Two intellectual memoirs dominated my reading over Spring, three if WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes can be included given that its analysis of the careers of various Austrian writers illuminates Sebald's own literary trajectory.1 Peter Brown's Journeys of a Mind: A Life in History is over 700 pages but remains fascinating upto and including the final page, and while Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio is over 500 pages shorter, reading it again only multiplies the pleasure. All three writers display a commitment to their research not limited to a 9-to-5 academic career. It is embedded in their lives;2 the two surviving authors are still working in their 80s. But why did they dominate my reading? I wondered if it was a vicarious living of an alternative life, the one in which I was able to dedicate my time to reading and writing, perhaps to enable a more satisfying production. I daydream of the garden offices I see advertised in my Instagram feed in which I might escape distraction and finally concentrate after decades of superficiality. The archive of this blog reveals a movement from naive enthusiasms and bitter agitations to more ambitious content that doesn't quite escape the original form and may in fact diminish its strengths. At its best, blog writing glances at subjects, whether that is a new book or literary current affair, acting as the corner of an eye catching sight of something regular coverage blanks out, while, at its worst, it merely imitates.3 Ultimately, however, it remains a dilettantism. It doesn't nourish. At least, that is what I have felt. Then I reread the passage in Self-Portrait in the Studio in which Agamben writes of a postcard on his studio desk of a 17th century painting depicting a woman feeding from her own breast.4 After acknowledging its 'cloying lineage', he argues for it as an allegory of the soul nourishing itself. He asks what it means to nourish oneself: "What is a light that feeds itself? A flame that no longer needs fuel?" In the process of nourishing—in any kind of nourishing, spiritual or bodily—there is a threshold at which the process reverses direction and turns back towards itself. Food can nourish only if at a certain point it is no longer something other than us, only if we have—as they say—assimilated it; but this means—to the exactly the same degree—that we are assimilated to it. The same thing happens with the light of knowledge: it always arises from outside, but there arrives a moment when inside and outside meet and we can no longer tell them apart. At this point, the fire ceases to consume us, 'it now consumes itself'.5 This, I realised, was why these books had dominated. Each in its way marks multiple crossings of thresholds, the meetings of inside and outside, and I was drawn to these books because I was aware that I had been impatient for such a threshold to make itself known and want to know how others had climbed above the shameful lowlands of secondary writing. Like so many others, I had sought assimilation in the consumption of ideas, washing down the keywords and catchphrases of philosophy, literary criticism and critical theory like so many pills, downloaded using the convenient shortcuts technology offers, but which map only the landscape of the outside. No meeting ever arrives. Ten years ago when I read Nathaniel Davis' translation of 'Across the Border', Sebald's beautiful essay on Peter Handke's Repetition, a novel that had dazzled me in the late 1980s alongside Slow Homecoming, Across, and The Afternoon of a Writer, I was also dazzled. I had read the novel several times was frustrated each time that I couldn't find words to express why it and the three other novels had stood out above almost everything else I had read,6 and Sebald's essay only deepened the frustration as it focuses on the novel's metaphysical ideas, its mythological scheme, and its relation to the theme of 'Heimat' in Austrian literature and Filip Kobal's quest for redemption from the inheritance of fascist violence; that is, nothing much to do with me, but did help me to understand "the particular light which filters through" the novel, the words Sebald uses to describe Handke's prose in Repetition. The light made "the text itself a place of refuge among the arid zones" and "by the power of words alone" made visible "a world more beautiful than this one". Reading Jo Catling's translation of the essay in a book we have waited for two decades and on which I hope to write more, I realised the larger issues had over those years become embedded in me, so familiar that I could set them aside to concentrate on what really nourishes, perhaps refuge, beauty and redemption. This is another reason why the books dominated: they emphasised the value of finding what such nourishment rather than trying to assimilate the food that passes right through. Assimilation may take a lifetime to arrive, but, as Blanchot says: "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there."  