Writing Catastrophe – Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene

More and more we will have to ask ourselves how we might respond to natural disasters in our stories, the kind of stories they might lead us to write. What is the significance of a catastrophe? This is almost a literary question, insofar as it concerns the interplay of meanings and appearances. Man in the Holocene, a novella by the Swiss writer, Max Frisch, provides an example of how we might begin approaching the topic. Ostensibly the record of a widower’s isolation in a Swiss valley cut off by bad weather, it is really a short but intense look at humanity’s attempts to live inside a world where their power and lives are limited.

A recent widower, Herr Geiser finds himself stuck in his house in a valley in Ticino as bad weather cuts off the town from the outside world. Soon even the power goes and he has to stick to matches and canned goods. He entertains himself by building things out of crisp bread and reading. His mind is not that of a young man, however, and he has to take notes by hand to remember what he reads. A little later, he decides instead to use scissors to cut out sections from books and stick them to the wall. Next, he makes an attempt to flee on foot to a neighbouring valley, but returns home. His note-mania continues as his mind declines, with whole diagrams plastered onto the walls, and shortly thereafter the story ends.

Narration

One of the first things I noticed about the novella, which I read in the original German, is the strange narratorial voice. Readers are not close to Herr Geiser at all: to give two examples, we do not learn his first name, and through impersonal and passive constructions (“es” (it), “man” (one)) or phrases like “it is not thinkable” Man in the Holocene builds up a feeling of being almost a work of science or technology, rather than a story. It is as if we are observing some creature at the zoo, except that here the creature is an old man, shuffling about. As a result, we come to see Herr Geiser not as an individual so much as a representative of Man in general (to refer back to the novella’s title) just as the creatures we see at the zoo are supposed to embody their whole species.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as animals, let alone as automata – I certainly do not, at any rate. But Man in the Holocene does much to force us down this route through its most distinctive formal trait – the cuttings that Herr Geiser sticks to the wall.

Cuttings

These are a fascinating novelistic technique and worth dwelling on. When I say cutouts, I mean just that – real cutouts are plastered across the text. They are drawn primarily from history books and encyclopaedias, with a little of the Bible thrown in for good measure, and all are presented in their original formatting. (I never want to read Fraktur, the “German” typeface, ever again, no matter how beautiful it is to look at when you do not actually need to make sense of it.)

Herr Geiser is a man of facts, unlike his wife, who was a reader of fiction. Man in the Holocene presents Herr Geiser attempting to make sense of the world via these facts. When he reads, he reads to expand his knowledge, hence the note-taking which expands into making cuttings. This process of gaining knowledge for the process of understanding, even control over his environment, makes Herr Geiser again rather representative of humanity’s recent Enlightenment destiny as a whole. Furthermore, this entire process of meaning-making is noted explicitly in one extract as something distinctively human – in other words, Herr Geiser’s actions make him more human, even though I said above it had the opposite effect.

One reason for this is because there is more to texts than the motivation behind covering the wall with them – there is also what they say. Generally speaking, like a text by W.G. Sebald, we have a sense as we read Man in the Holocene of accumulating catastrophe. As we learn about Ticino, we read about the countless catastrophes befalling its people, through rock slides and floods and war. Mostly, these are natural catastrophes, which highlight humankind’s powerlessness in the face of nature. We also learn about flora and fauna native to the world, and as Herr Geiser explores his interest in geology we learn about dinosaurs and prehistoric times. 

A sense of scale is one thing that rather makes us seem like animals. Because we are a speck in comparison with geologic time, the significance of our significances seems like nothing of the sort. “Man appears in the Holocene” is a more accurate translation of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän – in other words, we were nothing but ashes in all the years before then, and perhaps just as fated to short lifetimes as the dinosaurs. Indeed, reading about the Tyrannosaurus Rex in particular, it’s hard to avoid making the comparison in our heads that we too are an apex predator, yet just as fragile when we consider the power of nature. Another theme of the cuttings is that we shape nature to live in it, but little good does it do for us when faced with entire valleys slipping away.

This is not the main thing, however. Herr Geiser also cuts out diagrams of dinosaurs, but the final diagram in the book is that of a human being. This kind of echoing reduces us, in spite of our investigating the world, into a creature to be investigated and no different from the dinosaurs on the pages before. Our meaning-making, in particular via religion, is also challenged through the primacy the text places upon scientific work. The Bible might demonstrate humanity’s development, but not if the sections extracted (Noah’s Ark, Creation) are contradicted by the other extracts. Instead, this makes human reasoning look further flawed.

