Naveen Kishore, Publisher, Seagull Books

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It was much later, when I took it out from my heap of acquisitions and began reading it, albeit haltingly, that I paid some attention to the cover on it, the quality of the paper, the white space in the margins, the font and the clear print, in addition to the paragraphs, pauses and idiosyncracies in the syntax. Over the last year, I kept revisiting the book and discovering something new each time.

In the meanwhile, I had visited the Thieving Magpie exhibition, been privy to the making of the Seagull Catalogue 2011–12 and had alighted from the intellectual high horse that so many readers straddle, to realize that reading a book is, at the most basic level, a physical act and that a reader cannot afford to disregard the extra-textual elements as indispensable but secondary. From the moment of choosing a book in a bookshop, flipping through its pages, inhaling the aroma of fresh print to lounging with the book, reading silently and yet hearing voices of its characters inside the head, or reading out sections to a like-minded lot, we undergo a sensuous experience unwittingly—or even a sensual one as Pascal Quignard expounds in The Roving Shadows. Logistics apart, I feel, this is the only thing that distinguishes a printed-book-reading experience from an e-book-reading experience, and enhances the chances of the survival of the printed book in the long run.

When I went back to Divisadero the second time, I had begun reading Ivan Vladislavic’s ‘The Book Lover’, a wonderfully original short story centred round love of books and love of booklovers, and buying secondhand books. This time, I had been influenced by the discerning eye of the narrator in the story, who neither thinks a detail too insignificant to report nor misses an opportunity to elaborate on it, whether it is editorial, design-related or even regarding production.

The cover of Divisadero carries a lovely photograph by Willy Ronis, of a recumbent woman, staring vacantly at a point beyond the scope of the picture, looking at her past, perhaps, or even her future. By her side, on a table, lie signs of her everyday existence in the present, but which could well have been things from her past. The banality of these items acts as a bridge on the gulf between the past and the present that the characters try to create constantly. It is not the cover of the book (it is intriguing but not inspiring enough, though the woman in question could be identified with every significant character in it, male and female) nor the plot that makes it one of my favourites. It is the rough edges of some of the pages. The pages must have come stuck together and the previous proprietor must have painstakingly separated them in his or her ardour to read more. He or she has left no signs of a meticulous reading, however. There’s no marginalia, not even a name scribbled anywhere to announce ownership, nor a doodle. Except for the rough edges and the somewhat well-thumbed cover, this book is rather reticent about its previous life, and that does not fail to stoke my imagination. However, on bad days I resign to the fact that I may have been unnecessarily romanticizing its past. This particular copy might have landed in the seconhand-books stall precisely because of its ‘imperfect’ make.

Be that as it may, this book helped me discover my predilection for old, secondhand books. I did not notice before, but I have always loved the slightly moist, starchy texture of old books, the accumulation of years in the yellowing paper, the musty smell, the pattern of holes that silverfishes make and snippets of the previous owners’ lives pressed between pages. And this parallel process of building their lives retrospectively with bits and pieces held together by imagination, along with that of the characters in the book, is also a process of memory making. I add to my oeuvre someone else’s memory, someone else’s nostalgia. It is not plagiarism, only the way of literature and the printed book.

The Seagull Catalogue 2011–12 does that and a little more. It validates old memories, gives them longevity, creates new memories. It shows that a book is a thing to be read in its entirety, to be seen and heard simultaneously. And it also shows that to connect memories, one doesn’t even need an old book.

Sohini Dey, Assistant Editor, Seagull Books

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In a beautifully written section of Chander Pahar (Mountain of the Moon, 1937) by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, the narrator Shankar experiences an epiphany induced by a full-moon night in an African jungle, far away from his modest home in a rustic corner of Bengal. I partook in his epiphany when I read it for the first time and then again, and then every time I went back to those lines. That is how I would feel, I know, if I were Shankar or if I found myself in a similar situation. Incidentally, Bandyopadhyay had never visited the African jungles and had constructed the setting of his novel through extensive research and an exceptionally uninhibited imagination. Perhaps Shankar’s epiphany is a recounting of a similar personal experience of the author in the jungles of Bihar and what is now known as Jharkhand.