Notes Terry Pitts' two-part review of the collection is especially good on this.↩ This becomes clear in the remarkable final section of Agamben's What I saw, heard, learned in which he remembers a note he wrote as a child that "seemed to be the secret core of my philosophy"↩ All these years later I still cringe at the memory of when the Litblog Co-Op, set up to promote formally adventurous fiction and challenge the conservative coverage of print newspapers, announced its first 'Read This!' promotion as Kate Atkinson's best-selling novel Case Histories with the co-op member referring to the author as "a juicy pro", as if novelists were gymnasts and the novel a pommel horse.↩ The painting by Giovanni Serodine is given the title as Allegory of Science by the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but most other sources refer to it as Allegorical Female Figure.↩ Agamben is quoting Plato's Seventh Letter on which he bases the claim.↩ I wrote a blogpost on three of the four and another on Handke's book-length poem To Duration also written in the mid-1980s but didn't appear in English translation for another 25 years.↩

The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a November. The nineteenth never appears. On the 121st iteration of the same day she begins to write by describing the sounds made by her husband Thomas as he moves around upstairs. The same moves, the same noises every day. A simple premise and very promising, but very difficult to turn into a compelling narrative. If everything she sees and hears is going to be the same from one day to the next, variation or resolution can only undermine the conceit, making the novel the diary of an anecdote, essentially a ghost story,1 but if there is no variation or resolution, boredom and impatience are inevitable. And the novel is indeed fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, as the premise gives the reader an existential thrill imagining what such a condition might entail while also wondering how the constraint on the story will develop, and perhaps even resolve, but frustrating because there are only so many meditations on a regular day one can read. The novel is filled out with Tara's precise observations of her surroundings and descriptions of the events leading up to the "rift in time", a level-headed attention suggested by the title, all of which may be interesting in context, but not otherwise. However, any longueurs are mitigated when, longing for a world in which time passes, she tries to reach the nineteenth. She interrupts Thomas' routine and explains the situation in the hope that he will be able to lead her into the next day, but by morning he has to be told all over again. However, this does have its unique joys: We woke in the morning, we went for walks, we sat down and had coffee somewhere on the eighteenth of November. For most of the day as intimately aware of one another as couples in the first flush of love or nearsighted creatures. We made the horizon vanish. We sought this giddy feeling. The distance between us was dispelled in the fog. We made the giddiness a part of our day. Created a bright space out of dazed, gray confusion. The reader nevertheless is impatient for a resolution and spins the hands of the clock forward enabled by the smooth translation of Balle's uncluttered prose, only to discover on closing the book that there is a serenity in the stability of Tara's infinite crisis, and now that serenity is gone. This may be why there are several more volumes ahead, just as there is always another book to read. Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland Part one of On the Calculation of Volume has been reviewed widely and made the International Booker Prize shortlist and came top of the Shadow Panel's vote.2 While many of the reviews place the novel within a generic tradition and cite one of the most famous novels about time as a literary predecessor, not one review that I've found recognises the significance of the apparently random date chosen for Tara to explore. Had they wondered why a Danish author chose to write a multi-volume novel about time from the perspective of a French woman, they may have discovered that the eighteenth of November is the day in 1922 on which the author of À la recherche du temps perdu died.3 There are other parallels: Tara's experience at the beginning of the rift is a neat inversion of Proust's narrator at the beginning of that novel: each morning he wakes in uncertainty to reconstruct reality from forgetful sleep, while she wakes to a sense of peace as the normality of another morning appears, only for its normality to dissolve. And when she tells Thomas everything and they stay awake all night hoping the nineteenth will appear in an entirely new dawn, a sudden imperceptible loss of concentration leads to him losing the memory of the day, a moment that reverses Proust's famous instants. Perhaps then this is a novel written from the end of time, from the blank space of death or, less morbidly, from eternity. For Nietzsche, eternity is precisely the revelation of time. In the face of relentless change, the serene stability of the novel is the ideal form to enable an experience of time in relation to eternity. This may explain why the rise of the novel coincided with the decline of faith and the disenchantment of the world: if poetry is the gift of eternity, the novel is the gift of time, and the novels of Proust and Solvej Balle seek to merge both in the flux of imagination and reality.4     David Lowery's movie A Ghost Story springs to mind here. A dead husband haunts the house he shared with his wife and watches from afar.↩ See the Booker Prize website and the Shadow Panel's Substack report. The latter tends to more reliable in purely literary terms as it's not driven by corporate demands.↩ A letter to the TLS mentions it in response to a review, but much is behind the paywall.↩ There is another connection, not film or book related. In the thinking of the experience of the same day and the fog obscuring the movement of the days, I remembered seeing J Mascis and the Fog perform the song Sameday live in Brighton many years ago. The Fog that night featured Mike Watt of Minutemen (and later the underrated Firehose) and Ron Asheton of The Stooges. ↩

On this day last year I began posting every day for 39 days to commemorate 39 years since I began reading books. I dug out a folder of book lists I'd kept since 1986, chose one book from each year that I'd not written about before and wrote what ever the book suggested to me. Most of it came easily but a problem arose when I reached the mid-nineties. I discovered there were no paper records of what I'd read from 1996 to 1999. This threatened to end the project just as it was gaining momentum. I was dismayed because I have never stopped making the lists. Where had they gone?  It turned out that technology had disrupted the tradition. I had saved Word documents onto a floppy disk and had not printed them out, and now had no means of accessing the contents. Salvation arrived when I realised I could search old diaries for mentions of books I had been reading. I could also check the inside pages of books for dates of acquisition written on the inside cover – a practice I stopped along with writing a diary soon into the new century. Perhaps it would have been better for my self-esteem to have stopped the project too. This Space has never had many visitors so I thought adding quantity to quality would change that. It did: the viewing figures plummeted. I had hoped the book blogging community would respond with surprise and enthusiasm, perhaps with its own OuLiPo-like projects, or at least showing an interest in certain books discussed along the way, but of course there is no book blogging community (not anymore). In consolation, I discovered that committing to post every day was its own reward. The relentless schedule gave shape to otherwise empty days, reminding me of the cycling routine I once kept traversing the rolling hills of the Sussex countryside such as the one below. The reason why the days were empty and I was able to commit to the work was also due to technological disruption and will be the subject of a forthcoming post. The exponential growth of artificial intelligence in the last eighteen months has wiped out the job role I had had for fourteen years in an industry in which I have worked for thirty. This is why I have added a variant on the 'Buy me a coffee' button to the top of the page. In the twenty years of writing This Space, I have neither used advertising nor asked for support, so please try to ignore the stain on the page.  Meanwhile, if you need an essay, thesis, non-fiction book, short story or novel proofread for a very modest fee, do get in touch. A fellow worker wrote that I am "the best proof reader l've met and he finds everything". (Of course, 'proof reader' should be one word and the 'and' would be better replaced with an em-dash or semi-colon.)