It does not help either that by the end of the book Herr Geiser has essentially lost his mind – there’s an obvious narrative irony in the way that all these attempts to understand the world and the catastrophes befalling it bring Herr Geiser no closer to escaping or mastering them. Note-taking does not make the world take note. This is most explicit, and quite funny, in one of the novella’s central sections, where Herr Geiser endeavours, in vain, to remove a salamander that has ended up in his bathroom. After a few pages of struggling, suddenly readers instead read several extracts about the biology of salamanders – the implication seems to be that Herr Geiser believes that by understanding them a little better, he might be considered the real victor in their duel. It is, of course, not so.

In short, these cuttings are an ambiguous contribution to the novella’s network of meanings. On the one hand, they celebrate humanity as this meaning-deriving creature, driven by knowledge. On the other, they show its animal heritance, frailty and smallness. Generally speaking, they also do something else important – they force readers to put the extracts in relation to the rest of the text and interpret them for ourselves, thus increasing our participation beyond passive reading. We can even say that we join Herr Geiser even if we do not get close to him as a human – we become representatives of the “human being” too.

A Social Animal

Herr Geiser’s wife Elsbeth has died, I presume, shortly before the novella begins. The idea of human beings as social animals is one which I realise is also an important part of how the story builds its network of ideas. Herr Geiser is alone, with only his cat for company. He does visit a local inn at one point, but is largely asocial, before becoming actively antisocial as the novella draws to a close. He reads, but his reading seems pointless, especially when he finds he forgets it all. At the same time, he’s actually dependent on others, though he does not acknowledge it – to give an example, a neighbour brings him soup, without which I doubt he would be able to feed himself.

Frisch’s ideas of gender are a smidgen dated, I have noticed, but the function of Elsbeth’s memory within the text, I think, is to demonstrate how incomplete Herr Geiser’s life is when he is alone. His wife, who we learn reads fiction, symbolises an emotional interaction with the world just as Herr Geiser, through his encyclopaedia mania, symbolises a technological engagement with the world.

Neither, on its own, is sufficient for a fully human life. Man in the Holocene demonstrates how poor Herr Geiser’s single life is by showing how, alone, he declines. (Dementia develops faster in people with less regular social interaction). This is a further irony, because this decline as a human being, into a kind of animal or child, comes even as Herr Geiser continues his knowledge-obsession. The more notes he takes, the less sense he himself makes or can make as a human being.

Through the cutouts which praise human subjugation of the natural world, and the very fact of the town’s existence – “the Federal and local government do everything to ensure the valley does not go extinct” – we have a sense that even though human endeavour seems ultimately insignificant on a geological timescale, it is still better to try to work collaboratively to build human habitable worlds, than just to retreat into ourselves as Herr Geiser does. In this sense, the text is not entirely nihilistic.

As a Novella

With that said, it is hard not to read Man in the Holocene as an overall depressing, nihilistic work. It is a work where we humans simply do not matter. The cutouts, and the descriptions of nature, paint us as utterly insignificant and totally vulnerable to disasters. “Only man knows catastrophes, and only if he survives them; nature knows no such thing.” The relentless repetition of geologic facts emphasises the shortness of our lives, even the lives of homo sapiens as a whole.

We do not even need the cutouts, however. Man in the Holocene is a novella, and it shares many of the central ideas that form has gathered around itself during its storied history within German-language literature, such as madness in the protagonist. In terms of humanity’s smallness, however, another novella trope is important – a serious interest in time and its movements. In Frisch’s story, this comes across in the idea of cyclicity. Throughout the novella we get a sense of the valley as functional unit, with the post bus with its hooting in particular coming to be the obvious symbol for this. But at the novella’s end, all of these things are described in a long panoramic section without Herr Geiser being mentioned once. In other words, we loop back to the story’s beginning, and find that nothing has changed once we remove its central character. We do not need geologic time – even in the short timeframe of the novella we see how easily we are wiped away and replaced without a change to the world’s essence.

In the Context of Frisch’s other works

Man in the Holocene is my third Frisch, after Homo Faber and Montauk. While it shares themes of aging with the latter, in its concern with humanity’s development the more obvious point of comparison is with the former novel. I remember Homo Faber as being critical of humanity’s technological development through the figure of its narrator, who was obsessed with his electric razor, but ultimately struggled to experience emotions, leading to a kind of ruinous personal life. Like Herr Geiser, Walter Faber in his novel tries to understand his world through statistics and facts, but unlike Herr Geiser Faber finds strange coincidences and love forcing him out of his comfortable worldview.

