Never Any End to Paris Reviewed

Scott Esposito’s review of Enrique Vila-Matas’s Never Any End to Paris for The National. [via The National]

Vila-Matas shows art in all its inconsistency, thereby pushing it toward that liminal moment where it becomes true to life, where Borges’ memories, as it were, bloom into that truth that they can never quite be. Never Any End to Paris always strains toward this unreachable quantity, with irony, paradox, and anxiety being the author’s tools of choice for caging these mirages. Yet whereas Borges confides to his audience that “it saddens me” to think that all our memories of youth are Xeroxes made on faulty copiers, Vila-Matas offers his own take: instead of weeping for what is lost, laugh at what might have been.

Read more at the link.

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Understanding Thomas Bernhard

A great essay by E.J. Van Lanen on reading Thomas Bernhard over at Quarterly Conversation.

What I see in Bernhard is an examination of the problem of consciousness—if we understand consciousness to be the thing that provides us with ex-post facto justifications. And what is truly disturbing in Bernhard is not that his characters have created justificatory structures that verge on the insane, or at the very least the disturbed, but that these justifications are our own. For Bernhard’s characters always have an explanation, and those explanations, while delivered by unconventional people, and in unconventionally strident ways, are quite common: society caused this, or the family, or money, or fear of failure, or our innate goodness and seriousness running up against an uncomprehending and intolerant other. And maybe what he’s showing is that any attempt at justification or explanation is a kind of madness, that the causal search is a denial of the reality of the situation we’re faced with, that there is no significance, that our consciousness is just as deceptive as the consciousnesses of these half-mad characters, that our lives are based on stories, that we use these stories to paper, pitifully, over a truth that we can’t face, that these madnesses are our own madness.

Hit the link to read more.

[via Quarterly Conversation]

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