A translation by Nathan Ron:
Thursday 27 July 2017
Sunday 16 July 2017
#AMREADING EDWARD ST.
AUBYN’S A CLUE TO THE EXIT.
Charlie
has been given six months to live. What’s the best way to use those last
months? Spend all your money? Have torrid sex? Find your authentic self? All of
the above, and if you are a bestselling author, shock your agent by writing a
serious novel.
First then, find your authentic self, but that's not easy when it is buried under your surrogate self, the carrier of some cherished quality, the vehicle for a
certain story that needs to be shaped.
Another problem: friends who will not leave you in peace, friends with a psyche like a wildcat prospector, producing eruptions of
unwelcome insight.
But
at least Charlie succeeds in finding love/sex with Angelique who also helps him to get rid of his
money, gambling on his behalf, while he watches the gamblers drifting past like fish in an aquarium.
Yet
he cannot find peace and is plagued by thoughts
like a cloud of gnats at sunset, made visible by the dying light. In the
end, however, his torment is replaced by
the congealing powers of resignation and habit.
Meanwhile
the characters in his novel take shape: a woman loyal to her husband who is in a coma (are those feelings akin to necrophilia?). The woman and two fellow philosophers discuss the
nature of consciousness while stuck in a train stopped at Didcot. What else was there in the end? A man’s
biography was the history of what he had given his attention to, and so it
seemed worth knowing what attention was, and how it related to other types of
knowledge.
Angelique spends all of Charlie's money and departs. He muses whether it would be better not to wait out the six months and to commit suicide instead. It was less upsetting than this limitless
white terror, bleaching every object in its universe …It’s always the same
story: if you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)