Where Homo Faber was ultimately a cautiously optimistic work, describing a kind of way out of an entirely mechanistic worldview through emotional engagement, Man in the Holocene is no such thing. This is not merely because Herr Geiser’s mental decline is permanent. Rather, what is important here is that it simply does not matter. Humans may change the world however they will, but in the end it will all be washed away by floods, or crushed under heavy stones.

The world has existed since so long ago that we cannot even conceive it, and it will continue long after we have all gone extinct. The result is that nothing matters, even the attempt to write about it or gain knowledge about it, even the attempt to write blog posts about it. Because Elsbeth is dead, there’s no way out for Herr Geisler. Instead, there’s just a nature that is beautiful, but completely indifferent to him and all of us.

Depressing or not, I found it very interesting that the work demonstrated one way we might approach writing about things like climate change. A way that is probably morally irresponsible, but still valid – to write about life in this geological timeframe, showing how meaningless human endeavour is. This is the voice of a climate pessimist, or even a sceptic. The climate is changing extremely fast, geologically speaking and compared to historical changes to the climate, but the effects are felt the same way they are described here in Frisch’s work – as something huge, unstoppable, and utterly indifferent to us. A few weeks ago we had wildfires in California, last year my family’s house in Switzerland was itself flooded and the village cut off from the outside world. At least in the latter case we had insurance.  

When we think of nature, once we stop thinking about it in a Romantic manner – as a source of sublime beauty – we get to this sense that it is indifferent and cruel. (Of course, this is part of what the Romantics meant by sublime, but there is a slightly different emphasis). Clearly we must go a little bit further still, to find some way of writing about catastrophes and human insignificance which does not rule out human agency to make some small positive contribution against them. Without hope and ensuring action against these great impersonal forces and the human forces behind them, Frisch’s book, and humanity as a whole, may find themselves ashes, not some great interplanetary species. 

Unrevealing Revelations in John Banville’s The Sea

John Banville is perhaps Ireland’s most celebrated living author, and as I wanted to read something contemporary and English-language I picked up my copy of The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 2005. With its focus on grief, mourning and aging, it seems perfect for appealing to a prize committee of well-established adults who may feel their bones creak more than they used to, while its use of an unreliable narrator looking back on his life places it alongside Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (also a Booker winner in 1989) and Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (Booker in 2011). Budding writers eyeing the prize, I hope you are taking notes.

The problem with The Sea is that it lacks that wonderful structural bifurcation of The Sense of an Ending, where the story seems finished until the narrator realises he has completely misunderstood his own past. It also, even putting aside the escapist enticements of the interwar manor house setting of The Remains of the Day, lacks a narrator with anywhere near the charm of Stevens in that book, or that tender readerly experience of sad frustration we get as we watch the old butler repeatedly missing what really matters until it is (almost) too late. Instead, what we have in The Sea is a narrator who does not even pretend to himself to be a good person, and some final revelations that really reveal nothing. It’s clever, but has very little heart. 

In The Sea, Max Morden, our art historian narrator, returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday. He carries the grief of his wife’s recent death from cancer, a certain amount of estrangement from his daughter, and another, deeper trauma from that old childhood break, where he got to know the Grace family. As he sits in his room, he writes musingly about these two pasts – the childhood past at the beach with the Graces, and the adult past with his wife Anna. The two are divided by time, but narratively glued together, as Max shifts from one to another as his memory travels. It is this split structure which gives The Sea its great curiosity.

Why write? Perhaps to cope or find order in what seems a mess, or perhaps simply to pass the time. As for us readers, we peruse these notes trying to make sense of the enigma that is the human soul. Max’s soul, that is. What we discover is essentially an exploration of the way that a man’s life can be influenced by his past. The first narrative strand, where Max is on holiday and spending time with the Graces, brings out in him a character trait – shame at his class origins – that influences the rest of his life, which we then see manifested in the second strand concerning Max’s wife Anna, and also ultimately in the narrative set at the time of his writing the notes, where we see this trait from yet another angle.

That human character is shaped by past events is something we writers are obliged to agree to before we are granted our pens – it’s practically in our contract. But here Banville makes backstory the front-story, so to speak. The influence of the Graces comes not, it seems to me, from the traumatic end of that holiday which we eventually learn about, but rather from the very fact of Max’s getting to know them over the course of the work – the accumulation of experiences of another world which ultimately sends him on a life’s journey to escape the world he was born into.

