-house, the water that runs down at its angles flows more strongly, it is as if springs hollow out the pebbles at the places where it reaches the ground. At last someone says it is like the sound of micturition, that she cannot wait any longer, and squats down. Then some of them form a circle around her to watch the labia expel the urine.

Margeurite Yourcenar, Oriental Tales, “How Wang-Fo Was Saved”: The old painter Wang-Fo and his disciple Ling were wandering along the roads of the Kingdom of Han.

They made slow progress because Wang-Fo would stop at night to watch the stars and during the day to observe the dragonflies. They carried hardly any luggage, because Wang-Fo loved the image of things and not the things themselves, and no object in the world seemed to him worth buying, except brushes, pots of lacquer and China ink, and rolls of silk and rice paper. They were poor, because Wang-Fo would exchange his paintings for a ration of boiled millet, and paid no attention to pieces of silver. Ling, his disciple, bent beneath the weight of a sack full of sketches, bowed his back with respect as if he were carrying the heavens’ vault, because for Ling the sack was full of snow-covered mountains, torrents in spring, and the face of the summer moon.