Working the Room by Geoff Dyer

Author:Geoff Dyer [Geoff Dyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: a9781847678621
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2010-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

When Susan Sontag directed Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo during the siege it was widely felt that what was happening on stage offered some kind of absurdist commentary on events beyond the theatre. In a café in Mostar – a place which became stitched into international consciousness in the same way as Sarajevo – a comparable fable had unfolded before West’s eyes in the 1930s:

Young officers moved rhythmically through the beams of white light that poured down upon the acid green of the billiard-tables, and the billiard balls gave out their sound of stoical shock. There was immanent the Balkan feeling of a shiftless yet just doom. It seemed possible that someone might come into the room, perhaps a man who would hang up his fez, and explain, in terms just comprehensible enough to make it certain they were not nonsensical, that all the people at the tables must stay there until the two officers who were playing billiards at the moment had played a million games, and that by the result their eternal fates would be decided; and that this would be accepted, and people would sit there quietly waiting and reading the newspapers.

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