Max is lower class, while the Graces occupy a higher stratum. In a way, that’s all there is to it. Max’s relationship with his quarrelling parents falls apart and resentment towards his uneducated mother grows; he becomes an art historian, ever the refuge for the aspiring un-bourgeois; he marries a woman, at least initially it seems, for the money her father has made; and later he breaks down his relationship with his daughter, Claire, when she prefers to pursue a life that sees her helping those in poverty rather than solidifying Max’s status via continuing his work in the field of art history. A sense of social inadequacy, once present, leads the entirety of Max’s life off course.

This initial encounter with class is complicated, made rich and fragrant in the man’s memory no doubt, by its association with first love and then second, as Max grows enamoured first with Mrs Grace and then with his own coeval, her daughter Chloe. Then there is a certain fairy-tale-like undercurrent to the text thanks to Chloe having a twin, Myles, who is mute. Not for nothing does Max refer to them as “the gods” at times – they seem from another world, and gloriously strange.

Referring to the twins as such, however, also suggests a persistent problem Max has – an inability to see, which we note with a certain ironic smile given his profession. Throughout the book, he seems to prefer to view the world through the lens of his favourite artist, Pierre Bonnard. Chloe, for example, looks “remarkably like the forehead of that ghostly figure seen in profile hovering at the edge of Bonnard’s Table in Front of the Window.” That even some fifty years later he continues to think of her perhaps suggests continued infatuation, but it certainly suggests a problem with accepting how things are.

Indeed, often we have to wait to the end of a given section before Max actually reveals some useful information, about himself or his life. Take this shocking, painful, and pained admission of his wife’s frailty, which comes as a standalone paragraph after several unrelated long paragraphs on the child Max’s habit of finding bird nests – “Anna leaning sideways from the hospital bed, vomiting on to the floor, her burning brow pressed in my palm, full and frail as an ostrich egg.” Obviously, we need what comes before to see how it leads Max back to his pain, and also to give additional heft to the image of the ostrich egg. But it does mean that we spend much of the book sifting through memories, waiting for the occasional pithy statements that sometimes do not land.

(I am also not sure how honest it is as an approach, from a writing perspective. It feels a bit cheap – as if Banville had this admittedly great image of the egg, then decided to create the backstory to bring us to it. This is the cheapness of musings and memory – because they don’t really connect to anything, we can make up whatever narrative or language or image demands.)

Evasion, unseeing – Max is an unreliable narrator. We know them by now. He writes of childhood or of eggs and really he’s writing about his grief or longing. He misinterprets overheard information and he’s a flawed character, hitting his dog as a child and spouting misogynist twaddle as an adult. He hides things too, primarily his alcoholism, but in a way that the careful reader notices. All this is fine – it’s what such narrators do.  

The problem is that Banville really does nothing with any of this. Unlike Stevens at Ishiguro’s novel’s closing moments, Max does not actually learn anything about his life. The story ends with a minor factual discovery, but not growth. He may have written his pain out onto the page, but he doesn’t seem to have overcome it, or changed, or anything. The conclusion of the novel basically sees Max forced to accept certain realities he was previously disinclined to, but that again is not growth. We do not say that the suspect taken away in handcuffs has grown because she has stopped resisting – nor can we say it here.

Reader, I go into novels looking for ideas and journeys – maybe that’s my problem, but as an approach it largely clears the ground to let me enjoy a variety of things. The Sea basically has no ideas except that grief is often only approachable through evasions and that class shame can last an awfully long time. Nor does it have any journey to speak of. The traumatic event at the end of the childhood holiday seems to have had far less influence on Max’s subsequent life than his experience of embarrassment about his parents’ financial situation. As a final revelation, it reveals nothing to us.

In the same way, when Max then learns as an adult that something he had overheard at a critical moment during the final moments of his holiday with the Graces was wrong, it offers no catharsis for him or for us because that overheard information would not have stopped the traumatic event from taking place – the truth replaces the falsehood but all the bother would still have happened. Everything is disconnected, unsatisfactory. Even the sea itself is underutilised as an image!

There are readers who can drift along for page after page, enjoying a good metaphor or digression. I am not one of them – sorry. (Readers shocked at this admission should consult the name of the blog.) I can enjoy beautiful prose, and The Sea is beautiful, with plenty of phrases underlinable, but that’s not enough. These phrases ought to be connected to something, some idea or development or existence. Instead, they are like beautiful drawings on the sand, waiting to be washed away by the tide, as the memory of this book may well be for me, as soon as I start the next one.