For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess.             Amina Cain When TS Eliot read Dante for the first time, he noted a discrepancy between his enjoyment and his understanding, leading to the famous claim that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood". He warns potential readers against two extremes: believing one has to master the theology, structure and historical context of the Commedia to appreciate its poetry or that knowledge is irrelevant to further enjoyment, which is why he thinks many readers' enjoyment is limited to the local thrills of Inferno. The warning holds today as we remain uncertain about the role literature plays in our lives: is it a repository of instrumental knowledge, cod liver oil for the soul, or pure escapism? "All three" is the public answer, except the distinctions are never clear and never overtly discussed despite fueling an entire literary culture, manifesting in, for example, the Guardian's Where to start with series in which pellets of one are slipped inside morsels of another. (Dante started with a dark wood lacking a branch of Waterstone's.)  In the months before I read the sentence in Amina Cain's A Horse at Night, I had stopped enjoying novels. I picked up several hailed as modern-day masterpieces and, despite their mutually incompatible variety, there was no spark. I bought and borrowed more seeking to break the cycle. Nothing worked. It would be easy to deceive myself into a rhetorical enjoyment, such as one reads every day in reviews, and I have often done that myself only later to reflect and regret, but I couldn't deny something was missing. Be assured this isn't a prelude to announcing the death of the novel and a call toward the tethered blimp of non-fiction, as I maintain faith in the indefinable potential of formal adventure. So if my loss of enjoyment was not the dulling of age, I wondered if there was a common absence. A answer came in that sentence. Eliot defined his enjoyment. He called it "poetic emotion". The quotation marks are his own as the phrase refers to his earlier essay on Hamlet and its definition of the Objective Correlative in which "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" elicit a particular emotion. This suggests literature must stick to generic templates through which a skilled writer can provoke a response immanent to the work, and Eliot more or less confirms it by reckoning Hamlet an "artistic failure" because Shakespeare did not find an objective correlative for Hamlet's behaviour that he superimposed onto the "cruder material" of earlier plays: "Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." He dismisses the emotion as adolescent. However, if we go back to the essay on Dante, Eliot mitigates the mixture of autobiography, lyric poetry and allegory comprising the Vita Nuova because it is a recipe "not available to the modern mind", the one that assumes biographical detail is an exposé of a personality. Instead, in Dante's case it is a report of personal experiences that were important not because they happened to Dante but because they had "philosophical and impersonal value". We might ask in response: when did a change occur that makes such a recipe unavailable to us? Perhaps it was changing in Shakespeare's time and that is precisely what makes Hamlet an excessive play. For Dante, the inexpressible and excess of facts took the form of Beatrice, a childhood love who becomes a personification of the divine and leads to a religious commitment. For Hamlet (the man), the opposite is the case. What presents itself to him is not an undoubted human presence and its gift of beatitude but a ghost he may have hallucinated and yet whose demands press upon him. Can he trust the experience? If it is false, how can he trust himself? If it is genuine, how can he trust the world? If Eliot thinks Hamlet's angst is adolescent, it may be because such introversion is now firmly embedded in the modern mind (as embodied by a certain J. Alfred Prufrock) and so easily dismissed, whereas in Shakespeare's time it was only just emerging and out of joint with what was firmly embedded then and responsible for the plays Eliot judged as "assured" artistic successes.  Vita Nuova and Hamlet are anomalies in literary history (anomalies define literary history), and what they both exhibit and what they both emerge from is excess and deprivation. The combination plays out differently in each: for Dante, the excess of emotion caused by Beatrice's presence and the deprivation experienced when she withheld her greeting and then when she died is transfigured into a mystical apocalypse and a key to salvation. His new life will be one of praise. For Hamlet the excess of ambiguity and subsequent deprivation of trust leads to behaviour that nowadays might be considered signs of a breakdown. What they also have in common is a meeting of the personal and the other-worldly. William Franke says the Vita Nuova is modelled on the New Testament gospels in which the experience of the apparent son of God remains central to the life of the writer. Beatrice was Dante's path to God and lyric poetry was his witness, the only proper means of communicating the revelation, with the prose commentary grounding the divine in everyday experience. The phenomenon of transcendence