READING TAILS

Recently landed: Reading tails

Twice I have spilt my drink on my copy of Per Petterson’s I refuse, and neither time was it a reflection of the book, nor intentional. I had finished the book, translated by Don Bartlett, and had only to revisit my collection of dog-eared pages before returning it to the shelf, however, in a clumsy moment, I spilled juice on the cover, tail and fore-edge. The book served as a perfect sponge to my error.

Rather than tossing the book out, I planned to transcribe the passages I’d marked. Normally I’d leave them resting on the page to find on a revisit and wonder what it was I had wanted to remember. Time and good intentions had other ideas. The then once-doused novel, with the rippled and darkened pages languished on the floor, until I did the same again, and spilled water on the cover. Looking at the pages now, before I (sadly) toss the book away, one of the pages I had marked to remember has a line about feeling “I was in tune with the world” (p. 166). I like the visual this conjures. It is followed by “I really did. But something must have been wrong, because they kept me in the [hospital] for almost four months…”, which I like because it undoes the former, and reveals that personal perception is only one way of looking at things. “I felt the world was as I knew it, and I too was the way I was supposed to be”. Yet, scanning the page now, perhaps I’d marked the page for the line about birch burning slowly in the fire and not crackling the way spruce did “sending red and yellow sparks flying into the room”.

Continuing reading on Marginalia.

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15th of June, 2026

The two of us, standing before a detail from A fleeting sense of (extended), 2026, created especially for the exhibition, Slow Read, curated by Rachel Keir-Smith (image credit: IMAGEPLAY)