I know I could never see the moon dragging ‘the sea after it like a dark crime’, or its face ‘white as a knuckle and terribly upset’ like Sylvia Plath does in ‘The Moon and the Yew tree’. But the poem leaves an indelible impression by way of its vivid, violent metaphors and imagery. And being much more than the confessional poet that she was, Plath invests her personality into the poem, makes it breathe out the same carbon dioxide produced in her body and creates a vortex in the reader’s mind into which collapses the obvious and used-to-death rhetorical scaffoldings. I go back to Plath to see the same image but every time with a different eye.

On the collage-cover of War Diary (Ingeborg Bachmann’s diary entries in the last few months of the Second World War and Jack Hamesh’s letters to her, outlining the blossoming of an extraordinary bond between similar minds despite their rather diverse and antagonistic racial identity, upbringing and position within the power structure) designed by Sunandini Banerjee, there are two moons—one full, majestic, demanding immediate attention, the other a thin slice, paradoxically sharp and mild. That is how, I realize as soon as I see the cover, I would imagine the moon to shine upon nations where war plunders the last semblance of normalcy, decency, humanity. That is how stern and stark and austere and beautiful the moon looks in a night sky criscrossed by stars and falling shells. High above and alone, near the tops of leafless trees—in such troubled times, rarely does a poet or lover bask in its silver rays. The waning moon on the back cover, floating quietly in the unchanged sky, is to me a reminder of the unchanged human condition across changing frames of time. And all this, I know intuitively as I look at the book, though I haven’t experienced such war-ridden climes myself. An exceptional choice of image for a book named War Diary, I find it simultaneously imaginative and imagination inducing, mystifying and revelational.

Going back to my initial question about imagination and the clasp of subjectivity, I remember that even the Romantics, with their incomparable range of emotions and expressions, imagination and empathy, circled round their selves in solipsistic self-indulgence. But I also realize that though the impossibility of imagination without a prior image remains an incontrovertible truth, imagination is really like Koch’s snowflake, circumscribed by subjectivity but continuously growing by multiplying its facets. A constant interaction with the imagination of the other also increases the circumference of this circle of subjectivity, because sooner or later, consciously or otherwise, we assimilate the other into our selves. Hence the inexhaustibility of imagination.

Sohini Dey, Assistant Editor, Seagull Books.

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When he is alone, crowds become mysterious. Among others, he no longer knows himself. Who are they? Does he recognize his own mask? Sometimes, on trains or pavements overshadowed by skyscrapers, he gives them names. He goes home with them, lies in their carnivorous beds, cooks on their filthy stoves and sleeps with their bodies, possessed by love. Later they visit him in his numbered rooms, their constantly changing faces full of tender lips, their suitcases packed with genitals and teeth. Fragile and mighty, they have left their homes to settle into his protective dreams. Winged Thrones and Powers, rulers of estranged flesh.

The wind must have changed direction while he was lying on the black rocks dreaming. The water now smells old, tainted. He looks at the Arab watchtower directly above him and thinks that from there he must have looked like a statue of a dead knight on a medieval tombstone. There is plastic floating over the cathedral he swam through with the other fish just an hour ago, jellyfish, black seaweed, ash-grey scum. The lofty space below was bright and quiet. Weightless, he swam between the swaying grasses, making his eternal circuit past the high walls with the butterfly plants. The others he encountered averted their eyes, silent and restrained. Sometimes they swam in schools: silver clouds that turned away from him in a single flashing movement as if he were a leper. Later, where you would find the altar in a terrestrial church, he saw a large fish, the head of a harpoon still buried in its scaly body. He had turned to swim by a second time and could still see it before him: the white lips moving gently, the trail of bloody slime, the perfectly circular eyes watching him, as merciless as a target and with the black pupil as the bull.

The knife he took diving is lying next to him on the hot rock, a thing. Through his mask he saw a school of green fish that moved like a single body. In the liquid twilight he tried to pry the crown of thorns off a sea urchin, he followed the lost, drifting soul of a jellyfish. Now, naked on the rock, he sits in the sunlight like a living part of the sun itself, a body of fire. And still he has questions. How can it be that the bottom of the water surface, although no different to the top, is so much more mysterious than the restless plain he now sees? It was shining, as transparent as the glassy living jellyfish, a spreading, a spreading dancing crystal that separated the domain of water from the domain of air. How easy, he thought, to disappear, becoming someone who has left his clothes on the rocks and entered the mirror forever, the impossibly thin, living mirror that seals the silence. Rid of the word he had to be, his furthest destination infinitely close at hand among the ever-silent fish, delivered from his name.

