Garden, Ashes

Since childhood, I was afflicted with a sick hypersensitivity, and my imagination quickly turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo, the echo ordinarily reserved only for those memories which have been standing for many years in the powerful fixative of lyrical oblivion.

I'm going to be re-reading portions of this for a bit, because I'm certain parts went right over my head. It's rather murky, indistinct, lyrical, with very little by the way of plot. Yes, it's more of novel than [b:Early Sorrows: For Children and Sensitive Readers|259656|Early Sorrows For Children and Sensitive Readers|Danilo Kiš|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348074000s/259656.jpg|6298279], but only just. The language is gloriously poetic (honestly, bravo to the translator!), but I'm rather glad I didn't attempt to read the original first, because even in translation I struggled to connect several of the narrator's observations and glimpses into anything concrete. The early chapters were exquisite, but somewhere in the middle I began to lose the thread, what was trying to be said, although I'm pretty certain this disorientation was intentional ("Ever since my father vanished from the story, from the novel everything has come loose, fallen apart. His mighty figure, his authority, even his very name, were sufficient to hold the plot within fixed limits...) and I will need to re-read these parts to making any sense of them. I found it easier to follow the moments later in the book where the narrator returned to observations and ideas from earlier in the novel, everything else failed to speak to me. So those are my initial thoughts; a little bit of awe, a little bit of confusion. I'm told the final book in the trilogy, [b:Hourglass|217985|Hourglass|Danilo Kiš|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348301430s/217985.jpg|2028973] is the most experimental, so wish me luck...