Six Years of Mostly About Stories

I started Mostly About Stories towards the end of January, 2019, which makes it about six years old and provides the excuse for this post. I’ll cover some things I did this year, some writing I’ve done, and the statistics.

If you want to know what I’ve read and enjoyed this year, you can check out the updated All Posts page.

Personal

This past year I moved to Germany, where hopefully, employers willing, I will remain for the next year or two. For various reasons, primarily interrail tickets and the German Deutschlandticket, which gives me unlimited travel on all non-long-distance public transport at a very reasonable price, I have been quite busy travelling about. I’ve seen the Black Forest, Berlin, Hamburg and Luebeck, Copenhagen, Vienna, Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, Amsterdam, Tessel, Norderney, Utrecht, Maastricht, Aachen and Muenster. Of these, I do regret that after visiting Heidegger’s cottage in Todtnauberg the blog post on him never materialised. Another time. 

Compared to Russia, Germany is not very exciting. Still, I cannot say I’m not glad to be in a location where war seems unthinkable. While my German is reasonably good and improving daily, it’s challenging to integrate fully where I am, though I am working on it. Mostly, I end up with my co-workers. I would say the atrophy of my Russian has been halted by having many colleagues from that part of the world, while my Ukrainian has improved, now I have a friend here so crazy about a certain vision of her country that she has a trident stuck on her arm. Progress on my Polish is not good enough for my girlfriend, especially when I am learning Ukrainian over it, which even Ukrainians like to tell me is useless to me. Still, we get there too, slowly.

When I wrote my Three Years of Mostly About Stories post, I was struggling with combining work and reading, to say nothing of the writing I wasn’t doing. The company I was with didn’t know what to do with me, my immigration status in Russia felt precarious, and I was living under the shadow of a war that, it turned out, really was imminent.

Now I can say with some confidence that things have never been so good. I have a flat within walking distance of work, with green spaces nearby, and friends around. I actually have friends, where moving to Moscow was merely entering a vortex of potentiality. Work is fine – I am finishing up a graduate scheme so I get to try a variety of things to really work out what it is I want to be doing – and I get paid well. As noted, I’ve done lots of travelling. But the main thing is that I have finally sorted out the writing.

Writing

Mostly About Stories is a bit of fun and I hope readers treat it as such. The real thing is to become a writer of great fiction. To do that, I must first become a writer of fiction. At school I wrote a novel, which after paying an editor to go through, was picked up by an agent. I then, being about sixteen, got bored, feeling I was improving so fast that there was no point bothering with that old work. This was a mistake, obviously, but whatever. At university, I used to reach a boil of inspiration where suddenly things would spill over and I’d spend a weekend neglecting my studies and spewing out a short story. These I was proud of, and ultimately self-published on Amazon for a few friends to buy. A little later, I took it down.

Even with those bright spots, I struggled to write. I wrote and was immediately disheartened by the words, which meant I ended up producing blank pages rather than drafts that could later be improved. War and Peace, a novel I hold in high esteem, and which seems supremely natural, was actually redrafted and line-edited something like ten times. Perhaps only Goethe could get perfection the first time round, but plenty of people have produced things which in the end were even better, and all because they did not give up on what they started. This was not me: I produced neither perfection nor imperfection, unless we count the blank page perfection, and I am not into that kind of game.

After graduating, I did write the odd story, but given I spent vast amounts of time unemployed thanks to a certain autocrat, I was not making the most of my time. Writers get better by writing, they often say. There might be more to it than that, but it’s a good starting point, and one I wasn’t much aligned with. For various reasons, but primarily this incessant self-criticism, I got nowhere. It was also a little disturbing that I had no “ideas” for a novel. Any amateur will find it’s fairly easy to come up with great ideas – the family saga, the modernised War and Peace, etc – but it soon becomes apparent that these overarching ideas must be broken down into little ideas, little narratives, or they will not be possible to write at all. It wouldn’t even be akin to building the skeleton of a house – it would be like putting up the walls without the edges, and watching them fall over at the first gust. It’s the little ideas, the observations that sparkle on each page, that make a novel great – great ideas for overarching stories are easy, as ultimately there’s less originality there than you might think.

Anyway, this idea that is absolutely central to my idea of my own self – that I am a writer, must be a writer – was finding little justification in reality. Until this year, round about the half way part.