These extracts have been taken from Self-Portrait of an Other—Dreams of the Island and the Old City by Cees Nooteboom

Drawings by Max Neumann

Translated by David Colmer

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My first reaction was simply astonishment at the sheer scale of the wat, and its spick-and-span look. The second was the strange feeling that I had wandered into a sort of religious Disneyland. A gigantic simulacrum of a Hindu temple in India was just that. There were no devotees and the interior decoration was perfunctory. It looked like a set for a historical film. What were two large concrete camels, painted red, doing at one of the main gates? No one but a few curious tourists had any visible interest in the Chinese shrine. Even stranger was Luang Phor Khom’s personal museum which included, side by side, an upright human skeleton in a glass cabinet and a life-size replica of  Michelangelo’s gigantic nude David wearing fashionable red underpants from the top of which poked part of a swollen, un-Florentine penis. The initial Disney effect was, however, undercut by a general emptiness: only a few monks, no novices, no nuns and very few lay persons.

For whom was the wat— in this (then) hard-to-access corner of rural Suphanburi—intended? I had no idea.

I did not go back to Wat Phai Rong Wua till the 1990s, not long after the death of Luang Phor Khom in January that year, at the age of 88, after 68 years as a monk. General Suchinda Krapayoon’s disastrous coup as only a year away in the future. The place had started to decay. Quickly made cement statues were crumbling, paint was flaking off everywhere, the vast open spaces were littered with used plastic bags and other wrappings, empty bottles, bits of newspaper, fragments of flip-flop slippers and so on. Only a handful of listless vendors could be seen. The whole place seemed desolate. Later it occurred to me that Luang Phor Khom had probably never calculated the mainte- nance cost of his colossal wat and, even more probably, was not capable of raising lots of money in his final days perhaps because of his age, perhaps because the Siam of  the 1970s was gone for ever. Big money had begun to come into the province but it was going to the city of Suphanburi, home to Banharn Silpa-archa, the powerful, ambitious Sino-Thai politician who eventually became prime minister (1995–96) and whose lavish pork-barrel projects were making people joke that the city’s name should be changed to Banharnburi.

Walking round in a slightly gloomy mood, my eye was caught by some noisy activity in a part of the complex that I had previously overlooked. A cheerful, tough-looking guy, heavily tattooed, was busy shaping a new statue to join the dozens of others representing evildoers being ferociously punished in ‘hell’. We chatted briefly and I asked him why the wat was so empty. He said something that stuck in my memory: ‘This part of the wat, at least, always has plenty of visitors.’ ‘Who comes?’ ‘Mostly parents and school- teachers bringing youngsters to see what will happen to them if they turn bad.’ What I noticed, but did not dare ask about, was that all but two of the tormented ‘sinners’ were stark naked, and that the males among them were given unusually large and sometimes swollen penises.

Hell was still growing, but monumental construction seemed to have long ground to a halt.

Almost 10 years after that I went back again with the idea of writing something about the wat, especially its unusual Narokphum (hell). My friends Mukhom Wongthes and May Ingawanij kindly went along to guide and help me. The wat itself seemed to have recovered a bit: some repainting, extensive tidying up, many more Buddha statues—both Hinayana and Mahayana—and quite a lot of monks. But still no novices or nuns. Narokphum seemed to be growing but very slowly.

It was at this juncture that the three of us started to think about investigating this rural hell within its local and wider contexts. The first puzzle was why all of Narokphum’s horribly tortured victims had ‘captions’ inscribed on their bodies in which they were referred to as praed (hungry ghosts). In everyday speech of the street sort, one can often hear people being cheerfully greeted as ai praed. Ai is a colloquial term of address to males, and can express either contempt or close friendship in the same cheerful tonality as ai ha (ha is literally ‘small pox’ or ‘plague’), ai hia (hia is a large, water monitor lizard that feeds on carrion) and ai krador (krador means ‘penis’). Nothing particularly terrible. The general lay idea is that the praed are ghosts of people whose sins were minor. Their sad and bleak afterworld is still close to the human world and they meet with no torturers. The figure for their condition is a spirit ravaged by perpetual hunger, especially for blood and pus, but with a mouth the size of a pinhole.

