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Let us explain. Throughout our reading we noticed an interesting trajectory in your protagonists’ relation to you, the author. We have a straight white male, a straight white woman, a gay Thai American man, a wealthy white man, and a person of undecidable identity. We’re not questioning your right to write from these perspectives; the problem isn’t appropriation, it’s candor. Not that such a scale really exists, but one could roughly plot these stories along an axis of increasing marginalization, the idea presumably being to consider the theme of rejection from different perspectives. Viewed less charitably, it could be read as a way to head off certain dreaded allegations of self-pity and navel-gazing; an attempt at misdirection, as you smuggle your own hang-ups into theirs, while scoring brownie points for imaginative empathy. However, we believe that these distancing attempts only end up drawing attention to you, in a way that feels embarrassingly unintentional. (Our speculations about your authorial intent might strike you as unfair and out-of-bounds, but this isn’t lit crit, it’s feedback. Fair or not, readers do think about this stuff, and as much as it seems you’d like to control the book’s context, no writer truly gets that luxury, even while alive.)
stopppp
We don’t really know what “Sixteen Metaphors” is even doing in the book at all, except perhaps to bewilderingly underscore the futility of the book’s central metaphor. So we pass over it to conclude at this letter, “Re: Rejection,” a ventriloquist act where you voice your misgivings about the book through a fictional jury of scowling publishers. This to us, for obvious reasons, seemed the most bizarre and pointless flourish of all: arriving shortly after a novella that ends with a metafictional self-commentary implicating the author, we hardly need more of the same. The only thing more boring, exhausted, and self-indulgent than breaking the fourth wall at the end of a story is pointing it out. Even looking past the internet-borne tendency for writers of your generation to ass-cover with tedious disclaimers, the real point, we think, is to foreclose scrutiny, to get ahead of rejection by naming your sins before any reader has a chance to. But this perverse apologizing only feels like you’re cutting and chewing our meat for us, and we reject you (literally) all the harder. What does it matter that we know you saw it coming? Is it high praise to say that a book is conscious of its faults? Given the subject matter, we’d think you might be keen to the futility of writing an unrejectable book; you cannot curb a reader’s reading, nor steer their goodwill, no matter how clean your intentions or nude your soul. To attempt it is to abandon the possibility of an authentic connection with the reader, one in which you put yourself on their level (though, we suppose, at least this way you get to do the rejecting). So this special pleading on your own behalf, by way of adversarial autofiction, is just, well, annoying. And you already did a similar thing in your first book too.
i mean it's smart and funny but also sigh
I despise Walter, who appears slightly drunk at half-past ten in the morning and spews out his private complications. I am disgusted by Teresa, who rushes up and embraces me in a cloud of sweat and perfume. I would like to hit Paul, the maddening gay who turns up in high-heeled shoes when he knows he has to run up and down stage stairs all day. I detest Vanja, who tumbles in exactly a minute late with her hair on end, puffing and blowing and untidy, laden with bags and carriers. I am irritated by Sara, who has forgotten her copy of the play and always has two important telephone calls to make. I want calm, order and friendliness. Only in that way can we approach a limitless world. Only in that way can we solve the mysteries and learn the mechanisms of repetition. Repetition, living throbbing repetition. The same performance every night, the same performance and yet reborn. For that matter, how do we grasp the lightning-swift rubato so necessary for a performance not to become deadly routine or insufferable wilfulness? All good actors know the secret, the mediocre have to learn it, and the bad never learn.
He remembered much more than I did. He spoke of his hatred of Father and his strong ties to Mother. To him, they were still parents, mysterious creatures, capricious, incomprehensible and larger than life. We made our way along overgrown paths and stared at each other in astonishment, two elderly gentlemen, now at an insuperable distance from each other. Our mutual antipathy had gone, but had left space for emptiness; there was no contact, no affinity. My brother wanted to die, but was at the same time frightened of dying; a raging will to live keeping his lungs and heart going. He also pointed out that he had no chance of committing suicide because he could not move his hands.
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Sometimes I really feel the loss of everything and everyone concerned. I understand what Fellini means when he says filming to him is a way of life and I also understand his little story about Anita Ekberg. Her last scene in La Dolce Vita took place in a car erected in the studio. When the scene had been taken and filming was over as far as she was concerned, she started crying and refused to leave the car, gripping firmly onto the wheel. She had to be carried out of the studio with gentle force.
