David Markson: Wittgenstein's Mistress

... Doubtless none of these was a book which had been translated from English, however, where I have the largest familiarity with writers, but had been written in German to begin with.

Which is scarcely to say that I am not familiar with certain German writers also, on the other hand.

Certainly I am familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance.

Well, or with Goethe.

Although by saying I am familiar with either of these writers I do not necessarily mean that I am extraordinarily familiar with them.

As a matter of fact by saying that I am familiar with them I do not even necessarily mean that I have read a solitary word that either one of them ever wrote.

Actually the sum total of that familiarity may well extend no further than to my reading of the backs of the jackets of phonograph records.

Such as the back of the jacket on Thus Spake Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, for instance.

Don Delillo: The Angel Esmerelda

Its almost unbelievable when you think of it, how they live there in all that ice and sand and mountainous wilderness. "Look at it" he says. "Huge barren deserts, huge oceans. How do they endure all those terrible things? The floods alone. The earthquakes alone make it crazy to live there. Look at those fault systems. They're so big, there's so many of them. The volcanic eruptions alone. What could be more frightening than a volcanic eruption? How do they endure avalanches, year after year, with numbing regularity? It's hard to believe people live there. The floods alone. You can see whole discoloured areas, all flooded out, washed out. How do they survive? Where do they go? Look at the cloud buildups. Look at the swirling storm center. What about the people who live in the path of a storm like that? It must be packing incredible winds. The lightening alone. People exposed on beaches near trees and telephone poles. Look at the cities with their spangled lights spreading in all directions. Try to imagine the crime and violence. Look at the smoke pall hanging low. What does that mean in terms of respiratory disorders? It's crazy. Who would live there? The deserts, how they encroach. Every year they claim more and more arable land. How enormous those snowfields are. Look at the massive storm fronts over the ocean. There are ships down there, small craft, some of them. Try to imagine the waves, the rocking. The hurricanes alone. The tidal waves. Look at those coastal communities exposed to tidal waves. What could be more frightening than a tidal wave? But they live there, they stay there. Where could they go?

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This is civilization, I thought, the thrust of social and material advancement, people in motion, testing the limits of time and space. Never mind the festering stink of burnt fuel, the fouling of the planet. The danger may be real but it is simply the overlay, the unavoidable veneer. What I was seeing was also real but it had the impact of a vision, or maybe an ever present event that flares in the observer's eye and mind as a burst of enlightenment.

Edward St Aubyn: Some Hope

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

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As the drugs had worn off, a couple of years earlier, he had started to realize what it must be like to be lucid all the time, an unpunctuated stretch of consciousness, a white tunnel, hollow and dim, like a bone with the marrow sucked out. ‘I want to die, I want to die, I want to die,’ he found himself muttering in the middle of the most ordinary task, swept away by a landslide of regret as the kettle boiled or the toast popped up.

Flann O"Brien: The Third Policeman

The particular death you die is not even a death (which is an inferior phenomenon at best) only an insanitary abstraction in the backyard[...]

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Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.

Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses

'Not in my life, I'm not,' and then I started to weep, for I had known that this day would come, and I realised that what I was most afraid of in this world was to be the man in Magritte's painting who looking at himself in the mirror sees only the back of his own head, again and again.

Thomas Pynchon: Inherent Vice

They stood in the streetlight through the kitchen window there’d never been much point putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town.

Jeffrey Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

No-nonsense US family-relationship comedy-drama in the Zoe Heller/Claire Messud/Jonathan Franzen mold. Immensely readable in parts, particularly those featuring Leonard, apparently inspired by David Foster Wallace, and his decline into manic depression. Heroine Madeline however was a charmless drip, as was third wheel and author-inspired Mitchell Grammaticus, his surname reminding me of one of the most vapid and overrated novels Ian McEwan's Saturday. Once Leonard left the stage it was a drag, and the ending offered little satisfaction. This has been said already by reviewers but the use of such blandly straightforward narrative structure to question avant-garde writing only shows this technique to be the tired cliche it is.