I’m not even sure it’s a novel. It is, rather, a meditation on inner and outer decay, on decline, loss, memory, and the gradual effacement of even the most extraordinary of things. I half expect the book itself to vanish or crumble between my fingers while I’m reading. Certainly it reminds me of a book I read earlier this year — Teju Cole’s Open City. Published a decade earlier, Austerlitz (so far) greets us in Belgium as Cole’s novel does, and also in Wales and in London. The settings are intensely and intimately described, yet the novel also seems to take place within Sebald’s memory. There’s a term I’m reminded of: “umwelt” — a German word often translated as “a self-centered world”. Weirdly, I began a short story titled “Umwelt”, also set in London, which has dragged on and on…

And it’s the passages about the inner workings of our selves that seem most familiar. Here, at length, is Austerlitz describing the process of writing and reading:

But now I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed….However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.

As always, things seem connected. Between readings I’ve been listening repeatedly to the first track on what I think what may end up being one of 2011′s more under-appreciated break-up records. The same disquiet stirs.

Go ahead and be my world, and everything will be ok. Just hide there in plain sight, too big to see.

So sad to miss their show here in August.

Typhoon | A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Two beautiful covers, two musical eras. Go see Devotchka live. Generation Derivative, listen up.

It struck me one day that his hair is not really in his eyes as much as I think. He rarely brushes it aside, and goes about unbothered by the way it hangs. I realized that my brushing away hair that really isn’t in his way is in some respects me filling a need of my own — the need to touch him, to shape him, both literally and figuratively.

Thanks Austin.

My university attracted a sizable number of international students, and one of those who enrolled in the freshly launched course was a young Pakistani named I—-. Our classes took place on Tuesdays in the late morning and on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I—- rarely showed up for the Tuesday class. When he did he would appear late and out of breath and unkempt, odd bits of lint hanging about his pants and untucked shirt, his hair lightly gelled, hurried and askew.

As it turns out, I—-, missing his family and comfortable existence in Pakistan had been flying home to Lahore from Friday to Monday every other weekend. Professor J—- would speak to him after his late arrivals outside the room, sternly emphasizing priorities and education, but with the infinite compassion of a woman.  I would cast a glance at I—- as I passed.  His tears appeared to be the result of jet-lag and trying, somehow, to make it all work — the flights, the schedule, the passions.  I—- was not a stupid young man; he had strong opinions about political parties in Pakistan and a dismissive attitude toward individual politicians that indicated a family history of involvement in governmental affairs. Rather than sympathy, the thought of I—-’s transglobal flights angered me.  Attending class was a basic choice and rather easy it seemed to me, but I was in part jealous. A twenty-two hour journey seemed to me an obscenity. Had I cared I would have called it such, but I was aware there was little moral high-ground for me to stand upon. I could barely summon the will to visit my parents, who were a mere 90-minute flight away. Neither was I, by nature, devoted to to the cause of Indian politics. Like many university students the truth was that I believed in precious few things, content to make sense of that teasing combination of freedom and limited responsibility offered by a four year education. While others were serious, shaping their lives and growing passionate about causes, I was not. My conflicts were internal, and they raged over questions of identity and emotion and fear in the face of an adulthood I was entirely unprepared for. The outside world wasn’t my business; education existed to do me a favor, and after four years I only hoped to be smarter and stronger and bigger than the person I used to know.

Of course, today Pakistan is everyone’s business. I am struck by the multitude of perspectives pouring forth. The literary journal Granta has jumped on the bandwagon too, and my first reaction was a deep sigh. I hoped, desperately hoped, that I would be surprised. It is a cultural tendency of recent decades to “discover” an issue, or a country that has existed for over sixty years, and allow it a “voice”. The term that has become vogue is “space”, as in we need space for these voices to flourish, or, capturing their own space within the unheard diaspora. The unremarkable irony being that the partition of the Subcontinent was in some ways about exactly that — space. I enjoyed the Granta issue, but found it to be much of what is already known to South Asians. Most enjoyable to me were Declan Walsh’s piece on Pashtuns, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s dash of silly poetry, and the melancholy of the former journalist writing about a life and culture lost.