We decided to tackle the puzzle by making an inventory of all the captions. What sins would the list encompass? Could the list tell us something about the attitudes and intentions of the creators of Narokphum? Would it also have sakon characteristics? One thing was obvious after a single count: there was no great gender discrimination. The male praed outnumbered their female coun- terparts but not in a conspicuous manner.

This extract has been taken from ‘The Fate of Rural Hell — Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand’

by Benedict Anderson

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Rousseau wasn’t the first to associate walking with ease of thought, but he was the first significant writer who reflects on what walking means; he imbues it with a romantic value: one gets closer to nature; to one’s origins, and immediately one feels a well-being, a feeling of pure happiness, one is also free. The walker experiences freedom. He can choose his own road. And then it’s good for the intellectual processes and the health to move about on foot. It’s best to walk out of the city, out into the air, out into the country-side and out into nature: it liberates thought and brings good appetite. But what shall we eat? Jean-Jacques was nature’s friend and advocate, but he was no vegetarian. We find an inn in the text, and imagine a fine meal with lots of good drink. So we aren’t in the clutches of nature, we’re a good distance away from the wilds: in other words we find ourselves somewhere in between. And this in between is the haunt of romanticism. We’ve enjoyed a good stroll out from the city but wild untamed nature is a fair distance ahead. We are somewhere in between the city and its opposite: wilderness. Here, in between, man is freed from the demands of knowledge and culture. We have deserted the theatres and museums and the art that adorn the ugliness of modern life. But we’re not so far removed that we can’t get back to the warmth of home and the evening’s notes. We inhabit an idyll. A landscape where one pleasant view supplants the other. We can’t see the city. We look out across a cultivated scene with farms and small country cottages. Here is an inn, a church with a steeple. ‘Absolute silence,’ Rousseau writes, ‘engenders melancholy. It is an image of death.’ But we can hear the birds and the stream that runs through the fields. Over there, a flock of sheep is grazing, and at just the right distance we can see horses and cows. But loveliest of all is the view of a small lake where the lonely wanderer has a boat waiting. He rows out alone with one oar and spends hours lying on his back in the bottom of the boat, until he exclaims in ecstasy: Oh Nature! Oh my love!

Jean-Jacques is fond of nature. It is, in a sense, his love. He loves nature like a woman. For Rousseau nature is first and foremost a concept. It is pure and unproblematic, devoid of conflict and impurity. For Rousseau, nature is a notion of a better and more unsophisticated place for human beings. It seems that Rousseau sees nature as an absence of towns, of all he despises: vanity and debate, society and art. Gone are the streets and the noise, the bustle and all the insincerity; merchants and lawyers, journalists and artists. Gone are industry and technology. Here, without all that, man is in his natural state: ‘he wanders about the forests, without industry, without speech, without a hearth, without war or ties. He has no need of others, neither has he any desire to harm them.’

The wanderer is, according to Rousseau, a plain, peaceful man. He is free. He has left the city, has left family and obligations. He has said farewell to work. Farewell to responsibility. Farewell to money. He has said goodbye to his friends and his love, to ambition and future. He is really a rebel, but now he has bidden farewell to rebellion as well. He wanders alone in the forest, a vagrant. He walks the roads, without too many belongings, he has taken possession of the world and its possibilities. He carries all that he needs in a sack on his back.

Jean-Jacques leaves the inn. The rebel and nature-lover, simply dressed in a long, light brown fustian coat above short breeches and long woolen hose. His shoes are thin but good. He leaves the inn. Now he must decide whether to turn and go home, or whether to go on a bit further. Jean-Jacques turns, he wants to get back to the house and his desk. No sooner is he back at home; he’s borrowed a small palace from a rich lady friend, than he seats himself behind his desk by the window. Here, in Meditations of a Solitary Walker, he writes: ‘When, therefore, I had sat down to describe my mental state in the most extraordinary situation a mortal man can find himself in, I found no simpler or surer way of achieving it than by making detailed notes about my lonely wanderings and the reveries that fill them when I allow my thoughts to run completely free and follow their natural course, unhindered and untrammeled. These hours of lonely meditation are the only ones in the course of the day in which I am entirely myself, and belong to me without constraint or diversion, and during which I can say that I am what nature has intended me to be.’

This extract has been taken from TRAMP.  by Tomas Espedal.

Translated by James Anderson .

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I think if I knew someone here, I would soon lose my composure; but as it is, I don’t speak a word to anyone, and walk around unclear about my emotions.

The cafe seems quite an odd place to me. It appears to be a patisserie, with cakes displayed in vitrines and a shop girl wearing a black woollen dress and a white apron. In the corner, there is a light blue tiled stove, and sofas with upright, cushioned backrests lining the walls .A young puppy runs around yapping loudly, an unkempt, wretched creature. A grey-haired woman tries to stroke him but he runs away from her, his back arched in fear.The old woman follows him, coaxing him with a lump of  sugar and speaking loudly to him all the time.

I think she is insane. No one in the cafe seems to take any notice of her.

I have only written two pages so far and the pains are already beginning again, stabbing pains in my right side that cease as soon as I lie down or drink strong liquor. But I don’t want to lie down. I could write so well now, and it makes me terribly low to be so idle and all alone.

The insane old woman has left. I’d like to see how she crosses the street and if she talks aloud to herself outside too, like the grey-haired beggar women in Paris.

I never used to be able to tell the difference between insane people and drunkards; I would watch them in a kind of awestruck horror. But I’m not afraid of drunkards any more. I have often been drunk myself; it is  a beautiful, sad state in which we gain clarity on many things we would otherwise never admit to ourselves,emotions that we seek to hide, and that are not the worst in us after all.

I feel a little better now. I ask the reader to forgive me for what I write today; nevertheless, Sibylle said that even the bitterest experiences and the forlornest hours in my life shouldn’t be completely futile. This is why it’s so important to me, even in this hopeless state, to give in to my weakness and later, to put these pages to the only test that matters to me: whether I succeed, just once, in any way, to be taken seriously by Sibylle.

This extract has been taken from Lyric Novella

by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Translated by Lucy Renner Jones

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What would a true philosophy of life be like? Would it not be one that looks not just for success but also for fulfillment? Success is not the same thing as fulfilment. The message of fulfilment goes far deeper. People want to improve their lives, to look for pleasure, and to this end they work. The desire to enrich their life provides zeal and perseverance. The ingredients and objects of sensual pleasure are limited in nature, which is why the desire for such leads one into the world of severe competition. It is only by fighting tooth and nail that one gets the taste of victory. But does the conquest of success give one everything? For dissatisfaction and want exist in the midst of success and the joy of advancement. We cannot find completion or fulfilment through worldly success or consumption. Indeed, frequently enough that road becomes increasing convoluted. In the same way, worldly success and fulfilment are separate in both an artist’s work and life. Very large earnings, great fame and recognition do not necessarily bring an artist significance or aesthetic achievement. The achievement of aesthetic realization through unrelenting devotion to one’s art is a rare and almost quasi-divine experience. During the time I’m speaking of, worldly success was not only a rare commodity in artistic endeavour but its extent was far more limited, especially in West Bengal. Now it is much more widespread, indeed to a hitherto unimaginable degree. This is what, in my opinion, one saw to some degree in Delhi those days. Similarly, the great number and variety of work results in a positive lively aspect but also has a problematical side. I am firmly convinced though, that all this churning will give rise to wonders. The very fact that so many are working in so many different ways is itself a matter for rejoicing.

After five or six years in the city, we had become a part of Delhi life, working and remaking our lives through all the cut and thrust. I had in the meantime joined the St Thomas School, on a part-time basis, and was enjoying it. It seemed a full life, with work, with occasional time spent at my parents’, with visiting historical places around Delhi like Agra, Mathura, Rishikesh, and the odd solo show (once Somnath’s, once mine). Once we returned from a visit to Calcutta only to finish the remainder of our holiday in Shimla. I enjoyed it immensely and I lost a lot of weight going up and down the hills in those four or five days. A few days later I fell rather ill and it was only afterwards that I realized I was pregnant. By then I was 36 or 37 and Somnath was 41 or 42. Chandana came late, and I suffered because of my age. Ma insisted we stay with them, even though she was quite ill herself. Despite her condition, she would make all sorts of arrangements to make sure I was comfortable. I still find it difficult to believe how much care she took of me. God knows how she managed! My parents were very close to Justice Hidayatullah of the Supreme Court and his wife Pushpa—they shared a deep and abiding friendship. I realized how close they were and how fond they were of me during Chandana’s birth, when their support proved crucial. Severe complications arose but, in the end, Chandana was born without any surgical intervention (thanks to the skills of Dr Pathak and Ma’s constant care). This little infant, with her pink face, a head covered with black curls, two inquisitive bright eyes and an unending hunger, first kept Safdarjang Hospital, then my parent’s house (for the next week) and, finally, our new flat at Hauz Khas, agog.

