Amongst my varied reading which defies any sense most books that i read i either empathize or feel the book sympathizes with me or it simply puts the thrill and excitement of life into me or which makes me think.
Few books really give a new direction to ever wandering thoughts.This is one such book.On the surface
if you read it just as a story its all a series of infidelities and i hardly have much to say of the subject .But then it is the thoughts of the character and the narrators theories that are amazingly thought provoking.
Sadly though for a book with so much to ponder the story of the book as a whole seems focused on infidelities and such and is definitely not a great fiction read.Added to it there is a lot of physical descriptions which after a point get plain irritating in a novel with thought as its core.But then since the novel was originally written in French one does let it be .
The book opens with a deep conflict in itself
"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recur¬rence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify? "
I rarely get coninced by categorizations but this one surely made a mark and i surely put myself in the fourth category
We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.
The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the
look of the public. ………………………….anonymous eyes……………………..
The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known
eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the
first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the
room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category,
on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. ………….
Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of
the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One
day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. ……………………….
And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary
eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
The chapter "A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words" is a real fine one though my favorites are surely what is written in for the word "Music" and "Light and darkness" and "Living in Truth"
MUSIC
Franz made no distinction between "classical" music and "pop." He found the distinction old-fashioned
and hypocritical. He loved rock as much as Mozart.He considered music a liberating force: it liberated
him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his
soul to step out into the world to make friends. He loved to dance and regretted that Sabina did not hare his passion.
They were sitting together at a restaurant, and loud music with a heavy beat poured out of a nearby peaker as they ate.
"It's a vicious circle," Sabina said. "People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder. But
because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still."
"Don't you like music?" Franz asked.
"No," said Sabina, and then added, "though in a different era…" She was thinking of the days of Johann
Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence.
Noise masked as music had pursued her since early childhood.
……..Music roared out of loudspeakers on the site from five in the morning to nine at night. She felt like rying, but the music was cheerful, and there was nowhere to hide, not in the latrine or under the bedclothes: everything was in range of the speakers. The music was like a pack of hounds that had
been sicked on her………………………………………………………..
"Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words." And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done
nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the nd no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, haff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness
LIVING IN TRUTH
Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating. From the time e met Sabina, however, Franz had been living in lies. He told his wife about nonexistent congresses in Amsterdam and lectures in Madrid; he was afraid to walk with Sabina through the streets of Geneva.
And he enjoyed the lying and hiding: it was all so new to him. He was as excited as a teacher's pet who as plucked up the courage to play truant.
For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that ye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina
despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster. That was why Sabina did not suffer in the least from having to keep her love secret. On the contrary, only by doing so could she live in truth.
LIGHT AND DARKNESS
Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total arkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean orders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death……………………………….
But for her, darkness did not mean infinity; for her, it meant a disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see.
Its hardly a great fiction read , too much gross stuff in between for people with puritanical tastes and lain boring in places but wherein it pauses and observes and ponders its simply amazing.