Sometimes there is a special happiness in being a film director. An unrehearsed expression is born just like that, and the camera registers that expression. That was exactly what happened that day. Unprepared and unrehearsed, Alexander turned very pale, a look of sheer agony appearing on his face. The camera registered the moment. The agony, the intangible, was there for a few seconds and never returned. Neither was it there earlier, but the strip of film caught the moment. That is when I think days and months of predictable routine have paid off. It is possible I live for those brief moments.
Like a pearl fisher.
Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind on one frame after another, see the almost imperceptible changes, wind faster —a movement.
Dances were held on Saturday nights in the manor farm barn, everything there exactly as in Strindberg’s Miss Julie, the night light, the excitement, the heavy scents of the bird-cherries and lilacs, the squealing fiddle, the rejection and acceptance, the games and the cruelty. Owing to the shortage of male partners at the Saturday dances, I was restored to favour, but dared not touch the girls as I immediately got a hard-on. I also danced badly and was gradually discarded, embittered and furious, hurt and ridiculous, terrified and withdrawn. Puberty, bourgeois style, summer 1932.
I read ceaselessly, often without understanding, but I had a sensitive ear for tone: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Defoe, Swift, Flaubert, Nietzsche and, of course, Strindberg.
I no longer had any words. I started stammering and biting my nails. My loathing of myself and life itself was suffocating me. I walked hunched up, my head thrust forward, the cause of constant reprimands. The strange thing was that I never questioned my wretched life. I thought it should be like that.
pretty
I do not recognize the person I was forty years ago. My distress is so profound and the suppression mechanism functions so effectively, I can evoke the picture only with difficulty. Photographs are of little value. They simply show a masquerade that has entrenched itself. If I felt attacked, I snapped like a frightened dog. I trusted no one, loved no one, missed no one. Obsessed with a sexuality that forced me into constant infidelity, I was tormented by desire, fear, anguish and a guilty conscience.
So I was alone and raging. My work at the theatre provided some alleviation of a tension which only let go for brief moments in orgasm or drunkenness. I knew I had persuasive powers, that I could make people do what I wanted them to do, that I had some kind of surface charm which I could switch on and off at will. I was also aware that I had a talent for being frightened and acquiring a guilty conscience, because ever since childhood I had known a great deal about the mechanics of fear. In brief, I was a man with power who had not learnt to enjoy power.
AHHHH
My anger had cooled, but now it gathered momentum again and I tore down to the theatre to kill Hammaren. We met unexpectedly in an angle of the corridor, literally bumping into each other. We both found this extremely comical and started to laugh. Torsten embraced me and I at once appointed him in my heart the father-figure I had lacked since God had abandoned me. He took on the role and played it conscientiously during the years I stayed in his theatre.
[...] The film, entitled To Joy, was to be about a couple of young musicians in the symphony orchestra in Helsingborg, the disguise almost a formality. It was about Ellen and me, about the conditions imposed by art, about fidelity and infidelity. Music would stream right through the film.
I was left completely alone, speaking to no one and meeting no one. I got ‘drunk every night and was helped to bed by la patronne, a motherly woman who worried about my alcoholic habits. Every morning, however, at nine o’clock, I was sitting at my worktable, allowing my hangover to help intensify my creativity.
Ellen and I started writing careful but tender-hearted letters. Under the influence of a dawning hope of a possible future for our tormented marriage, the portrayal of the film’s leading female character turned into a miracle of beauty, faithfulness, wisdom and human dignity. The male part, on the other hand, became a conceited mediocrity; faithless, bombastic and a liar.
I was being courted, shyly but intensively, by a Russian-American painter. She was athletic but well-proportioned, dark as night with bright eyes and a generous mouth, a statuesque Amazon radiating uninhibited sensuality. My fidelity to my marriage stimulated us both. She painted and I wrote, two loners in unexpected creative fellowship.
The end of the film became terribly tragic. The female character was blown up by a paraffin stove (possibly secret wishful thinking), the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was shamelessly exploited and the main character realized that there was ‘a joy greater than joy’. (A truth I did not understand until thirty years later.)