Book of the Year

Book of the Year: How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility by Akiko Busch.

This is a wonderful, profound book about: going offline, dropping out, becoming small, forgetting, absences, the ephemeral nature of the self, how things linger even though they're barely visible, erasure (in art, literature), our desire for lightness...on not being too full of yourself. How in art and life and love we're drawn to the invisible, the unsaid -and how they flit in and out of sight. Without forgetting those who are 'disappeared' by illness or cruelty, or neglect.

I picked this book up at random in Foyles because it wasn't put back on the shelf properly (actually, it shouldn't have been on that shelf at all!). What a discovery! Lost and found, our oldest of games: Hunting? Religion?

I loved the bit about finding old signs in a city (on brick walls, say). Lots of those in London. The words faded, faint traces of a bygone era, the products they were once selling now nothing but a distant memory.

In a discussion with Mary Ruefle:

On your deathbed you may remember one word; if you're lucky you may remember one person, one place; but never the whole story, and never in order.

One chapter on Mrs Dalloway (that some of you might like). Personally speaking, I would have gone for Walser or Nescio or Pessoa (or Primo Levi's 'Argon').

A moving chapter on her mother who is losing her memory, identity:

Sometimes, when she sat outdoors in the summer evenings looking at the roses she had planted years before, a calm would visit her. Some of those had grown from cuttings taken from the rose beds her father had planted decades earlier. At the time, I liked to think the pleasure in her face reflected a sense of continuity, some skein of heritage, a few slender threads of family identity that remain unfrayed. And that she was herself again.

But the self is something old and new, derived from earlier parts of life and others

that might have come into being at just that very moment in the dusk.