Agnieszka’s Reviews > Faces in the Crowd > Status Update

Romantic endings are never epic. Nobody dies, nobody disappears for good, nothing ever finishes finishing.

Perhaps the last thing a man loses is his vigor. Later, when that too has gone, a man becomes a depository for bones and fesentment.

Then I go back to the novel. A vertical novel told horizontally. A story that has to be seen from below, like Manhattan from the subway.

I fell in love with her the way a stone might become enamoured of a bird.

If you dedicate your life to writing novels, you're dedicating yourself to folding time. I think it's more a matter of freezing time without stopping the movement of things, a bit like when you're on a train, looking out of the window.

What happens is that people die many times in a single life… People die, irresponsibly leave a ghost of themselves hanging around, and then they, the original and the ghost, go on living, each in his own rights.

Tiny shards of glass went flying, something like fragments of a child's world: that chair, that man, that poet, that sad, that broken; that sad, broken poet man.

God and people come out in solidarity with victims. Not just any victim, but victims who successfully victimize themselves.

All novels lack something or someone. In this novel there’s no one. No one except a ghost I used to see sometimes in the subway.’

A horizontal novel, told vertically. A novel that has to be told from the outside in order to be read from within.