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127 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
“Me habría gustado llorar un poco, pero no podía, porque no tenía ningún motivo para hacerlo�Bueno, hay otra esperanza a la que no renuncia: encontrar a Line, la mujer de su vida.
“Ella no ha venido al mundo más que para conocerme a mí. Se llama Line, es mi mujer, mi amor, mi vida. No la he visto nunca�Y realmente yo hubiera deseado que siguiera sin verla. Con todo lo que antecede a su aparición disfruté tanto como con sus otras obras. Sin embargo, la historia de amor, que además se inicia con un inverosímil encuentro, me ha roto la magia de su lectura y, aunque el párrafo final me reconcilió algo con la novela, el destrozo ya se había consumado.
لقد قرأت، أو سمعت في مكان ما
أن الزواج المثالي لدي الفراعنة كان الزواج بين الأخ وأخته
وأنا أيضًا أؤمن بذلك
I think that writing will destroy me.While it echoes the style and themes of Kristóf’s The Book of Lies trilogy, this slim novella—all the more tantalizing in its brevity—delivers a necessarily less serpentine and more compressed narrative. The deceptively simple prose, with its frequent declarative sentences, speaks similarly of identity—both national and personal—particularly here for the refugees experiencing alien status in another country. Kristóf also weaves in a thematic thread of writing and language, and the separate refugee experiences of being either bilingual or monolingual. As in the trilogy, violent acts and deaths occur as matter-of-fact happenings in the text—mere blips along a dull continuum of existential exhaustion. The narrator, having escaped a horrific childhood, lives now in another country, 'clocking in' at a clockwork factory (that produces spare parts for another factory, so that 'not one of us could assemble a whole watch') as he feels the formless days slip away into forgotten months and years. In the evenings he writes strange stories in his non-native language, inscribing with pencil in cheap school notebooks. The separately titled poetic passages interspersed between the main narrative sections of the book are presumably meant to be these private writings—a jumble of possible fiction and possible truth. The narrator is waiting for an arrival in his life, and when this person finally does appear the resulting circumstances are not at all how he had envisioned them. As with The Book of Lies this feels like writing scraped out from deep pain. The few bits of humor arrive tar-black, the mostly naïve characters all scarred by ongoing tragedy, and the narrative doomed from the start. Although Kristóf’s work tends to defy comparison, her narrative peculiarities here, more so even than in the trilogy, recalled that of Marie Redonnet, which was a welcome though unfortunately rare reading occurrence for me.
I believe I will soon be cured. Something will break inside me or somewhere in space. I will depart for unknown heights. There is nothing on earth but the harvest, the unbearable waiting and the inexpressible silence.