art, philosophy and knitting - ways of exploring the big questions -

Liv Reidun Brakstad

self portrait tuesday

i was barely there at the beginning, and i’m not absolutely sure what i(t) looked like… i have to rely on someone else’s depiction of it.

Brooklyn Follies

I have been reading Paul Auster’s books for many years, starting with his New York trilogy around 1988. I must admit I haven’t been as impressed by his latest works as I was by the trilogy. And I wonder; is it me changing as a reader, or is it him having lost something?
His last book, The Brooklyn Follies I don’t even seem to manage finishing. It has a lot of nice minor stories, but the major plot? The narrator is commenting on the narration, and by this constructing some kind of meta-fiction, but this is nothing like the things Auster used to do. I do absolutely not like to put a half read novel away, but I think I’ll have to do it now, unless someone can give me a really good reason to continue – a reason which quite disappointingly doesn’t seem to be found in the book itself.

Simone de Beauvoir in Chicago; 1954


I’m not too sure she would have backed up all the domestic needlework on this page, but I imagine she had a taste for good design - and no matter what - I do approve of her work, which I guess is what matters most, to me anyway…

My first encounter with John Banville’s literature was through his Booker Prize winning novel The Sea (2005). And I know for sure that I will have to read many more of his books in the years to come.

The way Banville uses language is amazing, and extremely challenging for one not having English as her first language. But the text, full of small sentences of poetry, makes the effort worthwhile & advisable.
In the story of the narrator, past and present are fused, like waves – coming and going in the mind of the narrator. Mourning the death of his wife in the town where he spent his childhood holidays, Max Morden goes in and out of different realities, and Banville is by this constant motion composing a complex life story.
But the story is just a part of this novel; even more stunning is the language it is written in, the way he as an author approaches wordless sensations. Like the indescribable feeling of one’s first kiss: “I had a sense of a general, large, soft settling, as of a sheet unfurling and falling on a bed, or a tent collapsing into the cushion of its own air” (161) the atmosphere seems almost painted on the pages…