Novels

"And again I think the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist."
(Milan Kundera, Encounter)

Kundera wrote the above to intervene (from 2008) in his original text: The Total Rejection of Heritage, or Iannis Xanakis (originally written in 1980). His intervention mentions Thomas Glavinic's novel Night Work, a novel about a 30 year old man who wakes to find humanity gone. Left alone he wanders the empty structures of what he knows as civilization: apartments, streets and storefronts.

Night Work takes its place among other somewhat clichéd last man on earth stories. Many people are obsessed with this scenario because they live in ways that make it inevitable. They are taking their place—in an oral and written tradition of destruction. I don't read these works. I was raised with the definitive and authoritative text on the subject, The Bible.

Roman Catholic Doctrine met, married and argued with an old coyote when my Grandmother married my Grandfather. She explained the way it was, and he said, it didn't have to be.

Authority. Be'ashniih. They both had it. Each one undoing the other. I stood between them and saw the power they had, to create one world, and destroy another. Each one did it. They did it over and over again. Every morning. Every evening. In the fight for each others soul they were defeated by two words: no divorce.