that Beatrice was for Dante became possible "only by the instrumentality of the lyric, specifically by virtue of its powers to express registers of personal experience in which subjective response and feeling are constitutive parts or aspects of objective events, not secondary and less real". Franke compares this to Christ's beatitudes that "lend themselves...to liturgical recitation and serve as kernels inviting supplemental elaboration in the form of illustrative narratives or parables and edifying doctrinal discourses". Hamlet does not have this resource and the very different form the play takes from Dante's little book indicates stages in a long process in which lyric poetry and literary prose finally become divorced, as described by Robert Alter, cited by Franke. The progressive narrativization of verse specifically in the refashioning and transmutation of biblical poetry into epic narration...describes a natural evolution starting from poetry, as the original form of literary expression, and moving to prose as its extension and elaboration. The process follows the incremental secularisation of Western society and the decline of the effects of revelation. It may explain why certain phrases in Hamlet have become embedded in everyday life in the same way as lines of poetry have (and so the apocryphal story of someone complaining that the play is full of quotations), while passages of novels, the exemplary form of disenchantment, have not (and indeed why poetry and plays have become minor forms in literary culture). Of course, novels are often common reference points, but nobody has lines running through their heads or recites passages off the cuff. They neither lend themselves to recitation nor to the rituals of performance. By becoming wholly extension and elaboration, prose has freed itself from its roots in lyric poetry and in the process that which exceeds the everyday, divine or otherwise. The lyrical state is a state beyond forms and systems.                                        EM Cioran So it was when I read Amina Cain's sentence that I recognised the problem. Plainness and excess has become prosaic. Plainness has become unimpeachable by making the everyday consequential in itself, though this has constantly to be renewed with critical hype – Dirty Realism was all the rage when I got into reading – and yet the residue of lyric and its promise of something other than the everyday remains: revelation has become a ghost in popular features such the 'twist in the tale' and the resolution of a plot, while in more refined circles, the possibility of revelation is present in the value afforded to 'experimental' writing which seems to promise that "under the myopic scrutiny of a good close reading" as Catherine Liu puts it "an obdurate, clam-like text [would] give up its iridescent pearl of gorgeous meaning". Meanwhile, excess is converted into maximalist world-building breezeblocks telling stories spanning continents and centuries, packed with history, adventure, romance, horror and fantasy. Each, however, remains undisturbed by the excess of its own presence, the incomprehensible revelation that with one sentence, however plain, however excessive, something has been added to the world, in the world as a product of a culture, yet not completely of the world. The surprise of distance. This has an effect comparable to that which Beatrice had on Dante and the ghost had on Hamlet; comparable but distinct, as it goes unnoticed. You can see the return of the repressed in "lyrical humanism", the form Lee Rourke diagnosed as the default mode of 'literary fiction', poised uneasily between popular and elite culture. With 'poetic' prose, it seeks to enchant a world without transcendence, standing in for that transcendence, and while it is ultimately empty, drawing the contempt of popular authors, it comforts the reader as much as the cushions on their conservatory armchair. (Dirty Realism is lyrical humanism in black and white.) We overlook its origins because the reception of contemporary novels follows Eliot by using contemporary mutations of the objective correlative to contain the terms of evaluation.  The sparkless cycle was broken when in a desultory search I picked out Thomas Bernhard's 1967 novel Verstörung, unfortunately translated as Gargoyles (it means Disturbance or Derangement) and began to read it for the first time in 25 years. I had regarded it as an also-ran among his novels, perhaps because the first of its two chapters is a plain story. A doctor's son home from college is listening to his father describing his rounds in a handful of small Austrian towns. There was a schoolteacher in Salla who he found dying and then a child in Hüllberg who fell into a tub of boiling water. The visits wear him down and the death of his wife and his daughter's suicide attempt hang over him. Despite this, the son's presence gives him cheer and he speaks of the restorative effects of nature. They prepare for a walk along the local river but are immediately interrupted by an urgent call to attend an innkeeper's wife in Gradenberg who has been bludgeoned by a drunken miner. The son accompanies the father to the inn and then the hospital, where she dies.  