From now until May 1 2019,  it’s at the very lovely Burley Fisher Books in Dalston. And for what it’s worth, I think it actually works (dammit). Here’s some pics of the opening night.

* no, I still don’t have the heart to tell the BL to get rid of the Amazon page…

All photographs by Lik Chung Li.  (lik_li@hotmail.com)

It was at this very same moment that Ivan Ilyich had fallen through the hole and caught sight of the light, and it was revealed to him that his life had not been what it ought to have been but that it was still possible to put it right. He asked himself: ‘But what is the right thing?’ and grew still, listening. Then he felt that someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes and looked at his son. He felt sorry for him. His wife came up to him. He looked at her. She was gazing at him with open mouth, the tears wet on her nose and cheeks, and an expression of despair on her face. He felt sorry for her.

‘Yes, I am a misery to them,’ he thought. They are sorry but it will be better for them when I die.’ He wanted to say this but had not strength to speak. ‘Besides, why speak, I must act,’ he thought. With a look he indicated his son to his wife and said:

‘Take him away … sorry for him … sorry for you too …’ He tried to add ‘Forgive me’ but said ‘Forego’ and, too weak to correct himself, waved his hand, knowing that whoever was concerned would understand.

And all at once it became clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not go away was suddenly dropping away on one side, on two sides, on ten sides, on all sides. He felt full of pity for them, he must do something to make it less painful for them: release them and release himself from this suffering. ‘How right and how simple,’ he thought. ‘And the pain?’ he asked himself. ‘What has become of it? Where are you, pain?’

He began to watch for it.

‘Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be.

‘And death? Where is it?’

He searched for his former habitual fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear because there was no fear either.

In place of death there was light.

‘So that’s what it is!’ he suddenly exclaimed aloud. ‘What joy!’

To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant suffered no change thereafter. For those present his agony lasted another two hours. There was a rattle in his throat, a twitching of his wasted body. Then the gasping and the rattle came at longer and longer intervals.

‘It is all over!’ said someone near him.

He caught the words and repeated them in his soul. ‘Death is over,’ he said to himself. ‘It is no more.’

He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out and died.

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Pa stands beside the bed. From behind his leg Vardaman peers, with his round head and his eyes round and his mouth beginning to open. She looks at Pa; all her failing life appears to drain into her eyes, urgent, irremediable. “It’s Jewel she wants,” Dewey Dell says.

“Why, Addie,” pa says, “him and Darl went to make one more load. They thought there was time. That you would wait for them, and that three dollars and all …” He stoops, laying his hand on hers. For a while yet she looks at him, without reproach, without anything at all, as if her eyes alone are listening to the irrevocable cessation of his voice. Then she raises herself, who has not moved in ten days. Dewey Dell leans down, trying to press her back.

“Ma,” she says; “ma.”

She is looking out the window, at Cash stooping steadily at the board in the failing light, labouring on toward darkness and into it as though the stroking of the saw illuminated its own motion, board and saw engendered.

“You, Cash,” she shouts, her voice harsh, strong, and unimpaired. “You, Cash!”

He looks up at the gaunt face framed by the window in the twilight. It is a composite picture of all time since he was a child. He drops the saw and lifts the board for her to see, watching the window in which the face has not moved. He drags a second plank into position and slants the two of them into their final juxtaposition, gesturing toward the ones yet on the ground, shaping with empty hand in pantomime the finished box. For a while still she looks down at him from the composite picture, neither with censure nor approbation. Then the face disappears.

She lies back and turns her head without so much as glancing at pa. She looks at Vardaman; her eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as if someone had leaned down and blown upon them.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying 

‘What I would do,’ he said, ‘is something that no gentleman could possibly divulge. Faith: that is what you need. Faith in me, my dear.’

‘There would be nothing you could do,’ said Irma, ignoring her husband’s suggestion that she should have faith in him. ‘Nothing at all. You’re too old.’

Bellgrove, who had been about to resume his seat, remained standing. His back was to his wife. A dull pain began to grow beneath his ribs. A sense of black injustice of bodily decay came over him, but a rebellious voice crying in his heart ‘I am young, I am young,’ while carnal witness of his three score years and ten sank suddenly at the knees.

In a moment Irma was at his side. ‘Oh my dear one! What is it? What is it?’

