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Peru | Nov 11 2002

For months I’ve been looking for something to read, a novel. Nearly every day I’m at the library, searching the stacks. Recently I’ve noticed this other person in the stacks; she’s there every time I show up. Has she been there from the beginning? I don’t know. All I know is that one day I saw her and realized I’d seen her before. Once I realized this, I started looking for her, and each time I did so, I found her. Like me, she’s trying to find a novel to read. Or that’s what I imagine, having never see her anywhere but in FICTION. Oddly, though, she never has a book in her hand. That’s the usual thing: you browse through the stacks and take down a book and skim through it. Often people stand in the aisle reading a particular book for several minutes, or else they hold a book in one hand while looking for another. She doesn’t do these things, or at least I haven’t seen her doing them. I find this scary. It’s not that she seems weird in any way. In fact she seems the very opposite of weird: the most unweird person you’ve ever encountered. Which in itself seems weird. Anyway I avoid her. If she’s in the C’s, I walk down to the T’s and start looking there.

Most days I return home with three, four, sometimes five books. I’ve yet to finish anything, nor even come close. Often I read a page or two and toss it on the bed. Yesterday’s haul included Asa, As I Knew Him by Susanna Kaysen, The End of the Novel by Michael Krüger, and Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre. I read seven pages of The End of the Novel before slamming it shut. I didn’t like the beginning of the second chapter, it seemed too written. Asa, As I Knew Him fared better, although at first I doubted it would. I found a picture of the author, a small photo, on the second page, the page before the title page. I didn’t like this picture. It seemed too much like a picture. The fact is (I might as well admit it, why be ashamed?), I found the author unattractive. I didn’t like her haircut. I didn’t like what she was wearing. Was it a robe? Was it some sort of jacket? She didn’t seem to have a shirt on, just this jacket, which while nice enough, seemed too much like the kind of thing one wears in an author’s photo. Obviously one would like to look attractive in such a photo, that’s a given. But my sense was that Susanna Kaysen was trying just a little hard, or rather, failing to hide how hard she was trying. I felt a touch of pity at this and didn’t like feeling it. I would have preferred if Susanna Kaysen had used a photo from grade school or maybe posed with a paper bag over her head with a smile drawn on it, which I’ve seen done to great effect. Of course the price of the latter approach is that one’s photo becomes a statement on such photos. Better to include no photo and avoid the issue entirely. However, one imagines that the publisher wanted a photo, knowing from industry studies that photos increase sales. I didn’t like thinking about these things and half-resented Susanna Kaysen for bringing them to mind. I liked her book titles, however. Aside from Asa, As I Knew Him, she’s written a book called Girl, Interrupted, which I believe was made into a film, and another called Far Afield. Far Afield is a so-so title, but I like the title Girl, Interrupted. I read thirty-seven pages of Asa, As I Knew Him. Or thirty-two, actually, since the book begins on page five. (I’ve never understood this practice of beginning books on page three or page five.) The first thirty-two pages of Asa, As I Knew Him concern a woman, Dinah, who works with a married man, Asa, the publisher of some sort of quarterly journal. Dinah loves Asa. Evidently they had an affair which in the end he ended. Here is a sentence I like: “I may have been born to love him—I’m sure I was; loving him was easier than eating or sleeping—but he was surely born to stomp my heart. He was better at that than loving me.” It’s two sentences, actually; I see that now. Asa is a blue-blooded Yankee. Call me narrow-minded, but I’m not interested in blue-blooded Yankees. Nonetheless I read the first two chapters, largely because they were easy to read. They weren’t ponderously pretentious like the beginning of the second chapter of The End of the Novel, which goes: “Through the holes in the sun umbrella quivering patches of light fell on my manuscript which a smooth stone I had brought back from Greece prevented from blowing about the garden. Enclosed in the stone is a small landscape, as though formed by mosses, a dreaming world, an Atlantis of minute houses and strangely distorted animals which effortlessly transverses the grey-hued sky carrying off the memories of gossamer-thin stick figures standing rigid on angular streets.” I’m sorry, but I don’t like this. Perhaps there are people who feel differently. This wouldn’t surprise me: people like all kinds of things I despise. Not that I would ever want to convince anyone to like the same things as me. People should like what they like, even if this means liking things like the beginning of the second chapter of The End of the Novel. The remainder of Asa, As I Knew Him concerns the youth of Asa, as imagined by Dinah. I know this because it says so on the back of the book. Unfortunately I’m not interested in Asa’s youth, imagined or otherwise. This is not the fault of Susanna Kaysen, who did her best to interest me. But she was behind the eight ball, as they say, from the start. I laid the book on the bed and opened Nausea. Half a lifetime ago I read a handful of Sartre’s plays, and I remember liking them, in particular No Exit. The beginning of Nausea is promising. It consists of a editor’s note stating that the notebooks we’re about to read were found among the papers of one Antoine Roquentin. To help us accept this premise, Sartre adds a few editorial footnotes in the beginning, indicating that certain words in the original text are missing or crossed out or illegible. I skimmed ahead and noticed that these footnotes soon end. Sartre simply included a few at the start to further the book’s conceit, if that is said correctly. Unfortunately for me, some cretin wrote all over the book, underlining words and scribbling comments in the margin: “Estranged?” “Losing grip?” “Thinks of past, but not now.” “Like mirror.” Disgusted by these remarks, which naturally I read and pondered, I threw the book on the bed (it bounced over, actually) and resolved to look for another copy.

