My wife and I tried to purchase a couch yesterday, and somehow that turned out to be a strange, little novel in my head. It is based on a true story, though, so… Well, it is anyway. It can be read here.
I believe that there is a certain path that many people took in regards to reading Umberto Eco. It started out when they read the best-seller In The Name of The Rose, which has Eco’s first published work of fiction. Many people loved that book in spite of the very academic passages that sometimes seemed to sneak in between thrilling scenes of the main plot – or at least they loved the film with Sean Connery. From then people would go on to read Foucault’s Pendulum – the second published work of fiction by Umberto Eco. Foucault’s Pendulum is however not a particularly accessible book, one might even say that it can come off as slightly pretentious. Or very perhaps, depending on how many years you have spent studying philosophy, language theory and so on. And then I think many people sort of gave up on Eco. Not that he doesn’t sell well – he surely does, but have you noticed how suspiciously new and untouched many of his books look up there on the book shelves in people’s homes? It has seemed to me that Eco was in danger of becoming the sort of author many put on their shelves for looks rather than to read. But then, suddenly, this book called The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana comes out and it is time for everyone to pick up a book by Eco again, I promise.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is about an ageing antiquarian named Giambattista Bodoni (named after a celebrated Italian typographer) who has a stroke and loses a vital part of his memory. He remembers every detail in history and anything he ever read very well, but he remembers nothing of his own life. He knows not his wife, and does not know his own name – yet he recites Plato flawlessly. In short, Bodoni carries with him the memory of his time, but not the memory of himself. He sets out to remember himself then, which he eventually tries to do by revisiting a reclusive house in the country that his family lived in during the years of the second world war. There he finds, undisturbed, the physical remains of his childhood memory in magazines, books, records and such. Bodoni then begins a journey through the history of his youth, but The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is perhaps more accurately a history of Italy itself through the period of fascism and war. Not a solely a factual history, but a history of the nation’s soul and what it went trough during those years – torn between nationalist fascism and joyful, almost naive Americanism. Throughout it all, Bodoni is chasing the story of his first love, a face that he cannot find but that he knows to have dominated him throughout his entire life.
First of all, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is just really well written and one of the most enjoyable reads in our time. In my opinion this is by far the best book by Eco (I haven’t read the The Island of The Day Before yet, though) when it comes to the feel, flow and strength of his language. In the other Eco books there is always a feel that the storyline is consciously interwoven with facts on history, philosophy, religion and linguistics in a way that divides the narrator into two separate personalities: Eco the dramatist and Eco the tutor. In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana the narrator is a more natural and poetic instance than seen before. At the same time the image of Italy during this period of time is just painted marvellously and the use of colour prints of adverts, stamps, magazine covers and such printed in the book itself works really well. Its sort of a journey of critical nostalgia through a questionable time in Italian history, and its a journey you won’t regret taking. Of course, Eco couldn’t resist having a true academic as a narrator, as it gives him the options to reflect on the contents of his story, but it has never worked as well before as it does here.
This is a book that everyone can read, and that everyone should read, if it were up to me at least.
Monday was back. This time it didn’t sneak up on me but rather jumped right in my face and started yelling. This has made it very hard for me to focus all day. The constant distractions of Monday are spawning the oddest ideas in my head. To give you an impression of just how bad it is, here is an idea that I actually have taken the time to tell you about.
Today I was chatting with a good friend of mine during my lunch break and one of her many periods during the day where she refuses to do her mindless, soul-annihilating job. We were discussing this quote from How I Met Your Mother:
“When you date someone, you’re taking one long course on who that person is, and when you break up, all of that stuff is useless. It’s the emotional equivalent of an English degree.”
And since she has exactly an English degree, she agreed – declaring her utter uselessness. But in the heat of the moment it came out as “otterly useless”, which I felt sure was not exactly correct. Awed by the power of her English degree, though, I thought I had better look it up before pointing the error out to her. A quick googling revealed that the word otterly actually does exist, though it means something different altogether. At least at first inspection.
The word otterly means, of course, exactly the same as humanly – just relative to an otter rather than a human. So things that can be humanly possible, can also be otterly possible or not. For example swimming seems to be otterly possible, while space travel is less so. At the moment at least – you never know. But the misunderstanding started with the phonetic similarity between utterly useless and otterly useless, and that got us thinking about what otterly useless actually means. My friend had said something that wasn’t actually incorrect, but what had she said then? What did it mean?
