I told you about this book I was excited about reading, right? “The Mystery Guest” by Gregoire Bouillier? I got it in the mail today from Amazon and just read it in one quick go and it’s fantastic, the best thing under 150 pages I’ve read since Pinball, 1973. It’s actually been a while since I’ve been in love with a book and not just admired its technical aspects or something - laughing at a joke instead of saying ‘that’s funny.’

I’ve been reading a lot lately because I’ve been trying to work on my own novel and I want it to be good. I want it to mean something to someone, even if it’s just one person. In part I don’t think books have been getting through to me because I’ve been down and depressed lately; where does a dog’s amputated leg go? Is it cremated? Bouillier cut through all that and made me feel human again for an hour. It really is like Michel Leiris said:

Literary activity, in its specific aspect as a mental discipline, cannot have any other justification than to illuminate certain matters for oneself at the same time as one makes them communicable to others, and that one of the highest goals…is to restore by means of words certain intense states, concretely experienced and become significant, to be thus put into words.