Recent content by John Doe

Was just thinking that this lunchtime, actually... But I think there's some beauty in it, as well as the grammatical shock of its ending. Perhaps we could consider fine novels that have indifferent/unremarakable opening lines?

Oh - and of course: "Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."

Three faves from Faulkner: 'Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.' - The Sound and the Fury "From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the...

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there..." [The Go-Between, LP Hartley] "On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn’t ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint...

What do you call a terrorist who spends the months of June, July and August on the island of Ibiza? All-Summa Bin Largin I'll make my own way to the coat rack, thanks...

I certainly hope we haven't finished with Austerlitz yet - I feel we're just getting started! I expected to finish reading it this week, but I've been bogged down with, y'know, stuff, and have been delayed. I'm almost finished though. I want to post some further reflections maybe over the...

Just read the essays collected in Illuminations - particulary 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' and 'Theses on the Philosophy of HIstory'. He's a pretty accessible writer, even if he can make the occassional gnomic pronouncement... Edit: I'm formulating a couple of...

No, I didn't express myself clearly at all. I was trying not to use the word diegesis - but I think the whole novel works continually via hypodiegesis ie the narrator (one level of discourse) reports what he has heard, in conversation, from Austerlitz (hypo-diegesis, or a secondary diegetic...

I don't find it clumsy at all. And it's quite deliberate I think - a strategy of foregrounding the speaking voice how the many levels of discourse within the text merge together.

Yeah, quite, although the M Moore/Adam Curtis approach to structure is framed as an essay - ie non-fictional, subjective (and thus very much the product of a centred, grounded, speaking subject). Austerlitz, I think, seeks not only to undermine but almost to invert this structure - the...

Yeah, know what you mean... I think that's because, as one reads, you're not really aware of who, precisely, is speaking at any one time (in the sense of a grounded, centred subject performing discrete and identifiable, speech acts - or dialogue - as in a classic realist text). There's a whole...

Yes, I think you've put it brilliantly there with the spectre metaphor - the title is chosen quite deliberately for its resonances and suggestions of 'Aushwitz' (and thus the whole Holocaust). I think the text is all about language and naming actually - what can be articulated, what is left...

And I think there, in a nutshell, you've hit the central meaning - and the method - of the novel bang on the head IR... Anyway, I'm happilly immersed in the novel now (third or fourth reading since it was published) and look forward to taking up the discussion of its meaning(s) when we've all...

Cool. A good choice, I reckon. What do we do now? Read it and then start arguing/discussing? Should we have some sort of timetable for finishing the book? Obviously, those that don't finish it on time get detention...

Neck and neck going into the final furlong? How exciting. Perhaps if it remains that way you should get a final casting vote IR (seeing as you got this thang rolling the first place)? Naturally if you vote for something I don't like I'll hate you forever, but I suppose you must accept IR that...