Here a man uses his grandfather’s actual diaries to recreate life in the early twentieth century. It starts off interesting – for example, we learn how many very specific scents are lost to us. Here he is on his great-grandmother:
Her black apron – he called it a pinafore – smelled like the offal of young rabbits
Horrifyingly specific. Then we get into flashforwards, where we follow the author around modern day and very dull city of Ghent. Things go rapidly downhill. It is not easy to write about the book you are writing. Emmanual Carrere manages it, but few others can, and certainly not this writer. Enjoy:
. . . I would scarely recognize the area. Wild geese, a few sluggish swans in the polluted riverside mud, nervous moorhens in the black, oil-soaked mire. Damaged nature, memory. Pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom. Humming, I walk out of the old cemetery. But in the twilight, as I revel in the adagio strains of Edvard Grieg’s ‘Ase’s Death,’ that superlative mourning music for a dead mother, I see, in my mind’s eye, the old phantoms far above me, flickering titanically on the walls of a cave, blown up into eerie shapes by the light of a fire beyond my ken.
This is where I stopped.