Fifty-odd pages into Patrick Modiano's Missing Person it's shaping up very nicely. Since it's about a man with amnesia I had the thought that I'm an amnesiac when it comes to remembering what novels were about. OK, I may recall, roughly, very roughly. I think that's true of most of us. We read. We forget. Fiction leaves that leaves an indelible mark is rare. Yes, we each have those novels that still bear their mark decades later. We probably don't recall much detail though. Our brains aren't built to retain so much information, obviously.
Novels that left a mark on me...On The Road, Tropic of Cancer, Moby-Dick, The Big Sleep, Naked Lunch...there may be others that I can't immediately recall.
A book about a missing person (the self) seems appropriate during lockdown, in my case anyway. Without being able to do all the things I normally do I feel incomplete. The 'real me' is 'missing'. Is that over-dramatising? Perhaps. Yet it feels true. I and many others are living half-lives. Yet some online gurus no doubt run classes about finding 'the real you' during lockdown. A golden opportunity to meditate on the nature of your...being..or something. Pah! The day I get used to this half-life is the day I've given up. To be about and about in a living society is essential.
Meanwhile, there are books, thank god. I haven't read more since being imprisoned but, as always, their existence, at least, is unaffected by lockdown.
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