I loved this book so much I can hardly function. I keep recommending it to people who have not asked for recommendations. Usually the Booker prize actively avoids actually good novels, but somehow this one has got on to the shortlist. I haven not read the others but CLEARLY THIS DESERVES TO WIN.
It tells all about a struggling actor who gets hired to attend university classes in a large black bag, as part of a sociology experiment. Over time he comes to love being black bag. Why? I can’t tell you, it’s a profoundly great book in which black bag can mean many things. As with all books I love, let’s just quote extensively. Here we are on his caring for his elderly parents:
“I would like to be able to look after you, but I can’t because I have stubbornly committed myself to an art and vocation with no future and precious little present., rather than training as an accountant or a stockbroker or maybe a lawyer. And out of what? Sheer perversity of spirit, encouragement at an impressionable moment (the nineties), and, by this point, sunk-cost fallacy.
Isn’t it time someone rescued me from the cult of myself for deprogramming?
To trust in the arts is an act of hubris so self-destructive the gods don’t even bother to punish you for it.”
On a swan shaped pedalo: “It’s face, like any swan’s face, real or plastic, resembles that of a man who doesn’t really want to be at the masquerade ball.” Who can ever look at swans the same way again?!
On a rainy afternoon: “The kind of rain that only happens on a Tuesday, heavy like preordained rain, rain augured and written by prophets aeons ago This will be a wet place.”
On entering an audition: “The usual plunging feeling that every human being is real, substantial and well-defined except for me. I dismiss this. Inverted vanity. Get over it. Well, hello, I must be myself, they’re grateful to me for coming in, my experience is impressive, just relax, they’re going to do something a bit different.”
On his friend: “Claudio and I get on well because we have known each other since the age of seven, which is to say thirty years, and we have, at some base level, no respect for one another: we do not fall for one another’s hasty renovations of character or revisionist sophistications; we are not convinced by one another’s adult selves.”
General lols:
“I pick up the collected poems of Frank O’Hara. I have a television. Sometimes I like to tell people that, in the way other people like to tell people they don’t have a television.”
And
“I worry that I smell of stale cofee but perhaps this isn’t something to worry baout in academia.”
And
“Within black bag I am wearing only a pair of maroon boxer shorts which – I don’t know why – have the words DARE TO WEAR written on the elastic in capital letters. This is the twenty-first century. Get on board or your pants will.”.
And then this lovely thought, not even by Kennard but quoted by him from the Pensees by Pascal: “A trifle upsets us because a trifle consoles us.”