Mathias Énard: Compass - Network Analysis of Connection in the Novel

Well, I did something 'atrocious' with Compass by Mathias Énard. As soon as I started reading this book, I began to wonder how his demonstration of 'everything is connected' will look like in a visualization. The picture you see is the so called network analysis of the connections made in this book. Few pointers: 1. All the items which are used in the book are broken in to 11 categories: Character, Concept, Entity, Event, Language, Literature,...

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‘Searching through a dusty book for some vanished main clause...’: Reading László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó

Suddenly he sat up straight in his chair as a new thought dawned on him. He raised his head and stared at the ceiling, gasping for breath, then gripped his pencil . . . 'Now he is standing up," he wrote in a deepening reverie, pressing the pencil lightly in case he tore the paper. 'He scratches his groin and stretches. He walks around the room and sits down again. He goes out for a piss and returns. Sits down. Stands up.’ He scribbled feverishly...

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"Crisis is the default state of history"

"He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos,to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity . . . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully...

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"But of course a man can never...

...really liberate himself from anything, he leaves the prison into which he was propagated and born only at the instant of his death. We enter a world which precedes us but is not prepared for us, and we have to cope with this world, if we can't cope with this world we're done for, but if we survive, for whatever constitutional reason, then we must take care to turn this world, which was a given world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and...

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Outside Time

"Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of...

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Flaubert, Borges, and Bouvard and Pecuchet

An article by Borges in defence of Bouvard and Pecuchet, written in 1954 seeks to answer some of the criticisms levelled against that magnificent work. I personally have a feeling that my almost reverent appraisal of that work has got something to do with a faint foreboding I have always carried with in me. It is like, I always tend to repeat to myself in moments solitude - That one either has to be born a genius to change the world or stupid enough to swallow whatever is. I don't belong to the former, so my lot is to swallow, however bitter whatever...

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And the Scheme of Things...

Indian people are inclined to consider the universal seriously in expressing their ideas of things. This can be easily seen in the fact of their verbal usage in which they have so great an inclination to use abstract nouns. In Sanskrit, an abstract noun is formed by adding -ta function doPopup(windowTitle, windowUrl, windowFeatures) { var popupWindow; windowUrl='nlReader.dll?BookID=39028&FileName='+windowUrl; popupWindow=window.open(windowUrl,windowTitle,windowFeatures); if( window.focus )...

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