Whether these writers become the new spokespersons for Pakistan or not, the impossible thing is undoing the breaking caused by partition. That remains the deepest and most torturesome aspect of the subcontinental psyche. That breaking. One wonders: if a thing has come undone, perhaps acceptance of the loss, of the erasure of the old, is the only true option for progress? The capacity for acceptance in South Asia at times seems extraordinary, but I am pessimistic.  It has instead become ever-comforting to consider over and over whether a thing once broken be reconstituted 1)without a further breaking elsewhere, and 2)back to an original form. There is no end in sight.

I—- did, in fact, fail to finish the course. He simply became absent, and after a few weeks even professor J—- stopped casting hopeful glances at the door when footsteps sounded in the hall outside. At first I believed I—- had gone back to his favored life in Pakistan for good, but I later spotted him around campus. Sometimes he was driving a sports car, and once, during our final year he came to an inaugural meeting of the South Asian Students Association (an effort bogged down immediately in arguments over the group’s name and questions of inclusiveness).  He seemed happy. No, I—- would complete his education and take his place in the rent fabric that is Pakistan.  He had long been destined to fulfill his father’s wishes and familial obligations to preserving the land, and the idea of Pakistan, which in essence is only an idea of family and tribe. Matters complicated enough for a young man, let alone a country.

This is a lonely place too, and I have told myself that it prepares you for the loneliness of the years ahead. For when one chooses to live apart and in a more solitary manner.  It is a good experience, because it reduces the glamor and idealism that can cloud a life of solitude — I know in many ways it would be extremely hard.  Many, if not all, of the homes here hold onto slopes; it is rare to see level ground.  Large valleys and gorges filled to bursting with trees and plants cut between the hills, drawing water to the coast from the mountains.  On some days clouds fill in these valleys and the sky seems to press the hills with a soft palm that darkens the tone of the trees and my mood. There are many places where land drops away and you feel as if you should soar out over the valleys, lifted by currents.  The landscape propels you to this.

One day we went to the coast, to a lighthouse where the cliffs drop away, and on all sides the boom of the ocean claiming and re-claiming rocks that fell a thousand years past.  The wind cut across the outcropping. I felt the call of the air and the siren of disorientation and it seemed as if the wind was lifting me from my feet, urging me to the sky among the gulls and the cormorants.  There is material for many mythologies among the fallen rocks and hidden caves, where one reckless gust can alter the landscape.

I am unsure still, as I lie and listen to the suggestion of a coming rain.  What is this solitude that I think of? Is it a formless impossibility of my imagination? Does it have substance and shape, like my two sons? Or is it something more akin to the love I hold for them, at times overpowering and at others like a teasing breeze across my skin?  Which is the more real — solitude or love? The two of them.

I hear and see a kite looping over the valley in front of me.  It rises in sweeping circles and cries until it glides along in one direction, overhead, closer to a hidden sun.

There were couples, and singles, and old folks listening. I wished I’d recorded the whole thing in a 360 surround screen, it was that good. I don’t know if this description is accurate, but it hints at a respect for a performer that I haven’t seen in years from an audience. Even between songs people stayed quiet, understanding that spaces are just as much a part of the whole as anything else. And when, during one of those spaces, a woman called out, We love you Scott Bondy, he said exactly the right thing: Thank you, darling.

My knowledge of my father’s travels is wrapped in black and white photographs – thick cards with serrated edges and short descriptions written in his hand on the reverse side. The comments are in English, in Roman letters shaped slightly with a curvature derived from an Indian script, perhaps Telegu. They place my father with only the barest of details. He refers to himself in the third person (so distant from the American sense of “I”), and thus, it is Sudershan at Patiala, 1956, or Sudershan with M. Singh in Kashmir, 1961. I imagine that third person habit to be a signal of his loneliness, as if from a distance he is narrating a story about a character who happened, quite naturally, to be him.  Maybe he didn’t know himself that well.  That too is a kind of loneliness.

I could be wrong about this aspect of my father.  It’s entirely possible that he simply enjoyed his trips and his pictures of himself across India. He certainly doesn’t look lonely in the pictures. In almost every pose there is a half-smile, something between a light-hearted challenge and a shy smirk. He looks pleased with himself, which is a far cry from the loneliness I want to ascribe to him. Really, it’s probably likely that my father was a relaxed, happy traveler.  With happiness there was no need to explain himself to anyone. People after all are more inclined to ask “But why are you unhappy?” That may be the reason my father described his travels with the barest of details – what was the point in kicking up dust if everything was going his way? Why raise questions in people’s minds? Wasn’t it preferable to ruminating too much?  This is who I am and where I was.  A young man in search of the world around him…