Earlier, in the library, in the W’s, the aforementioned woman, the not-weird one, sidled up to me, facing the opposite set of shelves. I waited for her to leave, but she did not. Was she standing next to me to stand next to me or was she looking for something on that shelf? After a minute or so, I turned and walked to the L’s to see if there was anything there by Gordon Lish I haven’t read. There wasn’t. So far as I can tell, Gordon Lish has written a total of four books: three novels and a collection of stories. Sadly I can’t read stories anymore, not by Gordon Lish or anyone. When I was younger I hardly made a distinction between stories and novels. Novels I thought of as long stories. But that’s not how I think of it now. A novel is a world, while a story is… something less than a world, perhaps a fragment of a world, a thing which at best suggests the thing it belongs to. I want the thing it belongs to. Moreover I want it to last. This is my other complaint about stories: you are drawn in (this is in the best case) and suddenly it’s over. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of finding a novel you love and settling in. Strike that. Wading in. Wading in and climbing onto the raft there, for there is a raft there, and beginning the slow drift across. You can live for a time in a novel, but you can’t live in a story. Again, I would never want to convince another person of these things. Let the people who love stories love them and let the people like me who can’t read them, not read them.

I read Gordon Lish’s third novel, Epitaph, first, and read it through to the end—a rare accomplishment. The next day I attempted to read his first novel, Dear Mr. Capote, but gave up in the middle. Then I read his second novel, Peru. Peru is what I was looking for. Peru is always what I’m looking for. The last Peru before Peru was The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. Two long years went by between The Loser and Peru. I can’t remember the last Peru before The Loser. Perhaps it was David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, although I don’t think David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress was quite Peru. Not that it matters which Peru was the last Peru. What matters is the next. It is, undeniably, like drugs, like being addicted to drugs. Or like love, by which I mean the first stage, the one in which the eyebrows of one’s beloved, suddenly discovered, appear achingly beautiful, each hair tenderly rooted in its follicle.

Since I was now in the L’s, I continued my search there. In the K’s I found The End of the Novel and Asa, As I Knew Him. I don’t remember how I found Nausea. Indeed, how did I end up in the S’s? Was it before or after the L’s that I went there? I don’t remember. No, I do remember. I found Nausea on the way to the W’s. I know this because I recall placing Nausea on a stack of books at the end of the W’s. In any case while in the W’s I found another book, the title and author of which I’ve since forgotten. It was a thick book, at least four hundred pages, and had something to do with chess. That’s what interested me: the graphic of chess pieces on the cover. This graphic made me think that the novel was about some sort of intrigue between people. Well, this describes nearly every novel ever written, doesn’t it? So let’s just say an intellectual sort of intrigue. This is what interests me, I suppose: an intellectual sort of intrigue. Although perhaps the word intrigue is not quite right. Nor the word intellectual, now I think about it. I opened the book to the title page and noted that someone had written there, using a black felt pen, “This book is profoundly boring!” The word profoundly was underlined. I laughed. Or perhaps I only smiled. In any event I was none too pleased that someone had defiled the book. Still I laughed (or just smiled), imagining the defiler, a disgruntled person with a black felt pen. This made me wonder if I seen the non-weird woman holding a pen like that. Had I? I imagined I had. I mean, I made up the idea that I had, and even went so far as to create a mental image of her hand holding this pen. The pen was open and she held it the way one holds a pen one is about to write with, the pen gently squeezed by her forefinger against her middle finger and thumb. The casual way she did this indicated that she was accustomed to holding that pen in her hand. Was this from defiling library books? I decided it was. Then I read the beginning of the book she had defiled. It was profoundly boring.