She lifted his head and put a cushion beneath it. Bellgrove was fully conscious. The shock of finding himself suddenly on the floor had upset him for a moment or two and had taken his breath away, but that was all.

‘My legs went,’ he said, looking up at the earnest face above him with its wonderfully sharp nose. ‘But I am all right again.’

Directly he had made this remark he was sorry for it, for he could have done with an hour of nursing.

Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast 

Mrs Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong. But the first few weeks after Mrs Pettigrew came to the Colstons to look after Charmain she sat in the kitchen and told Mrs Anthony of her troubles.

‘Have a fag,’ said Mrs Anthony, indicating with her elbow the packet on the table while she poured strong tea. ‘Everything might be worse.’

Mrs Pettigrew said, ‘It couldn’t very well be worse. Thirty years of my life I gave to Mrs Lisa Brooke. Everyone knew I was to get that money. Then this Guy Leet turns up to claim. It wasn’t any marriage, that wasn’t. Not a proper marriage.’ She pulled her cup of tea towards her and, thrusting her head close to Mrs Anthony’s, told her in what atrocious manner and for what long-ago reason Guy Leet had been incapable of consummating his marriage with Lisa Brooke.

Mrs Anthony swallowed a large sip of tea, the cup of which she held in both hands, and breathed back into the cup while the warm-smelling steam spread comfortably over her nose. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘a husband’s a husband. By law.’

‘Lisa never recognized him as such,’ said Mrs Pettigrew. ‘No one knew about the marriage with Guy Leet, until she died, the little swine.’

‘I thought you says she was all right,’ said Mrs Anthony.

‘Guy Leet,’ said Mrs Pettigrew. ‘He’s the little swine.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, the courts will have something to say to that, dear, when it comes up. Have a fag.’

‘You’re making me into a smoker, Mrs Anthony. Thanks, I will. But you should try to cut them down, they aren’t too good for you.’

‘Twenty a day since I was twenty-five and seventy yesterday,’ said Mrs Anthony.

‘Seventy! Gracious, you’ll be – ’

‘Seventy years of age yesterday.’

‘Oh, seventy. Isn’t it time you had a rest then? I don’t envy you with this lot,’ Mrs Pettigrew indicated with her head the kitchen door, meaning the Colstons residing beyond it.

‘Not so bad,’ said Mrs Anthony. ‘He’s a bit tight, but she’s nice. I like her.’

Muriel Spark, Momento Mori

Such a gathering contained, as might have been expected, the elements out of which a complete society might be constructed. And, as in a school, as in the world itself, there was among the eighteen men and women who met round the dinner table a poor creature, despised by all the others, condemned to be the butt of all their jokes. At the beginning of Eugene de Rastignac’s second twelvemonth, this figure suddenly started out into bold relief against the background of human forms and faces among which the law student was yet to live for another two years to come. This laughing-stock was the retired vermicelli-merchant, Father Goriot, upon whose face a painter, like the historian, would have concentrated all the light in his picture.

How had it come about that the boarders regarded him with a half-malignant contempt? Why did they subject the oldest among their number to a kind of persecution, in which there was mingled some pity, but no respect for his misfortunes? Had he brought it on himself by some eccentricity or absurdity, which is less easily forgiven or forgotten than more serious defects? The question strikes at the root of many a social injustice. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness. Do we not, one and all, like to feel our strength even at the expense of some one or of something? The poorest sample of humanity, the street arab, will pull the bell handle at every street door in bitter weather, and scramble up to write his name on the unsullied marble of a monument.

In the year 1813, at the age of sixty-nine or thereabouts, “Father Goriot” had sold his business and retired—to Mme. Vauquer’s boarding house.

Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot

Mrs Beaty lived and let live, a woman of sixty-nine, gone half deaf; she wore a grey comb in her hair and a hearing button in her left ear but rarely turned it on except to answer the phone when she ‘felt’ it ringing, and to talk with Levin when he ate in the kitchen – this was their major involvement. Sometimes when he avoided her he realized she was avoiding him. She went to bed at eight each night, except on rare nights she entertained; and early the next morning, wearing galoshes to protect her shoes from the wet grass, was already snipping flowers, or poking into the shrubbery around the house. She lived unselfconsciously in the presence of her dead husband’s cabinetry, rocking chair, pipes; his tools were still hanging above his workbench in the cellar. She had, she sometimes said, nothing against the world, and Levin envied her a little.

