You Shall Know Our Velocity

I read this in sort of a glum, monotone voice from the narrator, Will. I'm not sure if that was accurate of me, but Will always seems lost in thought and the real world rarely excited him, like he was just an observer, or maybe nothing understood him or his situation. Eggers made it easy for me to relate to Will, always having conversations with other people or objects in his head. I like the idea of the spontaneous world traveling, though under the circumstances it was rather sad. Will is struggling with the death of Jack and he thinks that going on this journey will somehow relieve the burden he's carrying. With a beaten face, I think a metaphor for his overall state of mind, him and his friend Hand force encounters with many different people, often prostitutes, to try and push this lump sum he earned off on them. I don't have the luxury to hand money away, though this book really made me think it'd be fun to just sort of drop everything and go somewhere. I haven't been anywhere they went and it makes me want to visit them, though it sounds silly to want to see something the way a fictional character did.

Amis's great predecessor in prison-camp memorialization! If you had the sublime luck to be sitting in your dentist's waiting room when you read that, you could have tried faking a sudden painful abscess and begging the nurse to infuse you with a triple dose of Demerol. That way, you might have lost consciousness before Acocella's sentence became stored in your memory cells. Her remark was shockingly and multivalently out of kilter. "Predecessor" implies a position and function kindred to those of the eventual "successor," and Amis is planets away from both Levi's experience and his evocative power. Auschwitz was not a "prison camp," it was a death camp. Levi's testimony cannot adequately be described with the bland "memorialization". And real writers, imaginative writers, writers such as Levi, do not "calculate" anything, let alone incalculable anguish.