When he learned that Chandana was due, Somnath located and rented the flat at Hauz Khas. Our previous flat at Kamla Nagar was more than adequate for our purposes but its one drawback was that not a beam of sunlight would enter. This made little difference to us, since our time was spent working, wandering about and staying out of doors. But a baby had different requirements: she needed the sun, especially during the Delhi winter. This house was absolutely perfect: two storeys, with a courtyard and a pocket-handkerchief-sized garden. The ground floor, with two large rooms, kitchen, etc., was ours. It had plenty of sunshine and fresh air and was in a nice secluded area. On one side was a wall from an earlier era, and peacocks would step down from it and come into our courtyard. Above us lived a Bengali couple. We became fast friends in a short while and would stand by one another at times of need. I remember hose days clearly. Chandana’s presence changed our lives; she was the centre of our universe. Her first requirements were food and sleep. Between nursing her, caring for her, as well as constantly keeping an eye on her, I did manage to save a few bits of time for my work. A well-wisher told me, ‘Forget about work for the time being.’ As it happens, this was not true in my case. The mixture of joy and love which occurs when one is holding one’s child and which occasionally spreads to other relationships as well, would seek release. In any case, weariness seems to decrease if I work. So even in the middle of a thousand chores I would find time to do some drawings or small paintings on the roof. And my child’s many excitements and abilities—one never knew what she would do next! So many amusing incidents! Through all this I still wanted to paint. With parenthood, another sort of experience came into our lives. Everyone who has been a parent at some time in their life will know what a different feeling this is. Chandana was an active, happy-go-lucky child. Her mother never had to worry unnecessarily about her. She would spend time on her own, drawing. And this would give me time as well. I’d be at sixes and sevens, however, if she fell ill. It’s difficult not to feel very distressed when such a frail tiny creature feels pain or discomfort. All rational thoughts cease at such moments. But even then there would be friends to stand by us so far from home. I’m not even thinking of my parents—they were our principal support. Apart from them, in times of distress, especially if Chandana fell ill, the Nanda family were always there to help look after her. Mrs Nanda—Leela—was particularly fond of Chandana. Many of the other neighbours, Bengali and non-Bengali, were also very supportive. It was as though by becoming parents we had got integrated into a larger community. Ma used to call it ‘passport’. And, in truth, Chandana was, in those days, our ‘passport’, both to other people and to the world of feelings.

This extract has been taken from the catalogue published on the event of Reba Hore’s current exhibition running at the Seagull Foundation for the Arts.

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My heart is already pitching towards Montreal and it’s only Wednesday noon. It was in Montreal that I emerged from my chrysalis: there I became the man I am now. In that metropolis I found everything that makes up the everyday fare of an enviable life: an angelic woman, a job, a roof, friends. I feel as if I were born in Montreal, as if the first eighteen years spent with my family and my twin brother (who is invisible today) didn’t count at all.

As a child I dreamed of being an only son so as to get all of my mother’s attention. To no avail. I saw my childhood and adolescence go by at lightning speed without getting an ounce of the affection I longed for. Many times people in the family—but not my mother—told me I was sensitive, irritable and unpredictable. But also humble, ambitious, unloved and instinctive and creative, too. As an adult, I can be humble, clever, full of complexes, or not loving enough. And the veil that hid the origin of my violent, compulsive urges, first against my brother and then against myself, is slowly lifting. In Montreal I learned to put up with myself, to like myself, if possible, in order to sleep peacefully inside my skin. It is only at this price that I can move forward in life. Live life to the fullest. Love others.