Bernard Malamud, A New Life

She lost no time in coming to the point. “I wanted to have a word with you about Phili.”

She was trembling. It’s horrible to know that one’s children are frightened of one. But at sixty-eight a man’s not free to decide whether he shall seem unapproachable or not. By that age the general cast of our features is set, and the heart, when it finds that it can no longer give expression to its feelings, grows discouraged… Geneviève  had decided what she wanted to say, and out it all came in a rush. … It had to do, as I had expected, with Phili’s buying a share in a Broker’s firm. She stressed the one point of all others best calculated to antagonize me – the fact that Phili’s having nothing to do was a constant threat to Janine’s married happiness. He was beginning to stray from the domestic hearth. I told her that a share in a Broker’s firm would merely serve to supply a man like her son-in-law with convenient alibis. She stood up for him. Phili was universally popular. Why should I be harder on him than Janine was? … I protested that I neither judged nor condemned him, that I took not the slightest interest in his love-life.

“Why should I bother about him? He certainly doesn’t bother about me.”

“He admires you enormously.”

This impudent lie gave me the chance to trot out what I was keeping up my sleeve.

“That’s as may be, my dear, but it doesn’t prevent you precious Phili from referring to me as the ‘old crocodile.’ It’s no good denying it. Many’s the time I’ve heard him say it behind my back … and I’ve no wish to deny the imputation: crocodile I am, and crocodile I shall remain. There’s nothing to hope for an old crocodile – except his death. And even when he’s dead” – I was foolish enough to add – “even when he’s dead, he can still be up to his old tricks.” (I’m sorry I said that: it only aroused her suspicions.)

François Mauriac , The Knot of Vipers

So that’s right: the target is driving along without a care in the world. He may be whistling. Perhaps he is listening to music; and because he is driving some of his mind is just plugged into the city… He reaches the end of the side street and slows as he approaches the traffic lights that guard a main road. It is evening and the bloodbath of sunset is daubed over the rooftops. No, it is darker, and on its way to being a dark night. In front of him before the red light is a woodframed Morris Minor, gentlest of cars. The red light spells arterial warning; then red-amber; then green. And the Morris Minor backs into him – and stalls.

Mrs Agnes Trounce, a widow, sixty-eight years of age in a little-old-lady hat and a grey-white shawl (nice touch), climbs flusterdly from her car and turns towards the target with her eyes benign and pleading. He climbs out too. Well, these things happen. But you’d be surprised how impatient, how non-understanding, people can be in such circumstances. None of this ‘Dear oh dear – well, not to worry!’ It’s ‘What you doing on the road anyway, you fucking old cow?’ And this makes things easier for Agnes Trounce. Because then the two young men, big lads, who have been lying low in the back of the Morris suddenly extend their bodies into the street. Then it’s ‘You rammed my mum!’ Or, if you were using black talent, ‘You rammed my gran!’ and so on. ‘That’s my mum you’re fucking swearing at!’ Or ‘That’s my gran you’re calling a fucking old cow!’ Agnes Trounce gets back into her woody Morris and drives away. And the target’s head, by this time, is jerking and crunching around between the door and the door frame. It was just a motoring dispute that got out of hand and you know how people are about their cars.

Martin Amis, The Information

I hadn’t meant to say anything about burning Hickson’s house down. Now, when I say anything like that, about shooting a man or cutting his tripes out, even in joke, I often get angry with him. And anything like bad temper is bad for me. It spoils my equanimity. It blocks up my imagination. It makes me stupid so that I can’t see straight. But luckily, I noticed it in time. Cool off, I said to myself. Don’t get rattled off your centre. Remember that Hickson is an old man. He’s nervous and tired of worry. That’s his trouble, worry. Poor old chap, it’s ruining any happiness he’s got left. He simply don’t know what to do. He sends you to jug and it makes him miserable, and soon as you come out you start on him again. And he’s afraid that if he gives you any money, you’ll come after him more than ever and fairly worry him death. Simply daren’t trust you. He’s wrong, but there it is. That’s his point of view. He daren’t do the right thing and the wrong thing gives him no peace. Poor old chap. It’s an awful problem for a poor old bastard that let down his guts about forty years ago, and has rolled in comfort all his life.

And I was so calm, that when I felt my pulse, it barely touched seventy-eight. Pretty good for a man of sixty-seven.

Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth