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Each and every one of us lives as though we were our own statesman at the center of the world, where all that we believe and think is accorded the greatest weight, quite regardless of the fact that everyone else believes and thinks exactly the same thing.
ten foolscap pages
Therefore I keep my distance, but not without observing the effect he has on everyone else in his presence, and in that I am consumed by jealousy, sometimes to unreasonable degrees, because I want to be him.
If I write the word “cunt,” I am overstepping the boundaries set by normal style; if I do so fully cognizant of this it is because I am trying to achieve a certain stylistic effect,
This is a duplication of Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest, laden with values. Delimitation, purity, development, these are Hitler’s key concepts,
When letters of the alphabet were to be made clear over the telephone, it was no longer permitted to say “D for David” – this was actually banned by the authorities in 1933.
In such a system, speech, or logos, is neither language nor reason, Heidegger’s Norwegian translator Lars Holm-Hansen writes, but the articulation of what is understandable, that which is possible to understand. Speech is not the same as language, but is the foundation of language. Language is a representation of what is already articulated in speech. Speech also suggests listening, and that we may also refrain from speech. In these instances we are quite beyond the rational. Moods, silence, listening, all that cannot be articulated by language but nonetheless is present in speech, the speech
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Always, I have had only one friend at a time, never more, never any we.
We still don’t know who died. They lost their names and became a number,
As I write about the Holocaust I sense its unmentionable nature. It feels as if there exists some right of ownership to it that means not just anyone can write about it, one has to have earned the right in some way, either by having lived through it or by writing about it in a manner that is morally binding and unambivalent.
I was what they call a sound sleeper. I could sleep on the floor without any problem, and with children screaming a meter away from me, it didn’t make any difference; if I was asleep, I was asleep. Once I had thought it was a sign that I wasn’t a real writer. Writers slept badly, had ravaged faces, at the crack of dawn they sat at the kitchen table staring out the window, tormented by their inner demons, which never rested. Who had ever heard of a great writer who slept like a child?
I donned my Ted Baker shirt, which stuck to my still-damp shoulder blades and would not hang straight at first, then I got into my Pour jeans with the diagonal pockets, which usually I didn’t like, there was something so conventional about them, all Dockers trousers had slanting pockets, but on a pair of jeans there was so much else working against the Dockers look that they actually looked good, for then it was the jeans style that was being challenged and as a result a kind of tension grew, not much, but in a world where all denims looked identical, it was enough to make these just that
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I put the phone in my inside pocket and met the gaze of a woman in her fifties, she had just lifted a bag down from the overhead bin and was twisting around to place it on the floor. “Fantastic books you write,” she said. “Thank you very much.” Embarrassed, I returned her gaze, my cheeks warm, my lips forming a half smile. “A Time for Everything is the best book I’ve read in years,” she continued. “Thank you,” I said. “That’s nice. I’m happy to hear that.” She gave me a warm smile and then turned to face the front again. A stranger had never addressed me to talk about my books before. If that
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in the whole series thats right he never once talks about being on the street and someone recognizing him!
buzzed the door open without asking who I was, I hated standing in front of those little boxes and introducing myself.
I had never gone looking for trouble in my life, as far as possible I tried to be kind and friendly and polite and decent, I just wanted everyone to like me, that was all, and here I was, in such a storm of aggrieved people and lawyers, not through ill fortune but following a reasonable response to an act I had committed. I wanted nothing more than to write and be an author, so how could I have ended up in a situation where lawyers had to read everything I wrote?
Apart from the opening, which we considered removing because the tone was so different from the rest of the manuscript, and the long passage about the new year’s party, which he wanted to take out, I did exactly what he recommended.
the opening is the thing about the heart? that’s interesting. and which of the books were edited, was it just the first two?
The idea was that I should write about my life as it was now and then go back in time, through my childhood, up through my teenage years into adulthood, to end with meeting Linda in Sweden, in such a way that our love story, which was so intense, would cast its light back on the events of the second book.
The voice at the other end spoke Bergen dialect, and whenever I’ve heard anyone speaking Bergen dialect since, I have heard that voice resonate and it’s sent shivers down my spine. It is the most unpleasant voice I have heard in the forty-nine years I have been alive and it was the
For the first time that day I spoke about literature. What I said was vague and not very good, but it was about literature and that in itself felt cathartic. I imagined it was a bit like how a shy plumber might feel after having to speak all day to the media about himself and his feelings, his family and friends, when at long last, late in the afternoon, he was able to talk about pipes and washers.
that’s pretty rough. after a day of interviews about the book “at long last he can talk about literature.” so all these interviews were just news stories
One of his books opens with a person who is alone and out of shame raises his hands to his face. Reading that, I thought I had done a much better job and with greater profundity in my debut novel, in which the main character is constantly ashamed and no stranger to the gesture and impulse that occasions the shame.
I was given a pile of clothes, all white, stepped into a cubicle and put them on. The trousers were much too big, they hung off me like a sack, but with suspenders they were fine, the assistant said when I emerged, and away we went. We lined up for the photo, Thorenfeldt played some Frank Sinatra at full blast, laughed and shouted as we three squeezed together and posed, with and without hats, and finally Hanne was given confetti, which she threw into the air as a kind of finale.
She was a novelist to her fingertips, uncompromising with regard to her books, and incorruptible. Rare qualities, both of them. As a person she was sensitive and there was something vulnerable about her,
from their dancing bodies came nothing, all their movements seemed to stay inside them as they gyrated and jumped and sallied back and forth across the stage, every step a thud on the floor.
There aren’t any mysteries in Greek art. The Pyramids are an enigma, but not Doric or Ionic temples.
The peppermint taste spread like a miniature storm in my mouth.
the atmosphere of transience and slow demise was irresistible,
Mom, on the other hand, had never been bothered by noise. Perhaps she was more at peace inside herself, perhaps she was more closed to the world, perhaps it was only that her tolerance levels were higher. But Dad really lived on his nerves, nothing was at peace inside him, one sudden noise and he exploded. Now it was my turn. Not so loud! No, no, no! Stop it! DO YOU HEAR ME? BE QUIET!