1. Where is the room in which the protagonist of Josipovici's new novel finds himself? When is it? Minimal description (but then the whole narrative is written minimally): greyness and silence, broken only by the sound of his feet echoing on the bare boards. Then, sometimes, the cries of children in the playground below, and the hum of city traffic, far away. But for the most part, greyness and silence, and the protagonist, Felix, looking out of the window.
We might mistake the room for a real room - as one his son can enter, and his daughter, both concerned about their divorced and now widowed father (are you a widower when you were divorced from the woman who died?). A room in which a telephone can ring and his son can say 'Fuck you', upset by his father's seeming indifference to his surroundings. Why won't he get the cracked window fixed? Sometimes his daughter comes to clear up. He hears her moving the vacuum cleaner upstairs, and waits for her to leave. What does he do in the greyness and the silence?
Perhaps it is there that memories come to him. He has found the room after everything that has happened. He's moved there, to a kind of promontory in which he can be alone. Alone - but it is there the memories come, as they do to the recumbent narrator of Beckett's Company. Felix remembers conversations, encounters. His son, when young. Proposing to his wife, even as he discourses on Shakespeare and Rabelais (Felix is a writer).
Then his wife leaving him for a younger man whom he has been advising. Felix, in these reported conversations, talks too much. He is too voluble. His wife, Sally, leaves him for Brian, the writer. Felix had said Brian's work was disappointing him. What promise Brian had! But Sally doesn't see why Felix should what he sees as Basil's failure as a personal affront. She's tired of Felix. And then she leaves him.
Conversations with Lotte, who Felix knew as an adolescent. Then, he desired her - but now, after Sally leaves him, she will give him what she seemed to promise. They walk through an art gallery in Munich. She resembles a woman in one of the paintings. He remembers how she seemed to flirt with him when they were young.
Then there is Felix's friend, George. His confidante. George is worried about his friend. Hasn't he recently had a heart attack? Didn't he have to be revived, having died for a while. Felix, for his part, remembers being dead. When he tells George about it, we recognise the description: greyness, silence, his face at the window, the hum of distant traffic, the cries of children, sometimes, from below: that room again, and now we understand.
Where was the room? When was it? Is it real? Is it imaginary, or somewhere between the two? Is Felix dead, or dying? Is he about to leave the room by way of the door, he says, is open? Again and again a description of the room breaks into the narrative. In fact it is there at the beginning, breaking open the narrative (and what an opening! - as Steve says, 'There are some books whose first lines, whose opening lines, are enough'):
A room.
He stands at the window.
And a voice says: Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes.
Whose voice is this? What has passed? A whole life? Everything - the good, the bad; joy and sorrow? Everything passes: the title of the novel: is this a consolation? But who is there to be consoled? Who speaks, and to whom?
The next paragraph of the novel:
A room.
He stands at the window.
Silence.
He stands.
Silence.
2. Felix is a writer. We learn from his conversations that he does not write often. Only when inspired, not like the prolific Brian. When inspired - and he describes a great movement of inspiration to George. He had woken in the night, filled with dread. But then, in the morning, the dread had passed. Euphoria: he began to write. Bent over the paper. Covering line after line, on the white paper, writing without pause.
A few pages pass before we return to this part of the narrative. Felix wrote till he was exhausted. He closed his eyes, triumphant. And then, opening them, sees the page was black. Nothing but black marks overlaying one another. He hadn't turned the page. 'All the while I was writing. I hadn't turned the page.' And then, 'That's how it had began.' How what began? What? Was it now the heart attack came, and the room opened? I think so. It was then.
3. Writing overlaid by writing: that's the image on the cover of this beautifully designed novel.
Everything passes: whose voice is speaking - and to whom? Perhaps the room is that place where such certainties can be heard. It may seem, then, that Felix is indifferent, that he neglects himself. In truth, he has heard a voice say: everything passes. The joy, the sorrow. The good, the bad. Everything passes, and isn't the room also a kind of passageway? A place to which he can now return, just as this narrative circles around it?
A place of passing - a way of leaving behind the world, or knowing the world as passage. Perhaps that is it: the world, in the room, is affirmed as passage, as what passes. Everything passes - the world is a great passage, where there will be joy, and then sorrow; the good, and the bad. Then who speaks? The voice hardens in the air. Speaks from the empty air in the room, reaching him from the silence. Him - but who is he? He's silent now. He's not talking about Rabelais, about Shakespeare. Silent, and nameless. For he is never named, when he's in the room. Who is he, the one who hears the voice say: everything passes?
Paul Schrader says a whole sequence of his films are about men in rooms. Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper - each time, a man, a room, as though everything had been reduced to the essential. A man, a room - and isn't the protagonist of Light Sleeper a journal keeper? Doesn't he keep notes for himself?
That's what a man does, alone in a room. Notes - to reflect upon what has been and on what is happening. On what is passing. Because everything is passing. But I suppose in each case these men are in rooms only for an interval. They are there for a period of waiting, a period of assessment, letting the capacity to act gather inside them. Soon, they will act - but for now? A man, a room.
But for Josipovici's man, alone in his room, nothing is gathering. The opposite, in fact: neglect, indifference - or that is, at least, what his son and daughter see. He rests in silence; he is a writer - but we do not hear of him writing in his room. He's silent, just that. He does not write, just that. Inaction, inability - it is to let the time of action pass, to give the ability to be to its passing that he is in the room. Let the world go. Let it let itself go. Meanwhile, the room. Between death and life. Where he is neither dead, nor alive.
4. The book contains almost as much space, as silence, as language, says Mark. 'It's almost auto-contemplative'. A book that contemplates itself - not, now like the fulfilled soul of book 10 of Aristotle's Ethics, in whom thought thinks itself. Not the one whose contemplation turns, still, around the capacity to think.
Thinking, rather, that happens, like fate. That thinks the very absence of a thinker at its centre. I am reminded straightaway of Blanchot's récit (and that is what Everything Passes also is: a récit), Thomas the Obscure, where it is said, I think, therefore I am not. A thinking, a contemplation with no one at its centre. That begins with a room, a space, between life and death, but belonging neither to life nor death.
The narrative, then, is as though set back behind itself. It belongs to a time before its own origin, as though death, Felix's death, had occurred before he had ever lived. Only it is no longer Felix's death at all, and the room, the empty room, is writing's remove, the space of writing.
Thought thinks itself; writing writes itself, but without a writer. Or the writer is given to himself in an act of writing that sets itself back from him. This is what is marked in this novel; it is what Josipovici is able to mark by his discretion, by his silences: the photographic negative of Felix's writing overlaid by writing.
Why then do I wish as I read and read Everything Passes, for more silence? Why do I wish the novel were yet more compacted, as though it could be drawn into itself like a black hole, collapsing everything but the room at its centre?