Andrew Stewart’s Reviews > I'm Not Stiller > Status Update

I think I’m actually gonna start over from the beginning. It’s too good to read in spurts the way I have been

“He sat down in front of the gas stove, the way you read about it in newspaper reports and novels, he turned on all the taps, put a raincoat over the gas stove and his head and breathed in the hope that death is simply the end, breathed a bluish stupefaction, perhaps screamed, but screamed without a voice.”

This book man. That’s on the first page when I started reading it again.

There's no need to put them in prison; no one who has landed in the Bowery ever gets out. In summer they lie in the gutter and on the pavement; you have to move like a knight on the chessboard in order to get along. In winter they crouch round the iron stoves of the doss-house, dosing, quarrelling, snoring, telling the same stories over and over again, or fighting, and it reeks of booze, petrol, and unwashed feet.

Frisch describes NYCs bowery as “fields of the lost” what a haunting phrase I love it

“there was no doubt about our friendship, yes, during those cowboy months without women we had indulged in acts of tenderness such as do occur quite frequently among men but which had been unknown to Jim and me until then.”

Well! A little unexpected spice.

I see you too Proustian and Byronic

I was just reading around a little about the author and I came across for the first time the word Kafkaic. The person who said it should’ve been slapped for being so pretentious. Kafkaesque is bad enough, it’s become lazy literary shorthand for things well beyond its intended scope, stop saying it. But Kafkaic, that’s just about enough to make a person sick, dont you dare try to get that bullshit in the lexicon

Over 100 pages in before it occurs to me that I don’t know what the crime is. That it is likely metaphorical. And to wonder whether this trial is even happening in an objective reality.

Wow that second notebook. If (ok I’ll play) “Stiller” wants any redemption in my eyes he has a lot of work to do. He didn’t seem to be inventing anything there. if he was, it wasn’t to spread a positive light, that was self-laceration.
The last line of the chapter was brilliant and hilarious. An utter bastard throughout that notebook, a confessional, but the last lines showing, of course, it wasn’t him.