For a long time I dreamed I had no mother. In reality, it’s as if I had lost her when I was very young. I hardly knew her. I was raised by a strict grandmother who inculcated in us the few rules I have assimilated. I have forgotten everything about my mother, as if she had no face. She had forgotten me first when she set her heart on my twin brother, giving all her attention only to him, showering kisses only on him. In moments of high anxiety, I used to tell myself it was my mother who separated me from my brother early on. She’s the one who turned him into my enemy, I would say to myself bitterly before coming back to my senses.

No concrete memory connects me to my mother. Not one story, caress, slap or hug. I have a hungry vacuum in the hollow of my chest that only the warmth of a maternal body against mine could fill. That was the time when I decided to provoke my brother and defy my father before breaking out of the family web. To follow my own path, alone, no matter what. The only sweet memory of my childhood: my encounter with a stranger—an orphan named David. I think we liked each other a lot, he and I. We rapidly became very close. Together we admired the junk dealers on Place Arthur-Rimbaud. We were inseparable. We often met on Siesta Beach. We used to run after the fish that were bold enough to swim near the beach, especially the skates.

Years later, I earned my pocket money by assisting the projectionist of the Odeon Cinema, in the heart of the European part of the city. I was already interested in the media, unlike my brother, who spent his time devouring books. When I went out into the fresh air he would lounge about in the half-light of our room with a book near at hand.

At that time the French infantry and naval bases were in full swing. The draftees were regular customers of the movies and the many bars. They weren’t men but human packs who stormed the two rooms of our cinema, the most imposing of the capital. Some discontented spirits from Algeria wanted   to baptize it Lagardeville, after the first governor of that territory, Viscount Léonce Lagarde de Rouffeyroux, and also rename the Olympia Cinema, our main competitor, in the same way.

For a while that’s where I found a true family. Warm. Carefree and joyful. That’s where I lived through my first exile—an exile that was French in every way. On the thin skin of my memories, I’ve kept a few caresses from that exile. You might think soothing people’s pain and treating them is a nurse’s job but, believe it or not, that’s exactly what I did as a projectionist. I used images to treat all those young men torn away from their farms or housing projects and thrown under the vertical sun of Djibouti. I loved that job and its small pleasures. I loved the moments before the screening, like the twilight which gives minarets their imposing silhouette. I loved the call to evening prayer that would rise from the nearby mosque. I loved everything about those transitory moments when the city shook itself off after the long lethargy of the afternoon. The horns of taxis and the clamour of street vendors filling the streets. And the seedy crowds of the night mixing together till dawn. No more rank, no more hierarchy. Just animal warmth, the pulsation of the night, the gleam of smiles. Just men and women glued to the bars, busy eating and drinking, or laughing, sprawled out under the pergolas. I loved nightlife there. I would even tolerate the senseless howling of the legionnaires. I’d take a shower before putting on my legendary outfit: lagoon blue Bermuda shorts, light sandals and flowery shirt open to the solar plexus. This was my uniform. My diver’s suit for plunging into the night and seeking out its spicy amber. I would have a little twinge of anxiety every time I opened the projection booth door at 6.40 p.m. Gripped by a mixture of apprehension and exultation when the first reel began and the wall became covered not with the first images of the film but with the pictures of the newsreels and commercials that had arrived from Paris the previous week. That excitement remained as strong as it had been on the first day. The cinema filled up quickly, ready for a new evening of adventure and dreams.

All that is so far away. But the sight of that cinema is enough to bring up the fragrance of the past up to the surface. My investigation is progressing very slowly. I’m stumbling over many obstacles. I’m waiting for the turning point. It’s always like that when I’m on the job. To be honest, I had some doubts from the very beginning. I thought of giving up a number of times. I hadn’t reckoned with Denise: she got me back in the saddle every time, explaining that I was going through a stretch of desert which felt like a waste of time, but no, it wasn’t a waste of time, not at all. I was unconsciously gathering a bundle of impressions and sensations—and thus, precious information.

Denise had only half convinced me. So why on earth did I leave the satin skies of Montreal? Did I really have to return to the land of my childhood? They say that the only true mysteries are the ones we invent for ourselves. That we take great pains to confuse nightmares and reality. I studied science—chemistry and physics—in order to stop dreaming—contrary to my brother who loved literature. Physics for its precision. Chemistry for its perpetual invention and magical finds. Not forgetting maths as a foundation. I needed powerful rails and a steady base so that life would cease to be something that merely floated around me.I studied all that in Montreal. That city saved my life; I would have gone astray, just drifting aimlessly along. Rubbing shoulders with shady people, doing just about anything to escape a pointless life. Montreal gave a meaning to my existence and, more prosaically, a doctorate in computer science. Montreal had a face when I met it for the first time. An oval face, with sky-blue eyes. Pearly skin. A turtleneck sweater. That was Denise, sitting on a bench in the garden of the centre for foreign students in Paris, the Cité Internationale on Boulevard Jourdan.

I had been dragging myself around feeling miserable for weeks and months. I shot out calls to everyone like signals from a beacon. Denise was the only one who smiled at me. And it was love at first sight. Despite her Quebecois accent, Denise was born in Paris in 1968. She is nine years older than I am. Her father, Isaac Rosenzweig, an Austrian from Vienna, had enlisted in the Foreign Legion and was wounded in North Africa in 1961. I have no idea if he’d knocked around my native land, which was then called Côte Française des Somalis, or French Somaliland. A year later he married a fiery woman, half Norman, half Panamanian, a native of Trouville: Elvira Triboulet. He became a waiter in a cafe; she  became an actress and a stripper. They lived with their daughter in a sordid little hotel on Boulevard Ornano in the 18th arrondissement. The Rosenzweig family emigrated to Quebec right in the middle of the Velvet Revolution. They adopted Quebec and never left it except for excursions to Paris in winter. That’s how Denise knows every little street, every neighbourhood, every piece of its history.

It was also in Paris, on another bench of the Cité Internationale, that Denise talked to me about another great walker in the City of Light. A philosopher of the past century: Walter Benjamin. She religiously kept his photo by Gisèle Freund tucked in her wallet, between Metro tickets and her coupons to the student cafeteria where we had our meals. It was Denise who introduced me to the secret life of this Walter Benjamin. Luckily, I was won over, not right away but much later. By his encyclopedic mind, his intuitive method and, above all, by his conception of history, which was not theoretical or arid in the least. It appealed to me because it seemed as sensitive to human beings as the stories my Grandpa Assod used to tell. I, too, have adopted the ‘angel of history’ and made it mine. Here is its description, as the German Jewish philosopher restores it for us:

There is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he is staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is agape, his wings are spread. This is how the Angel of History must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, wake the dead, and make whole what has been shattered. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

I am sure Grandpa Assod would have appreciated this fable. As for me, I began to identify with Klee’s angel.

From Passage of Tears by ABDOURAHMAN A. WABERI

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Whether a fire was started deliberately or accidentally, books were easy victims of the flames. It remains an open question whether the knowledge was burnt along with the books, that is, whether something irreplaceable, something that cannot be reconstructed, was turned to ashes. It is up to the masters of black magic and esoteric philosophy to reflect on whether the world would have been any different if EVERYTHING written down in the books of esoteric doctrine and heretical pamphlets had remained in the world and in people’s consciousness. Would music, for example, have developed differently, mathematics, philosophy? Had historical contingency been eliminated, would there have been a different chronology if the clandestine proposals in the burnt books could have spread their influence?

Today these questions, which were still being debated in the eighteenth century, have become irrelevant. The guiding principle of efficiency on the one hand the electronic means of communication on the other allow the plausibility or usability of ideas and inventions to be reviewed so quickly that we can gradually get ready to say farewell to books as the storehouses of positive or negative knowledge.

The age of the library of Alexandria, the age of Petrarch and his complaint about the too many books that distract us, the age of Leibniz and his idea of an imaginary universal library on the one hand and a Mathesis universalis portabilis on the other, a formula for the world that went on one sheet of paper, the time of Mallarmé and his interpreter Valéry who dreamt of a huge anonymous work containing all books, the age which allocated a sacred place to the book—that age is irrevocably past. ‘The world was made to end up as a beautiful book,’ Mallarmé said, according to Valéry.

With our farewell to the book we have also lost our assurance of the beauty of the world. For why else was the book invented if not to publicize the beauty of the world?

So let’s just get on with it.

Michael Krüger. Translated by Mike Mitchell.

Krüger is the editor of Akzente, one of the best-known literary magazines of Germany. He is the author of the novels The End of the Novel (1992) and The Man in the Tower (1993). He has also published three volumes of verse, including Diderot’s Cat (1993) and won a number of literary awards.

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