Author: Tônu Õnnepalu
This book is a beautiful reflection on love and existence.
themes
- Veneration of material
- Veneration of work
- Border states, transition states
- Sexuality expanded beyond merely physical; universal eros
motifs
- Sun and death
- Being and nothingness
- Phantoms and flesh
- Distorted time
questions
- Where does time go? Can it really “go”?
style & structure
Fragmented, almost stream-of-consciousness nod to the epistolary style. Montage of pretty images. A lament for the human spirit, now hollowed by the veneration of the material.
notes
- Pretty phrase: syrup of power
- Concepts materialized as spaces and their textures
- As one gets to know phantoms, they become flesh and blood
- Sexuality is expanded beyond physical conventions: “Sometimes I don’t know which I find more seductive, a solitary jogger or the flowering tree that he’s running past.” (29) → Eros
- The desire to capture and retain fragments experience
- Desire for union beyond the material, for something beyond the self
- The Other is an apocalyptic deliverance of love, desire, and death
- Time is distorted through the space between characters: “I saw Franz far away, wandering, cane in hand, over the gravestones toward me. He seemed to come and come, over months and years.” (52)
- Franz’s drops for heart to ease his fear of death: anxiety, but it’s ironic an highlights how ridiculous and surface-level life is for him. He has everything, but in the end, he still cannot conquer death.
highlights
It’s as if I were awakened from a dream. I flinch. I rub my eyes. But it’s already fading. Memory can’t catch the dream, can’t reclaim it. It’s already far and in a fog. It’s already beckoning from the opposite shore where the sun is making itself a soft bed, where everything faded even before it began. – p. 11
And I’m counting on the likelihood that these letters will be saved on the disk: that I have lived and have spoken. – p. 17
It’s too degrading to be loved. – p. 19
Angelo, I adore your nothingness. I’m sick to death and tired of all those people who are something. – p. 29
Note: desire for labels, for material, resistance to simply being.
They know everything and I still know nothing. Don’t know the meaning of anything. – p. 32
I want everything to vanish painlessly into the air, everything, department-store goods, paintings in the museum, the crowd that enters and exits the door, vanish like nothing at all and I along with that nothing at all. – p. 35
For some reason letters like to arrive in bunches. God doesn’t like regular distributions. Even pouring his spirit on the apostles was accomplished in one fell swoop. – p. 36
favorites I loved the hands of a human as if they were the hands of God, and I expected love from them, which was not human. I knew from the start that I was knocking on the door of the impossible, that it would never be opened, that the border was solid even though it might have appeared to be transparent, that the miracle would not occur. – p. 38
But that was enough for me, because one condition for the gods’ existence is the letters we write them, not their response to ours. – p. 40
But sometimes I enjoy observing the unhappy flesh that awaits its salvation in those bars. – p. 43
If you’re unhappy, then they run from you like from a mad dog, it’s catching! But if you’re happy and don’t worry about anything, then you attract them like flies to honey, like leeches. – p. 44
Tell me, Angelo, whisper in my ear so that no one else can hear, doesn’t history give you the creeps? Not just that throats have been slit, and are still being slit, but that this is of absolutely no consequence, that man will put up with immense suffering, immense! – p. 58
You know, Angelo, I have always been overwhelmed by the beauty of the world, wherever I may encounter it. I have never been able to resist it! It could be just a passing glimpse out of a train window, the most ordinary little path that meanders along vineyard-covered hills, or yellow tea roses dropping petals as they lean against the fence of the railway station, some ordinary street corner with its Bistro sign, or the bound volume on the counter of some bookstore. And people, the way that they can be fiery and ethereal at the same time! Poor me, I’m totally incapacitated by this. Strength drains from my limbs. My arms become weak. Just as when I saw you for the first time, Angelo, I was immediately overwhelmed by your beauty. – p. 64
Note: Angelo seems to be a figment of the narrator’s imagination named after someone he knows. Artist’s spirit, writer’s muse, inspiration in conceptualized form. Some sort of divinity that cannot be grasped; the narrator’s guardian angel.
You must never stay in places you find tempting—where the world’s beauty is stalking to ensnare you in its glittering trap. These one should only pass through or pass by, pretending disinterest. As soon as you pause, you are lost. Then the switches are already in the brine. You have succumbed to temptation, and temptation always leads to crime. The world’s beauty is always baiting to be destroyed. – p. 67
I don’t know what this thing called love is. Do you, Angelo? You’re supposed to know everything. It’s talked about so much, and it seems one should be chasing it in order not to waste one’s life. – p. 73
He is five years younger than I, and he stubbornly claimed to love me. Whenever anyone tells me that, it makes me want to run away, because the person who says that invariably has an expression that demands at least three drops of blood, if not your life, in return. – p. 75
In brief, humans aren’t necessary for garbage production anymore. Machines work just as well. Display items on shop counters doze in the alluring glare of artificial light, dreaming of garbage bins. Automatic teller machines hum silently. Money is circulating. Lights in offices turn off during lunch hours. There is nothing to remind us of humans anymore, just as there is nothing to remind us of yesterday’s garbage. – p. 80
That’s when I suddenly woke up, when it became clear to me that I had to bring this to a close, that none of them would ever catch me and that I would never want what I was supposed to want. At the last moment would always slip out of their hands! – p. 92
The flesh all around me is willing, Angelo, but there is no spirit anywhere. – p. 95