Crime, sickness, psychological distress and death pervade the region with son and father like Dante and Virgil on a travelogue through Hell, only without Dante's contrapasso placing the suffering in God's design. Purgatory of sorts is suggested when they reach the father's friend Bloch, an estate agent. The father finds some equilibrium by discussing political and philosophical issues with him and borrowing the big books of European thought from his library: Pascal, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche. He says Bloch resists despair by "seeing his life as an easily understood mechanism" he can adjust as necessary to practical ends. The son, a student of mining, agrees: "It was worth making the maximum effort to shake off a tendency to despair". Next they visit a wealthy industrialist who also seeks to make the maximum effort, in his case by shutting himself up in a hunting lodge to write on a literary work on a "purely philosophical subject". Father and son enter the lodge and walk on wooden floorboards through dark and barely furnished rooms. The son wishes to scream and throw open the shutters, but makes the effort to check himself.  Throughout the first half then the tension between mind and body, between self and world, is held in place by the firebreak between the observer and observed. The son is part of the world, partly outside. The plain act of description maintains literary sanity, with its correlative in the story being the father's commentary on the cases in the sanctuary of the car as they drive towards the summit of the purgatorial mountain. It is here that they meet Prince Saurau on the outer wall of Hochgobernitz Castle perched high above the surrounding countryside, a paradise of sorts. It is also where the second chapter begins and is what led Italo Calvino to call Gargoyles one of the great novels of the 20th century.  The Prince greets the visitors and immediately begins talking about the three applicants for the job he had advertised that morning, commenting on their dress, their demeanour, their background, their family, the towns they come from and, leaping from one subject to another, doesn't stop talking for the next 140 pages. He is enraged by the "idiotic bureaucratic rabble" that runs the Austrian state who have "expropriated" everything. He repeats variations of "expropriated" several times, and then "empty" several times. "Everything is empty!". In his analysis he comes across as intensely sensitive, lucid perhaps, and in the repetitions on the edge of madness. As is familiar in Bernhard's novels, the conditions cannot be separated. If the Prince hasn't descended entirely it is because the repetitions of words and phrases coalesce to maintain him in an oscillation above his abyss, even if it is an oscillation in which anger, loneliness, alienation, distress and despair comprise its dynamo. The Prince's compulsive repetitions form a lyricism in the absence of meaning, a revelation of sorts. Gershom Scholem called it the nothingness of revelation: "a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing...still does not disappear." It is a state we recognise in the process of reading Gargoyles. A more straightforward reader may interpret the condition as purely medical and the novel merely a case study, while admiring Bernhard's skill in capturing the symptoms. Lyricism has its place in these conditions, as Cioran observed: It is significant that the beginnings of all mental psychoses are marked by a lyrical phase during which all the usual barriers and limits disappear, giving way to an inner drunkenness of the most fertile, creative kind. This explains the poetic productivity characteristic of the first phases of psychoses. Consequently, madness could be seen as a sort of paroxysm of lyricism.  [Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston] Except the condition enabling such a diagnosis is not an uncontaminated onlooker: rationalism could be seen as a paroxysm of psychic catalepsy, the checked scream in recognition of the eternal silence of infinite space beyond the shutters of science, unwilling to confront the utter mystery of conscious existence. Pascal's famous line is the appropriate epigram to Gargoyles. With this in mind, we may turn to German Idealism and the intellectual history of the deus absconditus to recognise that the Prince is in a "delirium of loss" whose theological ground is set out by Alina Feld in Melancholy and the Otherness of God. The unhappy consciousness is "torn between finitude and the infinite, between the fallen and the ideal, between the human self and transcendent God". And while this condition appears to be conclusive, the form it takes remains part of the possible paroxysm, with catalepsy its cure. The lack of satisfaction in rational codefication is why we turn to novels, to its excess of the world, to writing that has an openness to an apparent outside, made apparent by writing, however deceptive. What is revealed in reading Gargoyles, and by extension in all novels, is a relation to what does and at the same time does not exist. The Prince's disturbance of this novel in particular is a disturbance of the novel in its generic safety and its readers seeking knowledge, cod liver oil for the soul and escapism. It is the revelation of the novel as an other-worldly presence in our lives, a measure of forever, an enjoyment beyond our understanding.