Bookplanet: a book review unlike any other, because it's blogged

What is it about blogs? They're definitely different from journalism. They often have a peculiar intimacy about them. I'll tell you what they really do, what is really different about blogs: they allow the most personal voice to come through. Bloggers write off the top of their heads, which means they often come straight from the heart -- or the loins -- or the tits -- wherever the most personal voice comes from. I think my blogvoice is still a bit public: I put on my chat face, like I'm sitting down to have a conversation with the reader, even if it is sitting down naked in NYC's sweltering June weather. But it's true: blogging is writing in your pj's.
Read this book review. It's in a very personal voice, the voice of Spurious. You'll never read a book review like this in the MSM. It's for the blog audience, a closer-by audience. It speaks softly in a confined public square. It talks in a room, not from a platform. In this case, it comes straight from the heart, even though Spurious is a very heady dude:

Repetition
You read a book with your whole life. Is that the sentence I wanted to write? I'm not sure it is true, for doesn't a book widen the circle of your life, pushing its circumference outward? I bring my whole life to a book even as that book broadens that life, until it stretches all around me like a great plain. My life (but is it mine?) has become vast and undefined, a great wound that stretches as large as the world. That stretches thus beneath an open sky that is also like a wound.

I am not sure what this means even as I write it. But a book is turning its pages in my heart and asks to be written about. Writing is a response to this book, an inadequate one. I am reading Peter Handke's Repetition and I don't know how to respond. Just now I looked through its pages - its real pages now, and not the ones which turn inside me (those unreal pages that is the work of the book, its patient unfolding not as itself but as it draws out of me a wistful and wandering life that is my own version of that of the narrator of Handke's book. Repetition repeated, if you like), yes the real pages of the hardbacked book I received through the post the other day, trying to find a passage to reproduce.

I knew what I was searching for: I wanted to find the pages on the young soldier whom the narrator travels with in a night bus. That young, composed solider who is the double of another figure of composure: the waiter the narrator sees in a cafe. Yes, here it is; read it with me:

He sat perfectly still, and his half-closed eyes with their rarely blinking lids suggested contemplative alertness. His thoughts could be far away, yet without a break in his fantasy he would calmly catch the parcel which, unnoticed by anyone else, had fallen from the baggage net just over his neighbour's head; before anyone knew it, he would put it back in the net and, as if nothing had happened, carry on with his peculiar blinking, which may have been connected with a mountain in Anarctica. While registering every sound in the moving bus, they were equally aware of the glacier that was carving at the same time, of the blind feeling their way in the cities of every continent, or of the brook flowing now as always though his native village.

One vignette among so many others. In the final part of the book, which I am still reading, vignette follows vignette. Their cumulative force is obscure. A glacier moves, the blind feel their way through cities, a brook flows through a village: the book is aware of all of this. It listens; it watches and I am borne along by what is written out of this listening and this watching. The book is alert and I become alert. It remembers (its narrator remembers), and memory happens in me, too. Remembering happens: slowly memories are born like clouds which form over the plain (over the Karst scenery the novel describes). Yes clouds form out of the air and return into it.

What is important - and this is harder to describe - is the way those memories are given. I am remembering with a book. A book is allowing remembering to happen. I close its covers and the memories come. But as they unfurl something of them is held back. They are not completely given, once and for all. Something withholds themselves in their gift. Who gives? The book, you might say - but in truth it is only the occasion of the gift. Who gives? I would like to say: time, all of time. What is given is given thus by time and is given such that time withholds itself as it is given. I would like to say: time keeps itself secret even as it gives itself.

Repetition. In 1960, 19 year old Filip Kobal travels to Slovenia from Austria, to his ancestral home. His brother Gregor disappeared there during the war. What had happened to him? Filip carries with him two of Gregor's books: some notes on fruit growing and a Slovenian-German dictionary. He muses on the relationship between words and things, remembering the ease his brother had felt in learning Slovenian comparatively later in life. Filip, too, experiences Slovenian, a language he does not know, as offering him something like a baptism. He writes as he travels in the Karst region, where, once upon a time his peasant ancestors had risen in revolt.

'In my brother's dictionary, the Karst was cited as the source of more words than any other part of Slovenia'. The narrator is writing in 1985; he is 45 years old. He remembers the Karst wind, which passes over the limestone scenery like a baptism ('It baptised me then (as it repeatedly baptises me now) to the tips of my hair'). He learns from the wind how to name things and receives from it that gift that allows him, the walker without purpose, to experience himself as 'a child of the world'.

A child of the world. It occurs to me that if it is time this novel gives me - if time gives itself as I read and after I read, it is akin to that same Karst wind that allows Filip Kobal to name the world - that is, to rename it, experience the dance of words and things in another sense. Slovenian will permit this rebirth - that same language in which his brother had come to feel himself at ease before he disappeared.

And what of me, the reader? Words come to me with those memories that appear in the air above the stretched out earth and beneath the stretched out sky. With them, yes, and like them bearing in themselves a reserve they can indicate but cannot name. But how is this possible? The words become heavy, resonant and rhythmical. They fall out of themselves like rain and settle in pools on the earth. But what do they reflect? Nothing at all, or rather that nothing which is the reserve to which they are bound but which they cannot let speak.

I would like to reproduce another passage from the book. Read with me:

I looked at him, not at his rifle, but at his profile, I knew that something was going to happen. To us? To the solider? To me? All attention, I looked at the irregular crown of his head and in it saw myself from behind. Bristling close-cropped hair that yielded a double image of a young solider and of a No one the same age. At last this No one would find out who he was[....] At last I had before me that protagonist of my childhood, my double, who, somewhere in the world, of this I was quite certain, had grown up along with me, and would someday turn up and be my true friend, who, instread of seeing through me as even my own parents did, would understand me without a word and acquit me, just as I would acquit him with a look of recognition or a mere sigh of relief. At last I was looking in an infallible mirror!

Reading Repetition, I recognise myself from behind. Who do I see? The 19 year old Filip Kobal, the 45 year old Kobal from behind. That is to say, I do not see his face and dream it could be mine. Or rather, that's what my heart dreams and knows as I read. And it is in that way the pages of Repetition continue to turn in my heart.

I am reading. I read with my whole life, with the child I was and the child I am as I read. I am reading, and discover in reading the No one I also am, the eternal child who arrives from what withholds itself from me in my memories and in remembering. I know now the child is a figure of time - not of the one, like the Fates who dispenses it, but who is given as and with and in time. The gift of time in time. That is the child, the No one without a face whom I dream is coming towards me from the other side of the universe. One day we will meet, but where? In the air, where the clouds come apart and come together.

YES, THIS IS NOT a book review. It's an encounter with a book, described from the inside out. A book musing. That's what bloggers do: they muse along. You're taking a stroll with their thoughts, in process, still running around in their heads like wayward children, almost unwritten.