=Book recently read: Newspaper by Edouard Leve=

Based on her admiration of an author's first book, a woman takes out another of his books, which she happens upon by chance on a shelf of new offerings at the library. This new book is quite unlike the first one and she didn't like it nearly as much. In fact, she finds it a bit difficult to push herself through the pages, even though there aren't very many of them, only 124, in fact. The book is supposed to be the transcription of a series of newspaper articles that have been stripped of specific identifying details, such as names and dates, so as to make the stories generic and typical of the human condition. The chapters are designated as "sections" of the paper. There are chapters labeled "International," "Science and Technology," "Literature and the Arts," "Sports," "Entertainment," "Classified," etc. In theory, it seems a pretty good idea and perhaps it would have been in practice, too, if only it had been done better. Drained of specifics, the stories seem so repetitive and generic that one runs into another and soon become terribly tedious. Maybe that was the point, the woman thinks, writing her brief review of the author's book. She knows that the author, shortly after finishing his final book, which was about suicide, committed suicide. Maybe life seemed to him just as gray, tedious, repetitious and futile as it does in this fictional "newspaper." Well, it's true, she considers, looking out the window at the stray cat digging hungrily into the bowl of food she's just set down for him, the news really is nothing but the same old series of stories. Endless war, corporate criminality, political corruption, inane gossip and puerile entertainment, which, if stripped of the constantly changing cast of characters that lend it a false sense of novelty and drama, would fail to hold our interest at all so depressingly typical and cliche it would prove itself to be. The book, she finally considers, is one of those conceptual pieces that is a lot more interesting to think about and discuss than it is to actually read. She thinks about the author, dead, by means of his own hand, at the age of 42. She looks out the window at the wind shaking the yellow-green leaves of the tree across the street. The cat, finished, sits at the top of the stairs, licks himself under one front arm and under the other front arm, and then slowly saunters off up the street. What does she think about when she thinks about the author? Nothing specific. There is a kind of gray static in which one can hear, or, more accurately, imagine one hears, the suggestion of this and that but, in the end, it is just meaningless fuzz. The clothes in the dryer downstairs must be done by now, she thinks, and ends her review.