sunshowerdandelion | 14.01.2025 (1): Envy

I read more of Fugitive Pieces and I think my main emotion towards it is envy. Unlike Held, which is full of glimpses of doomed people, Fugitive Pieces is about grappling with grief and history and succeeding by a simple truth: Love. And while I find the parts on love really, really good, I can only empathize so much about people with fulfilled lives. I'm especially envious about the work Jakob does, as a translator, and the friends he gets to keep. As someone trying to write, my experience with writing has been a strange being-apart and constant longing and loneliness. Jakob's life after the Holocaust seems inordinately blessed.

I'm reading the second part of the book and I think he continues to be inordinately blessed, even after his death. This is strange but I wish there was more human wretchedness in the novel. The prose is very, very good, but I think a lot of the savor of human life is in wretchedness. But then his sister died and she is haunted by him...