Otterly useless must be something that is useless to an otter and as it turns out, if you think about it, almost anything apart from fish and water would be considered otterly useless. What, for example, would an otter do with an iPhone? See? Good. But wait, there’s more!
So, what then is the difference actually between the expressions “utterly useless” and “otterly useless”? Utterly useless is defined by Webster’s to be complete uselessness, but since (as we have just agreed – yes you did, I was there) anything apart from water and fish and perhaps a few other things found in nature would also be considered otterly useless, what is the actual difference? If I said that a thing was utterly useless, it would almost always also be otterly useless – unless I was talking about water and fish, and then I would by all rights be flat wrong in any case. So, as it turns out the sentence “otterly useless” is not only correct in itself, but is also pretty spot on in actuality when used to describe the use of anything also considered utterly useless.
Of course, there are certain drawbacks to using otterly instead of utterly. People may wonder why you are being so specifically otter-related in your assessments of things, but as long as you just say the word without spelling it out to them, you should be okay. Only you will know that you are actually talking about the uses related specifically to an otter and not everything else. It may also make the conversation a lot more entertaining to you than to anyone else involved in it, and it doesn’t seem to lead to any obvious misunderstandings.
So, that was a thought from this Monday for you. And it is very obviously otterly useless, I am yet to decide if it is also utterly useless.
An otter, obviously
Friday seems to stir strange thoughts and stories in my head, and so this little, peculiar thing came out. It is called The Story of Brian, Savior, and it can be read here.
This is the first review of a book I add to this page. The idea is to have pages where I recommend books to those who may have similar taste as me. For a book to be featured here it has to have some sort of a unique quality that distinguishes it from other books in my opinion. My first review is as follows:
The setting of The Shadow of The Wind is Barcelona, 1945, just after the second world war. The action takes place in the shadow of the Spanish civil war and, as we find out, in the shadow of many other things as well. The feel of Barcelona is that of dark, mysterious streets where the fates of people intertwine like the narrow, stony passages that hold the old quarters of the city together.
We follow Daniel, the son of an antiquarian, who discovers a book named The Shadow of The Wind in an enigmatic place called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. This book is written by an obscure author called Julián Carax who no one seems to know much about. When Daniel discovers that his book is not only rare but may indeed be the last of its kind – the rest have been systematically been pulled off the market and burned - he begins an investigation into the past of Julián Carax. An investigation that will bring him into the the dark past of friends and lovers surrounding a Julián Carax whose fate seems to have been decided when he was much the same age as Daniel himself. As the story progresses the two fates of Daniel and Julian become increasingly and ominously entwined, and Daniel soon finds that the fate of Carax and his book will bring him to a past of death and tragedy threatening his own life as well. For in Daniel’s Barcelona mistrust and violence linger always, barely hidden in the shadows – and lives fade suddenly and tragically.
The Shadow of The Wind is one of the most read-worthy books I have read. Zafón somehow manages to draw from so many genres, and still keep the dramatic structure not only intact but under the control of a master. The long lost Gothic genre is somehow conjured back from the dead to play with the hard boiled detective novel amongst others and it just simply works very, very well. Only rarely will you read a story as exciting and thrilling as this while still sometimes finding yourself stopping to wonder at the beauty of its language and its characters.
Zafón manages heavy themes of civil war, loss and love beautifully in a book that can be heart-wrenching, cruel and delightfully amusing at any given time. The language is enticing without becoming overly complicated, and the chapter’s lengths fit really well with bed time reading as well. I really can’t think of any reason not to read and enjoy this book. Its the sort of novel, that if an author ever publishes something like it, he can call his professional career an accomplished success no matter what else happened in it.
So it was Monday again. It really shouldn’t keep surprising me that this happens, but somehow the arrival of Monday keeps sneaking up on me. This time my week started with a revisit from an old friend that I had almost forgotten: the porn-spammer. One of the emails in this mornings inbox informed that I was but a single click away from enjoying the virtual company of a delightfully charming, seemingly female character who was hung like a horse. I politely declined, but it got me thinking about a tragedy of my youth: the story of how I lost my first ever email address.
