No one belongs here more than you

I recently read a book, I might call it the book. The book contains the records of a number of people. By records I mean tales. And how their tales don’t have any crossing/mosaiking/referencing with any of the others. The point is there are a lot of tales. The people are odd. Some are fallen mega pop stars who have been to Spiller’s records in Cardiff. Others have relationships with the person they share a patio with and maybe another has an extremely dubious relationship with a person in the school she works in. In general all of the people are broken. The whole thing is quite conflicting. The author manages to slip the enough detail that makes you care, then just as you kind of feel real sorry for this almost husk of a person, you get the rug pulled from ‘neath you and the person ends up being really not right. Yet now it’s not even easy to withdraw all that empathy that’s been invested and even more curiously, it makes more sense for these people to be in this place. If we are told anything all the fucking time by stuff, it’s that damaged people become heroes and monsters are polar opposite to any of us.

The stories, while witty and have an interesting eye for detail, tend to be largely dejavuish. It’s as if this same person has populated a million worlds and we get to hear how this person would exist in varying circumstance. So maybe one time the person was a stripper, in another universe the person happened to run seminars on earthquake safety.

I dunno if I could recommend the book entirely. It’s a bit like doing a Sudoku. Every small bit you do is fairly interesting and makes you think, and laugh (okay maybe a Sudoku doesn’t make you laugh). Then you get to the end you feel a bit cleverer and look down and only see a collection of numbers. Then the realisation dawns that the last half an hour was spent writing the numbers one to nine in over and over again in several boxes and really you were just pulling off the same trick repeatedly, but disguised to make each moment of magic feel a bit different from the last.