In the Presence of Absence

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The overarching content is familiar and quintessentially Darwish: the book is a meticulous chronological record of major events that have defined contemporary Palestinian existence, from the Nakba and the Deir Yassin massacres in 1948, the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut in 1982, to the failed Oslo Accords. For Darwish, writing was a cause, because otherwise, “Who will tell our story? We, who walk upon this night, driven out of place and myth.” I think about death often. If I die tomorrow, I will be alive still. This version of me at least, the one writing this in the present that will soon, in a matter of seconds, become the past. That person (myself) will live there, here. In the Presence of Absence. Ahmet Öğüt, Bakunin’s Barricade, 2015–2020. With works from Else Berg, Timo Demollin, Marlene Dumas, Pieter Engels, Nan Goldin, Käthe Kollwitz, Jan Th. Kruseman, Kazimir Malevich and PINK de Thierry. Photo Peter Tijhuis.

Book Genre: 21st Century, Classics, Literary Fiction, Literature, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Poetry Plays Not so much a review but some reflections. It very well may read like a glorified journal entry, so feel free to skip. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.

Worry-free museum visit

You, who only know love when in love, do not ask what it is, nor do you look for it. But when a woman once asked you if you were in love with love itself, you were evasive and escaped by answering: I love you. She persisted: Do you not love love? You said: I love you, because of you. She left you, because you could not be trusted with her absence. Love is not an idea. It is an emotion that can cool down or heat up. It comes and goes. It is an embodied feeling and has five, or more, senses. Sometimes it appears as an angel withdelicate wings that can uproot us from the earth. Sometimes it charges at us like a bull, hurls us to the ground, and walks away. At other times it is a storm we only recognize in its devastating aftermath. Sometimes it falls upon us like the night dew when a magical hand milks a wandering cloud. In Simon Van Booy’s extraordinary novel, The Presence of Absence, each well-wrought sentence builds upon the next, taking us deeper into Max Little’s life with staggering lucidity. The first part of the story is constructed in descending numerical chapters that decline with a sense of fatalism as the narrator reconstructs his life’s highpoints interspersed with uncanny, existential observations on the business of life, death, and dying. Max confesses his mind’s innerworkings with adroit ease. “Do people ever walk around their homes, wondering which room they will die in? Whether it will be a Wednesday night or Saturday morning at the table with toast and coffee?” And “What would happen to things like knives and forks once I was gone. Would my wife keep them?” Simon Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable....wise, witty and always breathtakingly beautiful.”— San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of the Year For instance, I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us. I might even be dead. Yet here I am.”

You laugh, embarrassed by words that were so excessive in praising lust that they consumed it. A lust that starts with a pair of feet sculpted by a sliver ofsun, moving up two skillfully cast legs from where lightning flashes, and on to knees that were certified miracles. Higher still: the belly ebbs. Farther up: sunset gradually absorbs you with noble, bashful voraciousness. You approach and retreat, rise and fall, sweat, sigh, and drown in an enchanting night of sultry darkness. Her hands, or maybe yours, gather and carry you like an eagle swooning in a sky dripping with stars. You peek at her half-open eyes peeking at your half-closed eyes. Each of you wants to make sure that you are budding inside one another.In the final days of his life, Max Little takes memory and gratitude as the tasks at hand. Writing a journal from his hospital bed, he describes the people who have mattered to him: Carol, the therapist he saw in the weeks following his diagnosis; Jeremy, a kindred spirit facing the loss of his mother; and, most importantly, his wife, Hadley, whom he met when they were children. After his diagnosis, he wonders how he should break the news to her. How will his death affect her? These questions weigh on Max even more than his own sadness: While his diagnosis does cause pain, Max’s tone is overwhelmingly one of acceptance and nostalgia. “Those we’ve lost do return,” he says. In the novel’s brief second section, we see that theory manifest in scenes taking place eight years after Max's death. The concept of listening to a famous author reflect on life and writing is an appealing one, but the novel's aphoristic musings are often too pat to yield new insight or too abstract to reconfigure the reader's views. One of Max’s central claims is that each reader will imagine scenes differently in light of their unique experience. To that end, he repeatedly invokes his readers—“good company you are”; “It’s actually you telling the story”—but the novel is most affecting when it commits to a narrative of its own. Max’s initial response to his diagnosis is particularly poignant: He goes through a series of everyday activities—making toast, brewing tea, taking a bath—that feel like “impersonating myself.” But his later posture of calm renders the narrative placid and oddly ethereal. One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization. There is a brilliant section on memory and afterlife: “Since becoming ill, I have often felt sad that my physical death would be accompanied by the complete loss of memory. All the previous things I had experienced would cease to exist. To think, all those places and people who had brought me such deep joy, gone forever.” I agree with the protagonist that this is the beauty of life, its transiency. He explores how the concept of an afterlife assumes a retention of memory in some form. He explains how people seek confirmation of an after-life or reincarnation as “The idea of living again mitigates the fear of impending nothingness.” I wholly identified with his acceptance that life is to be lived while alive, as an afterlife is unlikely, or at least in a such an unrecognizable form that it bears no connection to its former life. A desire to keep moving, a commitment to rewriting and revision: these are the tools Darwish used to break free from the prisons of habit. Indeed, for all his mastery of the medium, Darwish’s career was a series of experiments. Some are more successful than others, but none are dashed off. The mixed prosody of In the Presence of Absence shows that his experiment was ongoing. Here, prose is pushed to extremes. It is relentlessly figurative in a way that English readers may find bewildering. In the book’s final chapter, Darwish offers a list of personal keywords: “My memory is a pomegranate. Shall I open it over you and let it scatter, seed by seed: red pearls befitting a farewell that asks nothing of me except forgetfulness?” Some of the playfulness here is unavoidably lost in translation: nathara means both “to scatter” and “to compose in prose” — a pun Darwish uses throughout the work — and the distinction between loose and linked pearls is an old Arabic trope for the difference between prose and verse. What seems like a baroque metaphor is in fact a commentary on the relationship between history (or memory) and prosody. “Poetry is the archive of the Arabs,” runs the old saw. The rhythms of Darwish’s prose are also heavily marked. His sentences are almost liturgical in their balanced yet onrushing momentum. One of the models for this highly metaphorical, richly cadenced style is the Qur’an. And it is a measure of Darwish’s ambition as a poet that his imitation is equal parts homage and rivalry (although, theologically speaking, the holy book is strictly inimitable). All of which makes Sinan Antoon’s translation especially heroic. I cannot think of another text by Darwish so difficult to render into English as this one, yet Antoon’s rendering is both elegant and faithful — an homage in its turn.

Dutchcharts.nl – Kansas – The Absence of Presence" (in Dutch). Hung Medien. Retrieved July 24, 2020.Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Jennifer Tee, Tampan the Collected Bodies and Tampan Ship of Souls #2, 2020. Photo Peter Tijhuis.