the stooping rhythms of failure

But I'll begin at the real beginning, on the dilapidated rooftops on an ordinary estate, in an ordinary neighbourhood in London. (...) I will never understand why my brother killed himself then, why he waited until that night to leave me. The way I saw it, for the two of us, all the bad stuff, the real tragedy, was over.

Coming to London should have been our fresh start, our new beginning. I remembered how very happy we were because we were going to Great Britain. I remembered the shock of finding ourselves alone in a small council flat in east London. Truth was, in many ways we lived better in Somalia, where despite years of war we were around familiar things that at least made life seem constant. In London we had to start all over.

Until I arrived here after a six-hour flight, I imagined a different universe of street parties, white girls with ponytails - and boyfriends - who ate chunky chocolate bars while jumping rope on lush, green grass; ice cream and fine wines and homes with tended hedges. (...)

Back to that night. The twin towers of Wanstead Flats, Forest Gate, east London. James and Ashvin best friends, stood on two separate roofs of the towers.

The binmen were expected; that muscular smell of refuse made it difficult to breathe. The smell drifted everywhere, covered everything, like concrete in your developed world. The horizon, as far as the eye could see, was enveloped in the gritty fabric of the London skyline at night, traces of the permanent stench, the stooping rhythms of failure: aerosol cans, empty plastic carrier bags, orphaned toys, rubbish everywhere (...); all scattered relics from battered lives.

from Forest Gate, by Peter Akinti

The deepest purpose of fiction is...

I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience.

In one model, which was championed by Flaubert, the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it's because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of whether people are able to enjoy it. We can call this the Status model. It invites a discourse of genius and art-historical importance.

In the opposing model, a novel represents a contract between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing thus entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group (...) The deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness.

from How to be Alone, Jonathan Franzen

Mum was in Dad's minicab and parked, probably illegally, outside the station at Faversham. I started to get into the car, but she got out first. 'What's this? She picked up one of my arms and let it drop. She tapped my wrist, pinched my cheek, poked me in the stomach. 'Did you leave the rest of you in Cambridge?'

Her hair was greyer. I forgot to look at her eyes. Instead I could see the smiling and the frowning she'd done while I was gone, her face quietly folding itself away into some scary distance. I couldn't think of anything to say. I hugged her. She smelt of flour and vanilla.

'I made you a birthday cake,' she said. 'In case you decided to have a birthday today. Remember that, eh?'

Inside the car I buckled up my seat belt, wanting to wrestle the tip of my tongue out of my mouth with my hands, to see if that would encourage sound. She didn't seem to notice that I hadn't said anything, not even hello. She looked over at me as she started up. She said: 'You probably won't be having any cake, though, by the looks of you. Cambridge has turned you bougie, hasn't it. I'll make you a nice cup of tea instead.'

At last: 'Bougie? Are you really calling me bourgeois? What are you on about, Mum?'

Mum grinned. 'Your figure's all boyish now. You know, like one of those girls with skin from a make-up ad who goes off to a lovely house in Italy and has the most beautiful breakdown because the philosophy books she's reading are too much for her brain.'

from White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi

(NB: the lovely house in Italy is definitely in Tuscany)

temporal name-tags

Five days was a long time at Diplomat's Week. Agnes, who had once thought days existed merely for identification purposes, temporal name-tags to facilitate social confluence, came to know each one as a prisoner does her jailers.

Of course Monday was the worst, a jack-booted Nazi of a day; people did suicidal things on Mondays, like start diets and watch documentaries. Fear of Monday also tended to ruin Sunday, an invasion which Agnes resented deeply.

Moreover, it made her suspicious of Tuesday; a day whose unrelenting tedium was deceptively camouflaged by the mere fact of its not being Monday.

Wednesday, on the other hand, was touch and go, delicately balanced between the memory of the last weekend and the thought of the weekend to come. Wednesday was a plateau and dangerous things could happen on plateaux. For example, one could forget one was in prison at all.

Thursday was Agnes's favourite, a day dedicated to pure anticipation. By then she was on the home stretch, sprinting in glorious slow-motion towards the distant flutter of Friday's finishing line; which, however, when reached, often felt to her like nothing but a memento mori of the next incarceration.

from Saving Agnes, by Rachel Cusk

the Arthritic motion of the clock on her wall

She had been employed, for reasons she was not yet able to ascertain, as assistant editor of this illustrious weekly, but soon came to feel that she was not so much assisting as getting in the way. The pain of this suspicion would become particularly acute when, sitting in her overheated office. she would find herself transfixed by the arthritic motion of the clock on the wall, and, forgetting for a moment that her imprisonment was owed to an act of will rather than one of international terrorism, would become tearful at the thought that perhaps the rest of her adult life was to be wished away thus.

from Saving Agnes, by Rachel Cusk

a cold breath of air on my forehead

Whenever I was in the station, said Austerlitz, I kept almost obsessively trying to imagine -- through the ever-changing maze of walls -- the location in that huge space of the rooms where the asylum inmates were confined, and I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had ever really ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as we pass through them on our way through the station halls and up and down the flights of steps.

Austerlitz, W G Sebald

W.G. Sebald interview extract

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn't be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered - not from yesterday but from a long time ago.

A malevolent and lightless palor (depression)

-'As soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases.'

-'And in this dreadful state of mind I sat for hours, for days on end with my face to the wall, tormenting myself and gradually discovering the horror of finding that even the smallest task or duty, for instance arranging assorted objects in a drawer, can be beyond one's power.'

-'Especially in the evening twilight, which had always been my favourite time of day, I was so overcome by a sense of anxiety, diffuse at first and then growing ever denser, through which the lovely spectacle of fading colours turned to a malevolent and lightless pallor...'

from Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald

Hidden Cities

'In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins.'

'The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.'

from Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

There's a Certain slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are -

None may teach it - Any -
'Tis the Seal Despair
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -

When it comes, the Landscape listens -
Shadows - hold their breath -
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -

Emily Dickinson