Absence

Review

Quincy’s Absence was my book club’s pick for May, and it’s one of the books we’ve read that I’ve appreciated (enjoyed might not be the right word) the most over the past year. I was sad to miss the group’s discussion; I finished the book around 9pm in an ER with a fractured fibula.

For a short book, Absence does read longer, probably because of Quincy’s very (occasionally very) long and sometimes meandering sentences. Though, as someone known to word-count sentences and to go through and circle the number of commas in a passage, I never felt the need to do so while reading. Only in transcribing the notes below did it occur to me how long they sometimes are. The bigger contributor to the elongated feeling is probably the darkness; it feels that there is a suicide or death besides every few pages. The book is really about our narrator encountering different people who have lost others, who are soon to loose others, or who in their distant past have lost them and continue aching across the years.

Perhaps it appeals so to me because I feel so familiar with the sensation of absence and the bizarre state that it is. So, when characters say or feel something like this, from page 104,

My father paused briefly, his eyes had become pale and remote, like his boyish fear had struck him again. The dead never leave you. They remain, strangely and beautifully, sometimes horrifyingly, always surfacing, again and again above time’s rising black water. It is not that you cannot escape them, it is that they never were not with you. And when you catch sight of them, even briefly, you lose sight of your present self, so through them, slowly, you join them and you dissolve with them into ranks of the past.

I understand that people gone from your life feel still feel present in their absence, in a way. I think about my great-grandparents very frequently, I think about others still living but absent from my life very frequently. This is maybe my one change to the above. I have a good memory for people, I can remember every teacher I’ve ever had, I can remember anecdotes from twenty years ago. Some memories are so tangible that when I start through them I have a hard time not trapping myself in them, because I can almost feel them and the people within them. Still, there is some bifurcation because this also feels much truer to me, from page 46:

Nowadays, I hear little, if anything at all, from anyone. . . . It is not that I am upset by this, it is just that I feel that I’ve been forgotten. . . . But now, even after just two years here, I fear the ink I had used has since faded, the etchings I made into bits of wood have been sanded off and the leather of the sofa re-upholstered. Maybe, as I have come to think, I am gone in the other’s minds and in the world, and as that is, I don’t truly exist anymore. I have been forgotten. . . . There is nothing worse than nothingness.

In a way, I think these two opposing views of absence are the core of the book, and I don’t think it is unintentional that in the first, we have a person who remembers, and in the second, we have a person terrified of being forgotten.

Apart from theme, I do acknowledge that this could be a bit of a drag for folks. I think maybe if you are not a generally melancholy person, maybe this just seems like a bunch of kind of annoying whining. I paused after writing that last sentence to go read a rather pissed off review in the Harvard Review. I typically avoid reading reviews before I write down my thoughts. I’m fascinated to see many points that I would level at other books, but for whatever reason this book works for me. While I am not familiar with Sebald (cited in the review I’ve linked), the review makes a connection to Garth Greenwell, and that might be something. Greenwell is my favorite contemporary author, and I do see some shared traits between this and Garth’s writing, particularly the earlier What Belongs to You — though the approach to the writing is clearly very different.

I’ll be very interested to see how Quincy’s writing had grown in his future works. I can accept and acknowledge that there are weaknesses here in some of the writing and wordiness (though I did not find ‘nadir’ to be the nadir of bad writing as apparently Mr. Callimanopulos did).

Notes

• p5-6 - Seeing him so undone, I was overcome by a burrowing sadness which moved from me a sudden burst of anxious concern for him: I explained that I appreciated his classes and his teaching and had been Sad to see him leave – remarks I immediately regretted making when I noticed him fall into the wordless stupor that tends to be provoked by the rising of the past above one’s mouth.

  • TB: Bold mine. I really like this imagery/feeling communication.

• p9 - By the time the fact of his passing had reached me, Mr Rothlan had been dead for little over a week and a strange silence lingered around it: it wasn’t in the news nor was there any kind of In Memoriam email from my former school . . .