I resolved it in two ways. The first solution arose last summer, when for the first time I had an idea for a “novel”. Something more modest and practical than the ideas above. On its own, that was no salvation. But I was also helped by technology. I went and bought a small folding phone stand and a Bluetooth keyboard. Unlike with my laptop, where I could always tab-out to something else, with a phone if you are in the writing app it’s harder to leave. This simple technological adjustment made it possible to write by lowering the barrier of entry and raising the barrier to exit. Rather than forcing myself with great effort to sit down in front of my computer, only to write a few words that disgusted me, and then immediately switch to some tab or video that would entertain me, here I could write with almost no effort at all. From bed, on a cramped train, lying on a sofa, and so on. Because phones have smaller screens, there was also only so much neurotic re-reading I could do. I just had to accept what I’d written, and move on.

The result was a novel. 114’000 words – some good, some definitely not – with a beginning, middle, end, and characters who were, at least when you squinted, recognisably human. Also, gladly, it was not a work that was “semi-autobiographical”, a phrase that always makes my stomach churn. This was and is, absolutely, something to be proud of. I had made something come into existence that only I could have done.

But once it was done, in this first draft, I realised I still could not write anything else. Inspiration is great, but clearly unreliable. At a given moment, I’ve got a couple of things I want to write, but not necessarily so desperately that I must write them. Not enough to go back to that same method, anyway.

A second revolution was needed, one that was far simpler. I adjusted my routine. I am something of a control-maniac, and one of the joys of my life in Germany is that I have my own flat and life here. Initially, I planned each day to get up a little before 8, then from 8:05 to 8:25 I did my morning routine (shower, bathroom, clothes, etc), before leaving at around 8:27 to ensure I arrived at work at 8:57 and in time for any 9:00 meetings. I had imagined that, when I came home each day, I could then have “half” of the day to myself. This was delusional. I was not tired, but I was tired enough that this was not leading to the results I wanted. Yes, I might read, but certainly I was not going to sit down and write.

I have always had struggles with sleeping, though not proper insomnia or anything that might lead to wacky fiction. In the autumn I was waking up regularly at say six and unable to get back to sleep easily, so I decided one day to have a go just getting up then. Combined with my morning cup of matcha, I found I had something functional. I still got ready to leave at 8:27 and kept my alarms in place, but instead those alarms were not reminding me to leave bed, but rather to finish up my writing. Now, I woke up around six forty with no alarm (having also moved my bedtime an hour earlier), got up, made my matcha, and sat down to write. I then wrote until the alarms forced me to get ready for work.

So far this method has been in operation for a few months. Not every day has been a success, but I would say the clear majority of mornings find me doing this. No matter how rubbish the words are, I get them down, between 500 and 1000 of them. I then head away to work, knowing that however badly I spend the rest of my time, my day has been no failure.

These are promising developments in the life of a writer. It is impossible for me to say whether the quality has improved, or will improve, with this system. We might also question whether writing in this way forces me to produce things that are less cohesive compared to the several thousand words I might write in a single day when the inspiration pressure cooker was overflowing at Cambridge. But at least I am writing. I have no particular desire to be published at this stage, so I am happy just to get drafts on the page, for further editing and examination down the line. I have a well-paying bourgeois job – I’m no starving writer desperately trying to see things in the papers. This gives me the luxury of writing as much as I want and whatever I want, before I actually start trying to make money off it.

Mostly About Stories is just a blog about the books that I’ve been reading, and will not contain my fiction as a matter of principle, though thematic interests may be shared between work “off the blog” and the work that does go on the blog. Thinking aloud is nice, but so is thinking on paper. Borges used to ask why he should write a book of five hundred pages when he could write a book review for this imaginary book and get it all down in five. I am no Borges, but writing the review first, then the novel itself, may not be a bad way to go in terms of learning thematic focus.

While I do not want to share my fiction on the blog (ewww…), readers who think they might be interested in reading and providing feedback should certainly get in touch.

Stats

There’s inevitably little visibility on the amount of views that literature blogs get, and I cannot see much harm in sharing my own. Last year I had a significant increase in views. I have no idea why but I cannot complain. I’ve also had interesting comments. Really that’s all I can ask for. If you are reading, thanks.

Conclusion

Anyway, it appears to have been a good year. I have entered 2025 reading more, writing more, and getting better at the things that matter. Now all I need is a permanent position at work, and things will be sehr gut indeed.