More quotes from Joseph O’Neill, THE DOG.

• Dinner with the locals:The three men jumped on the black goat and wrestled it to the ground and instantly roped its legs. I might have been watching a rodeo. Giancarlo slit the animal’s throat…A short while later the chef arrived with a serving dish. “The liver,” Georges said. “Fresh, fresh.” I accepted a piece, against my will. I did not want to put a part of the goat inside me.
• Experience: When all is said and done and pondered, experience amounts simply to extra weight.
• Relationships: Inner absenteeism is inconsistent with the performance of the duties of a loving partner.
• Suicide: I find it calming that I have no dependents of any kind and am always at liberty to hang myself. On second thought: To put oneself to death would offer a dispiriting example and one ought not to do it.
• Facebook: A festival of mutual absolution – I wanted some of it. I wanted to divulge my playlists and movie favorites, my moments of wit and hope and wry gloom.
• America: A strange, gigantically foolish place that sooner or later will be undone by the calamitous mental life of its population…Dolts thrive; one senses an eventual crash of crashes.

#amreading Joseph O’Neill’s THE DOG.

Okay, this isn’t my usual blog post stuffed with historical tidbits unless my years as an expat in non-democratic countries count as a historical tidbits, and Joseph O’ Neill’s book is about an expat in Dubai. It offers some excellent insights into the Kafkaesque experience of life in a country that will always be foreign to you.

O’Neill’s prose may sound a bit strange, or maybe not, given that his protagonist is a lawyer and must therefore be aware that

a word is exactly and covertly what it appears to be, a letters-shaped blackness, which is to say, a kind of verbatim detail of the immovable, possibly entropic, and in any case finally annihilating, residual super-reality of blackness.

O'Neill's character tries really heard to make himself understood, to kill or cage the rats of complexity, but in vain. He produces a cruelly rambling, almost agrammatical near-balderdash of baffling dependent clauses and ultra-boring, ultra-technical phraseology that enveloped the reader in a dingy, alien, almost unbreathable word-atmosphere offering barely a vent of punctuation indentation, or line breakage.

Sound like a description of the pre-nup you signed? Or the disclaimer on the insurance papers?

But don’t think that O’Neill’s lawyer is inhuman. No, he is all too human and realizes that he is in deep shit because he is seized with a knowledge of facts. That’s not good. A fact is where it all starts to go wrong. A fact is a knock on the door.

More bits from O’ Neill’s swamp of plausibility in my next post on Sunday.