Three excerpts from an unwilling elegy.
1.
We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by words,
2.
How can anyone believe that one day he was here and the next day he was gone?
Yet how can one, I thought. How can one know a fact without accepting it? How can one accept a person’s choice without questioning it? How can one question without reaching a dead end? How much reaching does one have to do before one finds another end beyond the dead end? And if there is another end beyond the dead end, it cannot be called dead, can it?
How good you are, Nikolai said, at befuddling yourself.
3.
You write fiction, Nikolai said.
Yes.
Then you can make up whatever you want.
One never makes up things in fiction, I said. One has to live there as one has to live here.
Here is where you are, not where I am. I am in fiction, he said. I am in fiction now.
Then where you are is there, which is also where I live.
Some books are too hard to write about. Imagine how hard this one was to write: if you think about that while you’re reading it, you might have to stop, as I nearly did. I liked this review by John Self, in the Irish Times. This one by Rachel Veroff in the LARB is good too.
Novel Readings 