It's starting again

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submission
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Well i was already thinking this way in 2014 it seems, but sometimes when you read a book the protagonist's musings really chime with your own thoughts...
Synchronicity? Well yes i think so, for example i've had houellebecq's submission sitting on a shelf for a year or so, friends have picked it up and put it down, now i started it at particularly the right time for me as i contemplate travelling on my own...

I started to wonder what I was doing there. This very basic question can occur to anyone, anywhere, at any moment in his life, but there's no denying that the solitary traveller is especially vulnerable. If Myriam had been with me, I'd still have no good reason for being in Martel, yet the question simply wouldn't have arisen.A couple is a world, autonomous and enclosed, that moves through the larger world essentially untouched; on my own, I was full of chips and cracks, and it took a certain amount of courage for me to slip the information sheet into my jacket pocket and go out into the village.

My mailbox was full of various kinds of bureaucratic mail, some of which would require an immediate response. To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you're always likely to run foul of some agency or other. I knew it would take several days to get back up to speed. 

In a certain milieu - granted a very small one - I was known and even respected. Financially, I had nothing to complain about. Until I died I was guaranteed a generous income, twice the national average, without having to do any work. And yet I knew I was close to suicide, not out of despair or even any special sadness, simply from the degradation of 'the set of functions that resist death' in Bichat's formation. The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man. I was incapable of living for myself, and who else did I have to live for? Humanity didn't interest me - it disgusted me, actually.

 

New Zealand on the map!

So nobody is ever missing is set mainly in new zealand, the next book i read set in belgium (thirty days) a character goes to new zealand - what are the odds??

Also this.

Nobody is ever missing

As we walked home that night smelling like the bourbon that had drizzled onto our knees, i knew that my husband was a song that i had forgotten the words to and i was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love and i knew that the song my husband was, the song i had forgotten, was not only forgotten but no longer existed, that there had only been one record of it and it had been melted down and turned into something else and only one person knew how to sing it and that person was long since dead.

The adversary

Reading Hans Keilson's strange book in the morning sitting by a window and he writes about hearing people pass by on the street outside... just two minutes later there's two guys having a sunday morning argument on the street..