![]() ![]() flows … although that’s perhaps too big a word, while trickle and meander are too small. The journals Longhand and Notebooks did some of this work, but logged more anonymously amid travel quips. Not that Bail states anything at all about the genesis of his fiction – though he does talk about ‘being a ‘writer’’, for example, as a peculiarity, ‘behaving differently to everybody else’, sitting ‘at a table writing every morning and weekend.’ The genesis of his fiction is in his childhood and travel particle-memories. Intuitive/inquisitive readers of his novels, such as Holden’s Performance and The Voyage, probably sensed a partial basis in autobiography – which is now (almost shockingly) revealed. The willingness to expose personal vulnerability is a newness for the writer, known not to like the confessional first-person pronoun: hence the assiduous use of the third-person. The size of this small book (164 pages) is disproportionate to its affect of astonishment – at least for this fan. ![]() seems to enclose most of a life and much of the world. ![]()
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