![]() Hearing myself speak, I become self-conscious of the strangeness of their storylines: an Irish rubber baron dreams of establishing an opera house in the Peruvian Amazon ( Fitzcarraldo) two Parisian clerks become enthralled by the idea of creating a total encyclopedia just to figure that it looks more like an anthology of stupid quotations ( Bouvard et Pécuchet) a writer obsesses over the possibility of narrating the absolute instant ( Farabeuf) a man becomes an outcast once he has seen a point in the universe that contains all others ( The Aleph). For I often find myself in a hard spot trying to explain the plot of some of my favorite novels and films to people. My father stopped asking and I returned to my book, knowing that the awkward scene would soon repeat itself. “Nothing, just Correction, one of Thomas Bernhard’s books, a slightly twisted rendition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life.”Īnd it worked. So I opted for the easy way out, blurting out the title, the author and an empty reference: And I couldn’t quite figure out how to explain, without seeming mad, that the book I was reading was the epic of a man who had left university life behind in order to solely devote himself to the monumental yet senseless task of constructing for his beloved sister, in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, a mathematically perfect building baptized by him as “the Cone.” ![]() ![]() ![]() “Which book are you reading?” asked my father. ![]()
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