Welcome to Litsy!

I wanted some sort of skillety thing for my birthday breakfast and the fancy place I planned to order from wouldn‘t let me ask them to leave out the red onions. Boo. I stopped off at Tim Horton‘s instead for a resoundingly adequate scramble box alongside my daily short story.

This collection is HEAVY. Manea‘s fiction draws on his experiences in a concentration camp; an important subject that many people obviously need a refresher on.

Phew. My 5th book from the International #Booker longlist took some time, and some perseverance. It flows, it‘s just keep going. A schoolteacher learns of the layout of electrical solenoids connecting through Bucharest, becomes a mite messiah, floats two feet over his bed loses his way in every building, and turns into something like a sperm. Dear reader, you're left to decide what to make of this.
#IB2025

Next international #booker book. I‘m about 20% in - it‘s long. #IB2025

Such nice gifts this year!

This psychological and metaphysical prose was published in the 1930s. It feels like a confession, where the outside world is perceived as too common, boring and useless and the narrator struggles to escape it by hiding in his inner world, where anxiety, unrest and morbid thoughts torture him.

The goal: to educate the Censor inside every thinking human being. To train them to be their own Censor, but to not even suspect it, to not know.

Many rumors are circulating about her, she's become a legend in Censorship! What degradation, from a censor to a poet! How shameful!

How is it possible for them to write so many novels?
[...] Writers-a bunch of parasites that just write and write, with all the abundance of incontinence they're capable of. Readers, the poor things, read what's published, what they're offered, but they nonchalantly and with indemnity skip over all the passages that bore them, a sign of mental health, of course. If I weren't a censor, I'd do the same, I don't even think I'd read, actually.

She asks me: When was the last time you felt satisfied?

I want to laugh the question off, then I think about it: When was the last time I felt truly satisfied? When? She's expecting me to name a book, to brag about some successful author, maybe some lover.....

But no, no, I know when, being completely serious:
-One night recently... when I killed a mosquito that was keeping me from sleeping.

🤣

Despite her many other obligations and tasks, she managed to fill up a thick A4-format notebook... writing almost daily there as well (things that often had nothing to do with her professional obligations). The archival collection of the institution of censorship is immense, miles of documents, and that is after a large part... had already been destroyed. One conclusion would be that censors became truly addicted to writing