The Details

by Ia Genberg

There were certain things we didn’t agree on (Oates, Bukowski), others that left us both unmoved (Gordimer, fantasy), and some we both loved (Klas Östergren, Eyvind Johnson’s Krilon trilogy, Lessing).

I preferred books with a pull so strong I couldn’t get out. It was the same way with most things in life and as a result my responsibilities were few, perhaps too few. In fact I’d rarely encountered a responsibility I didn’t reject.

The book in my hand is The New York Trilogy. Auster: hermetic but nimble, both simple and twisted, at once paranoid and crystalline, and with an open sky between every word.

wanted to find out if the series was in fact obvious or boring but not a single thing was off about it, and soon thereafter I read Moon Palace and was again spellbound.

His discerning simplicity became an ideal, initially associated with his name though it endured on its own. Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature.

men and women who enjoyed the wrong kind of literature (crime fiction only) or the right kind of literature for the wrong reasons (Ellroy, because he’s hard-boiled), or who liked the things I did for the same reasons I did but saw no reason to talk about it, or who simply thought that printed matter had become irrelevant as an art form.

But just as we can’t choose our deaths, we can’t choose the extension of a broken relationship.

She was able to get her bearings and form an opinion on some topic in the span of one minute—or perhaps more accurately, what passed for “an opinion,” and which could easily transform into its opposite at the blink of an eye, like a game, as if the subject matter itself was an irrelevant appendix to the verbal flexing made visible by its light.

You didn’t raise your voice in Johanna’s family, you just upped your speed and the number of clauses. I was attracted to it, I inhaled it, I let myself be impregnated by her way of speaking and being. I adapted, made my own version of it, let her change me forever. That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called “self”: traces of the people we rub up against.

I suppose that is at the core of every relationship, and the reason that in some sense no relationship ever ends.

and when a man on the panel recommended Paul Auster’s most recent novel, Johanna exclaimed, unbidden: “I’ve never liked Auster.” An abrupt assertion, shot off without prompting, as though she’d been keeping her gun ready and waiting to fire.

Suddenly I’d joined her circle of many who “knew” that Niki’s childhood had been terrible and that her parents deserved to burn in hell, and since I quickly counted as one of her closest friends, I was expected to be loyal and allied with this unverified truth and its want of details.

I realized from the very beginning that this was how she related to other people, that everything was black or white, love or hate, heaven or hell, nothing in between.

but at that age (I was twenty-three) friendships were different from the way they are now. They could last forever for two months, two years, two hours; what mattered wasn’t time but magnitude, or speed, or the concentrated mass of meaning.

flesh. It was as if something was perpetually tugging her downward, toward the underworld, the mess, the dirt, and the filth, as if she was unable to feel disgust when others did and was overwhelmed by fascination instead.

Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter. An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation—or the “so-called conversation” as Niki would put it—sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast, and with the anecdote next in line tugging at their attention.

We didn’t watch TV by passively staring at the screen but methodically, critically, as part of a perpetually ongoing analysis of everything around us. To get absorbed by a show, to let yourself be swept up, would have been a sign of mental lassitude.

TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices.

and the cover of The Man Without Qualities. The novel has been in my possession multiple times over the course of my life, but it always gets lost, whether in a breakup or by someone borrowing it and not returning it, as if it kept fleeing, arms full of bounty.

Sometimes it took a minute of scanning the muddle before I spotted one, The Exposed or In the Time of the Emperor or most likely The Marsh King’s Daughter, she owned multiple editions of that one. These were the only books Niki would never dream of giving away or even letting anyone borrow.

“If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” I told her, which was the truth. When Niki kept looking at me in silence, I added, still speaking the truth: “Wonderful. I read it in one day.”

All relationships have the potential to end abruptly, it’s an inherent risk,

Like death, I guess. Everyone knows it’s coming but few look at their living hands and think that those hands will one day go limp and reach room temperature.

It seemed like the kind of passion that had to be manifested in the eye of others, a love that blossomed before a witness,

This dismissal had been part of our friendship from the beginning, the entire thing a walk on perilously thin ice, so I was as prepared as a person can be. Still, something broke within me when I saw Niki’s distorted face and absorbed her last words.

but the information was just the container and not by any stretch the details that woke me up the next morning,

Maybe this was where it would all play out, from now on. I considered that maybe there was no place I’d rather be than in the details next to all this information, all this surface.

pacts made in a state of fleeting elation or while high on the future, in a sort of arrogance vis-à-vis the passing of time.

reading to each other (Kristina Lugn’s The Dog Hour, Sonja Åkesson’s Domestic Peace)

Trust, after all, is only a word when you can’t feel it in your body. As soon as trust attaches, as soon as it takes root, it fuses with the rest of what’s there, takes on other names.

He was a messy guy in a tidy world, constantly in motion and defined by polarity, and then I’d add, “It would never have worked in the long run”; a qualified guess, sure, but above all an attempt to make myself feel better.

Our relationship was the length of a breath and yet he stayed with me, as if there was something in me that bent around him, a new paradigm for all my future verbs. Everyone I’ve loved or “loved” since then has had no alternative but to accept being measured against him during a few inescapable moments in the early stages,

“That’s just how it is with some people, right?” he said. “They blow through your life.”

We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.

But whenever I’m in the grips of a fever or infatuation there is no confusion; my “self” recedes and gives space to a nameless joy, a unified whole that preserves all the details, inseparable and distinct, next to one another. Afterward I always remember this state as one of grace.

But it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it’s simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outward, and I mean truly outward. That’s where this sharper sense of being alive is found, in the alert gaze on another.

I assume this is how a singular experience affects a person; the event gets encapsulated with the poison still intact, seeping, a slow command. It’s well-known that whoever coined the expression “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” has never met a rape victim.

She drifted whichever way the wind blew—not because she was placid or obsequious, but because it was all she could do. An inescapable drive to adapt, that’s what he left her with,

Her efforts to blend in and avoid friction obliterated the part of her where an individual character should have formed with all its desires and roughness, a spine with its own bristles.

This world remained a dangerous place for the rest of her life, dangerous to all, an unbearable place, in no way made for people.

Anxiety’s central task, as instructed by fear, is to run ahead and touch everything, circle potentialities with the intention of preventing them from happening, on and on and on in a process that never stops, that becomes one with life. As a child I would sometimes watch Birgitte when we’d

She was never granted peace, there was always some aspect of the world that had to be controlled lest things went out of hand. And I suppose that’s what’s at the heart of it for every person suffering from anxiety; the fact that life, by its very nature, is impossible to manage.

Her anxiety kept her living at surface level, and it might be fair to say that she was banal in that sense, helplessly, against her own will. Going deeper requires a loss of control, requires the abandonment of that constant surveillance of time and space in exchange for a headlong fall inside oneself, or into somebody else, or down one of life’s many cracks and fissures.

This lifelong undertaking, the effort to make her instability seem normal, was her life’s great struggle, the great stipulation for being touched by the love of others.

As far as the dead are concerned, chronology has no import and all that matters are the details, the degree of density, this how and what and everything to do with who.

When I was younger I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money jobs that became my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger.