P. NP? What comes after the evacuation?
Mark Kohut
markekohut at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 19 20:38:55 CST 2012
So I pick up this new double-prizewinning novel by a young Argentinian-born Spaniard (b.1977) I had
never heard of, because I had never heard of him and the book carries a Bolano quote. It is called
The Traveler of the Century. His name is Andres Neuman.
We know I can be a little projectively touched. But the first section is entitled The Light Here is Ancient,
so, okay, from Genesis to Against the Day there are a million light allusions, then I read a page--a guy, shivering
with cold, is in a carriage that comes up to a stone wall and an arched gateway [okay, okay, I say, more common
things in Europe that are also a focus in AtD but so?....] then he sees that the wall has something odd about it----harder to leave
than to enter, he thinks... [so, a theme here?, something akin in my touched mind to rooms which are bigger inside than
from the outside?, nah...] then he sees ..."needle spires, ornaments shaped like vertebrae".: "HE HAD THE IMPRESSION
HE WAS ARRIVING IN A PLACE THAT HAD JUST BEEN EVACUATED [my caps], where the clatter of hooves
and the wheels jolting on the cobblestones [SIC] were producing too loud an echo. .....it seemed as though someone
were spying on them with bated breath. ....the carriage turned a corner.....they were now on a beaten earth track. .....
They went down Old Cauldron Street. Hans caught sight of an iron [sic] sign swinging in the breeze"...
Any plister read this book, this guy? Tell me where we get more thematic Pynchon tropes in two pages than here?
I think the young writer has paid awesome homage and started his imagining from where Pynchon took him. "arriving in a place
that had just been evacuated".....wonderful thematic allusion.
Sometimes, reading is as richly surprising as Shakespeare must have been and Pynchon.....who still are....
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