Ils sont dans le vrai

In 1989, Anatole Broyard, a literary critic for the New York Times,  began writing "Kafka Was The Rage," a memoir based on his life in Greenwich Village during the late 1940s.  I first became enamored with Broyard after reading this excerpt from the novel, published in Laphap's Quarterly (which is an amazing publication, by the by).  Here, he describes the intense relationship between romantic partners and their potential for revelation.

I would be seized with an incredible sincerity, and while I knew that this sincerity was temporary, there was a sense in which it was eternal too.  The girl and I were like two bows bent all the way back, with only one arrow between us.  Seduction was a touching and beautiful genre, the most heartfelt literature of the self.  At such times, I saw myself as I might be, as lovable.  And I think the girl saw herself at her best, too, as inspiring. 

There was a wonderful embarrassment about it all, a moral nakedness.  A contemporary writer, a psychotherapist, defined embarrassment as radiance that doesn't know what do with itself-and that's what we had.  We had radiance.  When people are embarrassed, it's as if they've fallen out of their compulsive rhythms and are framed for a moment in an absolute, undefended stillness.

I could go on and on about how much this book meant to me but my friend Haley summed it up best in a thank you note for a copy of the book I had given her.

Merci for giving me the gift of "Kafka was the Rage", which I lapped up slowly, like the best milkshake, until I finished it down this morning. Possibly, and probably, one of the most distinct and dead-on literary descriptions of the human form, love, lust, and nostalgia that has ever been written.  I'm happy that I read it, because I think his words will stay with me, even, if not especially, in my most "radiant" moments.