There are many books one admires, Jon Fosse’s Septology or perhaps Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch for instance. While reading them, I am excited by their distinctive nature and the formal achievement, but cannot imagine returning to either.

Eighty pages into Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, I am already  anticipating rereading and tracking down its sequel. I am thinking through an intelligence so fiercely alive that I am exhilarated even as I am chilled by the world she describes. It brings  to mind the fictional world conjured up in Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus. Both books represent peaks of this year’s reading.  What connects them is less the worlds they describe than the extraordinary intelligence through which those worlds become perceptible.

“The voices,” M. said to me once, “are like a composite quotation of everything I heard.” (“Composite quotation” is an expression coined by Andrei Bely, who said that for him every writer was represented not by a series of separate, word-for-word quotations, but by a kind of “composite quotation” that summed up the essentials of his thoughts and words.)

Every acquired book offers the possibility of entering another’s mind. An empty notebook offers the chance to discover one’s own mind.

In These Spindrift Pages, Theodore Dalrymple’s observations of his reading encounters, he writes:

Simenon bought notebooks without knowing what he was going to write in them or use them for. I have immense quantities of notebooks bought in the same way which I probably could not fill if I wrote for twelve hours a day for the rest of my life, but if I pass a shop that sells notebooks . . . I invariably enter and buy.

I suffer from the same compulsion, looking now at a wine crate that formerly contained a dozen bottles, now full of a variety of notebooks acquired from around the world, but especially in London, Tokyo and Paris.

There is perhaps a connection to be made with Heinrich von Kleist’s short essay On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking, in which he argued that we don’t necessarily think first and then articulate our thoughts.

I wonder, too, whether acquiring notebooks in this way, rather than being an expression of the desire to think, is actually a sophisticated way of avoiding the disappointment that might follow from doing so.

Heinrich Von Kleist was born on this day in 1777.

But I, bearing in mind my limitations, give my work off-hand, without premeditation, and indeed almost in rustic fashion, the caption of Attic Nights, derived merely from the time and place of my winter vigils; I thus fall short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care an in elegance of style.

I have been sampling the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, a second-century commonplace-book of grammar, assembled, so its author attests, through the long winters of Attica, and find it fascinating. Meanwhile I await James Falen’s Eugene Onegin, my appetite having been whetted by Nabokov’s Bollingen commentary, anticipation heightened by poem’s reputed digressiveness.

There are exceptions, perhaps foolish exceptions, and the writer of this paper is conscious of proving the rule. But I venture to think anyone who cares passionately for abstract discussion, be his hair never so grey, his hand never so palsied, is in spirit young. I do not say this is an advantage. It is possible to stay young too long. There is a “time to grow old.” If you stay young beyond your time, you gain some ways; but you will pay for it: it is a form of hybris, of transgression, of “uppishness”.

Two years ago I was charmed by Jane Ellen Harrison’s Reminiscences of a Student’s Life; the word was inadequate then and remains so. Hence my pleasure at a new Alpha and Omega. I intend it to accompany this late summer, with secondary reading, and with the Prolegomena, which one does not dip into so much as submit to.

Radiant Terminus took me somewhere I didn’t want to leave. Like Thomas De Quincey in the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis, Volodine treats landscape as a state of consciousness, though stripped of De Quincey’s grandeur. In the endless taiga time dilates, nights last centuries, the dead walk among the living and among those who can’t tell the difference. Jeffrey Zuckerman’s prose is slightly fatigued, a flat register that sustains the wasteland.

The best things I’ve read this year: this and Suspiria de Profundis.

There are, fortunately, many more post-exotic works.

Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.

— T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus (2014, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, 2017) names dozens of plants growing on its irradiated steppe. A few are real. Most are not. The list below is an exercise in botanical glossolalia: French folk-naming, Russian loanwords, mock-Latin coinages, and invented hagiography.

The real ones

A few genuine herbs to establish credibility, so that the rest of the list reads as belonging to the same botanical register. Absinthe is the bitter wormwood.

savory
sage
white sage
absinthe
mint

The Slavic and Siberian-sounding

These sound borrowed from Russian.

kvoina
iglitsa
chugda
majdahar
ashrangs
bouralayans
zabakulians
lovushkas / Lovushkas-du-savatier

The mock-French folk names

The most beautiful and most clearly fabricated. French popular botany is full of compound names.

Jeanne-of-the-Communists
Marche-sept-lieues (seven-league-march)
mère-du-lépreux (leper’s-mother)
dame-exquises
midnight Jeannes
Damsels-in-flight
prance-the-ruins
pugnaise-des-errants (the wanderers’ bedbug-flower)
dangue-à-clochettes (little-bells-dangue)
folle-en-jouissem
quick-bleeds
old-captives
smallglory captives
fox barrens
four-o’clock beauties
racines-rieuses (laughing roots)
great ogronts
Vornies-cinq-misères
caincers
mauvegarde
caped mudbeaks
willow benaises
Chiennelaines (bitch-wools)
deadchive plumes
twistsprouts
fine-brousse
huckster terbabary / ravive terbabary
bushes of gourgoule-des-pauvres
aldousses
Saint-Valiyans
Valiyan-harelips
Grimes-amerses
Rasping-odile-des-foins
grand-odilie
lancelottes

The pseudo-Latin and pseudo-scientific coinages

The densest and most inventive band. Some surface near real plant suffixes used for French plant and flower names. Some are portmanteaux. Some are pure phonetic invention.

septentrines
epernielle
saquebrille
lucemingot
regrignelle
molle-guillotes
malveines
pituitaines
doroglosses
solivaines (rogue and aromatic)
argamanche shrubs
torchpotils
masquerats
sottefraise
chauvegrille / calvegrillette
diaze-lights / dive-diazes
sweetbalers
brume of aromatic herbs
verdurous ocean

‘We haven’t changed a bit, I thought.’

Jorge Luis Borges, whom William Gass described as ‘a man made civilised by the library’. I could spend a life in patient study of his stories. In The Other from The Book of Sand he offers a ‘longwinded catalog’. All his lists are enchanting.

In the wardrobe closet in your room, there are two rows of books: the three volumes of Lane’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights—which Lane called The Arabian Nights Entertainment—with steel engravings and notes in fine print between the chapters, Quicherat’s Latin dictionary, Tacitus’ Germania in Latin and in Gordon’s English version, a Quixote in the Garnier edition, a copy of Rivera Indarte’s Tablas Sangre signed by the author, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a biography of Amiel, and, hidden behind the others, a paperbound volume detailing the sexual customs of the Balkans.

Also in his story: Dostoievsky’s* The Devils or The Possessed and The Double; Joseph Conrad; Rubén Darío’s Azul; Verlaine’s ‘Art poétique’; a line of Victor Hugo’s poetry; Walt Whitman; Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, and a reference to Lazarus.

‘Always referring back to books.’

[*Borges’ defensible spelling.]

Reading James Elkins, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, Unamed Press. It is the second volume of Five Strange Languages. Elkins explains, ‘You can read each book by itself. They are entirely independent of each other. Each is different, with its own style, mood, and stories’, adding, ‘A Short Introduction to Anneliese begins with a 200 page rant. . . At its center is a hundred-page chapter in which Anneliese talks about long books.’

I’m midway through this delicious rant, a place to pause and take breathe, trying to resist the propulsive force towards Chapter Seven, the one about the long books. It is calling to me, some human call, that compels me to listen to the work. It brings to mind a Stella Gibbons’ coinage: thought-whelmed.