It happened during the end of the nineties in a conflict similar in type, if not in scale, to the Cold War. My older brother and I (being the respective representatives of The Warsaw Pact and NATO of course) were involved in some sort of debate that, for reasons lost in time, caused me to strain the fragile state of truth in our household with a minor threat. I informed my brother that, if he were not careful, I would sign his email up for an online, rather graphic newsletter concerning same-sex relations between young male adults. One must remember that this was a time when spam-filters were about as effective as the American Star Wars defense project of the late 1980s, and that the internet was still something you called on the phone and spoke to in the strange, hizzing and screeching language of modems. So, the prospect of receiving more than a megabyte of imagery concerning dubious subjects involved in explicit physical activities was not altogether pleasant.
My brother, stunned at first by the audacity of my new tactic, soon informed me that there would really be nothing preventing him from returning the favor. Well, no sooner had I invented this new weapon before my adversary caught up and presented the option for total retaliation. So, I thought, it would be back to the drawing board – no reason to actually carry the threat out seeing as neither of us really had any interest in becoming the victim of such a ploy. But alas, my brother and I were still teenagers, and we weren’t ready to manage a conflict of this sensitive type.
So the next day I began receiving emails concerning young ladies whose bust size was rivaled only by the size of their male genitalia. I was rather surprised at this (in many ways), especially since I had not signed my brother up for anything similar yet. Inquiries soon confirmed my suspicions of a preemptive strike carried out by my brother the evening before, fearing that I would otherwise strike first. Now I had to retaliate, of course, and so the tragedy unfolded with both our email-addresses as innocent casualties.
This story clearly shows two things… well, perhaps not clearly, but then at least remotely. The first is that the world was fortunate not to have me and my brother in charge of the two superpowers of the Cold War. The second is that even though we may have forgotten about the porn-spammer, he has not gone away. He was there when the internet grew up and he will occasionally, like Mondays, return to catch us off guard – reminding us of the sordid truth behind the ever cleaner and more respectable technology called the internet. A truth never expressed better than by the words of this great character:
“I’m fairly sure that if they took all the porn off the Internet, there’d only be one website left… and it would be called Bring Back The Porn.” – Dr. Perry Cox
Just wanted to let people know that I have added a new short story to this page. I small idea that has been on my mind for some time. It’s called Guidance and can be read here.
So, I decided to move to Barcelona in Spain, just as I had decided that I wanted to be a writer. Since I don’t speak a word Spanish (or Catalan for that matter) the two decisions seemed equally sensible and I wanted to share them both with the world. I think the world should generally feel better about its decision-making skills and this is me doing my part to improve everybody’s self-esteem. You’re welcome.
To make things better I am not even a native English speaker. No, I’m Danish (no, not A danish – it’s a nation… it is! Look it up if you don’t believe me.). So, shortly put I am a Dane living in the Catalan-speaking part of Spain who writes in English. I had hoped that would made me this really cool, international person, but instead it has just made me generally and confoundedly confused. When I wander through the charming streets of Barcelona, I have no idea of what is going on around me at any given time. People may be chatting on the street about the toxic gas especially designed to make testicles shrivel and explode that has just been released into the metro system by maddened lesbian terrorists, and yet you will see me smiling and nodding while I get out my metro card and keep walking down the stairs.
But really, you may then ask, does the internet need another blog about being an idiot? Surely we have enough of those. And yes, we do have enough of those, but this blog is actually not intended to be about idiocy (note: intended). No, this blog is about writing and about the unfocused, sometimes unwelcomed and almost always strange ideas, thoughts and notions that pop into your (or at least mine) head while you try to write something sensible. Having moved to another country seems to only make this problem worse as I have no one around me to throw these distracting ideas at. No one who will understand me anyway. I have tried flushing these creative hick-ups out of my head but they seem to clog up the drain instead. They insist on being realised and they keep blocking my brain from writing anything else until I do realise them. So now, I am going to blog them – I am going to create a place where I can simply write them and put them.
In many ways then, I have created this blog mainly for my own personal reasons, but don’t get me wrong: I would love nothing more than for someone to take something of value away from what I write here. Be it joy, inspiration or just a quick laugh on my expense – it is not important. So, I will put my thoughts and small pieces of creative misfits and peculiarities here for anyone to read or discard as rubbish – whichever they prefer. I have added a section to the blog called “Texts and oddities” where I will put the imposing, creatively disturbing notions that come out either as short stories, short prose or even poetry. At this point in time there is but one text there, but there will be added more, I’m sure.
So, we will see how it works out, I guess – both for me and anyone who stumbled in here either by mistake or led by a fetish for the odd, creative misfit and perhaps a good laugh.
