Free Reading To the Public

Sometimes when I am in the toilet in early morning while still half asleep, I have the most splendid visions. Here's one of them: Put up my own library. My library will be huge and it's going to have 6-tiered bookshelves, one shelf for each genre. And when I say genre, it has to be very specific as in, "Historical fiction taking place between 1810-1850" or "Novels that have been adapted into movies starring Brad Pitt". Or not.

Or maybe I could just collect used books from the neighbors and display them on the sidewalk for anybody who's interested in a free read. I'll set up 2 tables and a few plastic chairs beside the makeshift  shelves and put up a sign that says "free reading to the public". The only problem with this idea, though, is that it won't be an original. Somebody in our neighborhood (in Manila) already beat me to it, and I don't have the space anyway. And so now, this person is reaping all the fame and glory as I see local TV crew set up cameras in front of his house while he is being rehearsed for an interview (will write about this in a separate entry). Why haven't I thought of this sooner?

Anyhow, the point here is that books are always a good thing. They must be made public, and shared. So it came as a pleasant surprise today when Sir Joseff of La Belle Aurore lent me his personal copy of the Duino Elegies (from one of my favorite poets, Rilke!). It didn't matter that we only met for the first time today, and I probably looked creepy with my smeared eyeliner after rubbing at my eyes and forgetting that I had eyeliner on (I only confirmed this an hour later at a mall's comfort room which could only mean that I unknowingly freaked out more people at the mall and during the jeepney ride to the mall). But anyway, the kind gesture was lovely, I can't wait to devour the elegies, and I can hardly wait either for the other book that somebody else has promised me. :-p

A merry, nerdy, bookish Christmas to us all. :)

Paul Auster's Oracle Night

This is not a book review. If it is, I would have to dissect, analyze and piece together the three stories within this novel which is a torturous thing for me to do at this moment. Oracle night is a story within a story within a story. It is the story of Lemuel Flagg, a British Lieutenant of World War I, of Nick Bowen, an editor at a New York publishing house who made The Great Escape of his life, and of Sidney Orr, the writer who created Nick Bowen from the pages of a mysterious Portuguese notebook and whose life takes on a bewildering turn after doing so.

I loved the Nick Bowen episode. Mostly because of his larger-than-life decisions, and also because his story didn't have an ending and nobody knows what happened to him. He might as well have died, but nobody knows for sure, not even Sidney, who created him. His story is a prime example of starting over a new chapter of one's life, but not in a warm, fuzzy, feel-good way. After having had a near brush with death, Bowen decides that a new life has been given to him and immediately leaves for a new city without going home to pack his things or even telling his wife about it. He checks in at a hotel, phones a woman he has met once and declares his love for her, and goes out to shop for clothes only to find out that his ATM  and credit cards have been cancelled. With only a small amount of cash in his pockets, he skips out on the hotel bill and goes looking for the only person he knows in Kansas City--Ed Victory, the taxi driver who drove him to the hotel.

His bad luck doesn't there. Ed Victory hires him as a telephone book sorter in the dubiously named Bureau of Historical Preservation, and through a bizarre twist of events, Bowen ends up being locked up alone in full darkness in an underground bomb shelter. Sidney Orr has no idea how to get him out of that desperate situation, and so he leaves the story unfinished. Pretty frustrating, if you ask me.

Nick Bowen and Sidney Orr are interchangeable characters. They both make a living in the writing/publishing industry, they almost have identical wives, identical dilemmas. As I was reading through the novel, I get the weird feeling that their stories are beginning to merge. Sidney Orr's friend pops up in the Nick Bowen story and I have to go back several pages to make sure that he really is Orr's friend, and not a new character in the Bowen story.

Oracle Night is not the story of Nick Bowen, though. It is mostly Sidney Orr's story and of how the written can mysteriously foretell the events in the life of the writer. Although, technically, Oracle Night is the story of Lemuel Flagg. I know I'm not making any sense here, so might be better if you just find out for yourself. :)