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3.5/5
In this novel, we have the inheritor of Kafka and his brilliantly horrific vision of the vicious contortions human beings would willingly place themselves into. A rock and a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea, the descendants of his compatriots and the wide open refuge and its incorporated corporations of name, line, and visa. World War II, a timeline running roughshod over its hordes of antling men, women, children, accomplishing the phenomenal feat of rendering every tale of terror into one of penultimate banality. Here we see the mad dash overlayed with countless stamps, seals, panderings officiated and otherwise, drawing out the tension laden chaos of millions scrambling for their lives into a thousand year machinery of filling, hoping, waiting. Always the waiting, the inheritance of all those displaced souls fleeing the wreckage of their heaving homeland, the machination of ancestral Pompeiians and modern Syrians alike.
Away, away, run far away, and then, perhaps, we'll let you stay, but only you who wants to, what? Away.
To stay, long enough for the comrades in migratory arms to deliver their own tales of endless woe. Long enough for the expired, the rejects, the missed deadlines by a hair and lack of the proper intersections of licenses to realize that to operate by logic is to fail. Long enough for the concentration camp escapees to become a dime a dozen, long enough for the guarantee of success to become a matter of absurdities complex enough to vaguely hint at serious realities and nothing more, long enough that a life worth writing about is no longer the end, but the means. To hitchhike on a lonely ghost up until the point of departure, and remain in place to see off that saving ship and its triumphant crowds, off on their hard won journey to their final place of rest.
Unbelievable? As unlikely as riotous invasion and systematic imprisonment can be. Disappointing? Depends on your personal definition of success: your life, or your life. Ironic? About as much as an author can make a genocide.
"You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don't you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn't bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: 'What do you think you're waiting for? You've been in Hell for a long time already.'With that in mind, let's look now to that Sartre quote, "L'enfer, c'est les autres," ("Hell is other people,"), shall we? In the former, we have the judge, in the latter, the populace. It took a feat of supreme humanity to come up with the machinery bordering on infinite that combines the two in such convulsive precision: bureaucracy.
In this novel, we have the inheritor of Kafka and his brilliantly horrific vision of the vicious contortions human beings would willingly place themselves into. A rock and a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea, the descendants of his compatriots and the wide open refuge and its incorporated corporations of name, line, and visa. World War II, a timeline running roughshod over its hordes of antling men, women, children, accomplishing the phenomenal feat of rendering every tale of terror into one of penultimate banality. Here we see the mad dash overlayed with countless stamps, seals, panderings officiated and otherwise, drawing out the tension laden chaos of millions scrambling for their lives into a thousand year machinery of filling, hoping, waiting. Always the waiting, the inheritance of all those displaced souls fleeing the wreckage of their heaving homeland, the machination of ancestral Pompeiians and modern Syrians alike.
Away, away, run far away, and then, perhaps, we'll let you stay, but only you who wants to, what? Away.
To stay, long enough for the comrades in migratory arms to deliver their own tales of endless woe. Long enough for the expired, the rejects, the missed deadlines by a hair and lack of the proper intersections of licenses to realize that to operate by logic is to fail. Long enough for the concentration camp escapees to become a dime a dozen, long enough for the guarantee of success to become a matter of absurdities complex enough to vaguely hint at serious realities and nothing more, long enough that a life worth writing about is no longer the end, but the means. To hitchhike on a lonely ghost up until the point of departure, and remain in place to see off that saving ship and its triumphant crowds, off on their hard won journey to their final place of rest.
Unbelievable? As unlikely as riotous invasion and systematic imprisonment can be. Disappointing? Depends on your personal definition of success: your life, or your life. Ironic? About as much as an author can make a genocide.
The remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death toward another.It's a small world after all, and everyone has been given their share of rope.