  • TB: What I’m interested here is the period of time between the death and the awareness of the death. How long does the interregnum last? Would news spread? How permeable are the differing social circles? If it is a circumstance where the decease could anticipate their death (terminal illness, suicide, very advanced age), do people really want some sense of final words? I often wonder if letters like this are really written for the author, not for the recipient, and maybe the recipient would be quite glad to get nothing and forget the whole thing.

• p29-30 - Or was it that like him, they felt an implacable pain each night when they thought of the time before then, and that they were forced to reflect on what in some way they felt responsible for? But that distance – that is ever-extending yet not as wide as we often feel it to be – helped them cope with their dreams, their terrors and the quieter times when one of them would stumble across a photo . . . leaving them all . . . to instead walk the earth separated, divorced from each other but full of crumbling thoughts of the other, all only wishing that that distance they had cemented over time would one day collapse.

  • TB: That second sentence, unabbreviated, has 101 words, which would usually make me grind my teeth, but something about it flows perfectly well for me. Emphasis mine.

• p45 - She would leave calls and send threatening ltters without a name at their house, accusing them of wild conspiracies like: her father had hired a man to swerve into Josephine’s car to kill her, or that Josephine wasn’t really dead but had been paid by her family to disappear.

  • TB: Emphasis is in the original, reflective of dialogue.

• p46 - Nowadays, I hear little, if anything at all, from anyone. . . . It is not that I am upset by this, it is just that I feel that I’ve been forgotten.

• p46-47 - But now, even after just two years here, I fear the ink I had used has since faded, the etchings I made into bits of wood have been sanded off and the leather of the sofa re-upholstered. Maybe, as I have come to think, I am gone in the other’s minds and in the world, and as that is, I don’t truly exist anymore. I have been forgotten. . . . There is nothing worse than nothingness.

• p47 - But my dear Sully, enough now. When you become afraid think of the words Beckett spoke to Bram van Velde after the war:

  Bram says, ‘Oh, I haven’t seen you for years, Sam.’
  Becket replies with an embrace, ‘Only physically.’

  * TB: I really love this.

• p87-88 - With Margaret’s words, it became clear to me that before there was no ending, no horizon, no beacon pushing through the haze he lived in. It was as if his whole field of vision was clouded by a fog that became denser, more impenetrable the longer he remained within himself. I imagined that Patrick, a partner, helped disperse it in him, even if only momentarily.

  • TB: Relatable; but a lot of pressure to put on a partner.

• p90 - It wasn’t long after that she began to take painkillers with codeine in them. Without me noticing at first, she became addicted and would spend her days in a haze, drifting through life from sleep to sleep, disordered by the rugs.

  • TB: Emphasis in original as indicative of dialogue. I flagged this noticing addiction (but more specifically opioid addiction) as something of a recurrent theme.

• p97 - I desperately combed through the words I had heard and tried to cling to each one, but all that presented itself was the void . . . Sensing this, my desperation hushed in me and a beating steadiness took hold. It was an understanding that the knowable would would forever remain unknowable and the sayable would forever remain pale, ghostlike, evasive.

• p104 - My father paused briefly, his eyes had become pale and remote, like his boyish fear had struck him again. The dead never leave you. They remain, strangely and beautifully, sometimes horrifyingly, always surfacing, again and again above time’s rising black water. It is not that you cannot escape them, it is that they never were not with you. And when you catch sight of them, even briefly, you lose sight of your present self, so through them, slowly, you join them and you dissolve with them into ranks of the past.

  • TB: First, I love the reflective quality of this. Second, I wonder how true this is. It is hard to imagine being an indelible memory to someone, it just seems impossible. Consider this next to the notes on p46 and p47, where the (letter) writer feels such a certainty that they have been forgotten (or never remembered in the first place, which I consider to be different); that feels more relatable to me. It’s an interesting doubling. I suppose it is possible that the person that feels forgotten could in fact be in some way indelible to another and perhaps all either has are the crumbling thoughts. But that strikes me as maybe a little delusional.

• p112 - In 1949, both my parents passed within six months of each other, and even thenHamed didn’t rear his head, nor did they pass into the next life knowing what had happened to their son. His quietness remained for many years and an unanswered quietness is often loudest within yourself.

  • TB: Italics in original as indicative of dialogue, bold mine.