Threshold by Rob Doyle

Author:Rob Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Mediterranean

On the cusp of autumn, convinced, for reasons I will get into, that it was absolutely necessary for me to get out of Paris for a few days, I conceived the idea of making a journey to Blanes, on the Costa Brava in north-east Spain. The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño had lived in Blanes for many years, and I had read about a seventeen-stage Bolaño walking tour that had been inaugurated there in 2013, on the tenth anniversary of his death. The ruta literaria ‘Bolaño en Blanes’ – and the article I would write about it to cover costs and pay the rent – seemed a strong enough pretext for me to leave Paris.

On a Tuesday morning I rode a crowded Métro train to the Gare de Lyon, and there boarded a train to Barcelona. It was a double-decker and my seat on the upper floor faced backwards, so that as we travelled the landscape receded in front of me. On the journey I read Mónica Maristain’s Bolaño: A Biography in Conversations. The book is essentially a series of transcribed interviews with people who knew Bolaño, presented without much attempt at ordering or interpreting the material. Maristain is gushingly, irritatingly admiring of Bolaño; it is hard to avoid the accusation of hagiography when a writer insists on comparing her subject to a saint. As I read on, every little thing Maristain wrote grated on me. I should have been enjoying the journey, but instead I was all tensed up with irritation towards this lazy biographer.

I closed the book, or rather turned it off, for I was reading on an e-reader, which I’d bought the day before moving to France to curb my habitual accumulation of physical books while on the move. I watched the landscape vanish before me as we sped towards the south. To put it bluntly, I was in a wretched nervous condition. It felt like weeks since I’d last had a decent night’s sleep. Lying awake at two, three, four o’clock in the morning, I had been unable lately to slow the apocalyptic whirring of my thoughts. For years I had been living a largely solitary existence and it had never bothered me much. In Paris, though, it was getting to me badly. If you spend too much time alone, I reflected, then what would otherwise be a disturbing but transient thought will grow to immense, grotesque, obsessional proportions, so that finally you fear everything, emanating weirdness and menace on the streets and in the Métro. Your sleeping will go to hell and life will lose its flavour. Food, music, books, people, the days themselves – all of it will taste the same, taste of nothing. The very strategies you previously adopted to ward off paranoia and dejection – a good diet, exercise – will fall by the wayside. You will not eat well and you will certainly not jog. It will soon go from bad to worse, I reflected, so that when a friend comes to

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