what I'd rather not think about
by Jente Posthuma
translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey
Divorced from the larger context of the book, most of the passages I marked for excerption from what I’d rather not think about lacked impact, even for me–I can only imagine how weightlessly they’d drift across the eyes of someone who had yet to read the book.
It was a really good counterpoint to the last book I read, My Year of Rest and Relaxation: nameless female protagonist; New York City; Twin Towers. While I questioned the representational purpose of 9/11 in Rest, it is both clear and intricate in not think; the narrator is a twin, overshadowed by her “elder” brother:
The North Tower was called 1 WTC, so the South Tower was called 2 WTC. 1 WTC was 417 meters high, and 2 WTC was two metres shorter. 1 WTC had an antenna on the roof and was completed in 1972, a year earlier than 2 WTC, which did not have an antenna. For a short while, 1 WTC was the tallest building in the world, until Chicago’s 442-metre-high Sears Tower surpassed it in 1973. This was a bitter pill for 1 WTC to swallow but what is worse? To have briefly been the tallest building in the world or never to have been the tallest because the building next to you was always slightly taller. (emphasis added.)
He spends the book dead, though because time is slippery, out of joint, he’s always around; she spends the book reflecting, nearly learning to stand on her own. sort of realizing that she always has been, before–inevitably, if the metaphor is to be borne out fully–her own collapse. But 2 WTC didn’t collapse because it lost 1 WTC; it was hit by its own plane. Perhaps it would have stood, survived, even after losing 1 WTC. But if it had continued, could it ever not evoke its lost twin?
freedom tower under construction, september 2011. I wasn’t sure what building this was at the time i took the picture.
not think in the abstract seems like it would be a chore: 9/11 and loss don’t make for lightness of spirit. Yet it is an excellent book to read, bleak in impact but comic in presentation:
My brother was standing in his kitchen, slicing vegetables. I went and sat on the windowsill.
Do you know what anxious laughter is?
Naturally, he knew what it was. Using laughter to express fear, he said. Or discomfort.
But it’s also using laughter to disarm. Diminishing yourself so that you don’t frighten others.
He asked which self-help book had taught me that. I laughed and said I’d just been doing some googling and he started hacking away at a spring onion.
It is one of the those books that does not need to end. The scope of its world, created by each page, does not establish firm boundaries from which to view actions or events; the book continues, even after the words cease. Never were a series of unpredictable or “important” events catalogued, but rather a feeling was captured, draped over some things that happened; mundanity poked and prodded until it formed the essential shape of a literary document:
My reaction seemed to shock my brother and this made me angry. Maybe he’d assumed that it would bother me as little as it bothered him.
I don’t need my own life, I said.
You just don’t want to live on your own, said my brother.
But that wasn’t it. I did want to live on my own, just with my brother. He said I was easily agitated and I found that difficult.
Our narrator must continue living each untethered day, even after her connection with her twin unravels. She could continue presenting short self-contained musings, even after the book itself ends. The excerpts here could continue until the whole of book is restated—each segment could stand on its own, a short-form vignette strung together loosely, towering towards infinity.
But reading them together is like looking at a mosaic–each tile may be beautiful in its own right, but the art is in their placement. So it is with each day we live. Take a step back and get a good look at what i’d rather not think about. You might catch of more than you intend.