I’ve burned two books in my life and purposely abandoned one.  I will start with the second book I burned, an ignominious distinction belonging to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. My wife, Maria, aware of my fascination with the written word, goes out of her way to buy any old book she comes across at thrift stores, swap meets, and estate/yard sales. She knows that I do not like new things and gravitate towards older literature. Treasures have been accumulated under this scheme. Several years ago, an early edition of Tropic of Cancer showed up at the house. It was accompanied by an illustrated copy of Flaubert’s Three Tales and Boswell ’s Life of Dr. Johnson, all obtained at a proximate estate sale. A decent haul by any standards.

I knew Miller’s work by reputation only and attacked it with lewd curiosity. His usage of the English language was exquisite and the prose hypnotic; traits that made Miller’s violent and pornographic misogyny all the more horrifying.  He created a masterful structure housing filth. I could not put the book down, its elegance pulled me in. How could I describe the book and its author? Proto-fratire written by a  bohemian Andrew Tate? No, that is a poor analogy. Miller was an artist; an exquisitely gifted one at that. He was an artist who, nonetheless, delighted in denigrating and debasing humanity. He does this not to expose societal fault lines, hypocrisy, or emphasize moral shortcomings. There is no satire with Miller, yet it is not the ramblings of a rake delighting in vice. It is something different, strange, perverse, and-ultimately- wrong. The work is a blasé yet masterful ode to the debasement of femineity. The contrasting beauty of the language with the ugliness of the content offends the core.

Burning it was not premediated. I had a bonfire one fall afternoon in my backyard and sat transfixed by the dancing flames. The mind wandered and settled upon things literary. Miller’s imagery arose in my mind and, without thinking, I returned to my study and grabbed the book. Moments later, it was flung into the pyre. It burnt slowly, the spine separated and pages released and fluttered through the flames. One, carried aloft, lazily settled by my feet. I picked it up and, as its orange-glowing margins slowly disintegrated, I read a fragment of Miller’s handiwork, “as I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper’s skull…” Hateful yet beautiful, words burnt into my memory-try as I might to forget them.  I returned the fragment to the flames and watched the phrase brighten then darken into soot and vapor as it was consumed. Through instinct, we destroy what we don’t understand, c’est la vie.

The first book I ever burned was Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont.  It is evil, none should ever read it . It is a novo Malleaus Mallefectarum that, through means unknown to me, inexplicably ended up in my house. I never bought it. It was just there, sitting on a shelf for years. I made the conscious decision to burn it within minutes of opening it the first time.  A fire was lit for that singular purpose. Some things should never be seen and I needed to ensure that human eyes would never settle on this particular copy.

I regret neither holocaust. Yet the book I purposely abandoned haunts me. After finishing the final lines, I flung it to the ground at the train station in Fukuyama, Japan. My reaction to it was visceral, yet once it was out of my life, I regretted my action. It should have been revisited. It at least deserved a space in the pantheon of conquered works that adorn my living spaces.

But first a discussion on spatial associations with books, for this plays a part on how I perceive works and how this particular tome came into my life. I read voraciously and deliberately on my travels. Travel is, for better or worse, my business. Ergo, I have an endless need for literature.  It is my escape. No television and little technology is consumed on the road…only the word and my surroundings. I naturally associate literary works with the places I was when I read them. When someone mentions a place or a location I have been to, my mind immediately goes to what I was reading when I was there. I associate Jaroslav Hasek ’s Good Soldier Svejk with my anabasis from Bramsche, Germany to Izmit, Turkey.  Sienkewicz’s trilogy was started in a café off Stiftgasse (I sought out this road for a specific reason) in Vienna and finished three thousand pages later in Sitka, Alaska.  Lazarillo de Tormes and Quevedo's El Buscon were commenced in Golega, Portugal, carried me to Caceres and Badajoz in Spain and finished in a flop hotel in Petah Tikvah, Israel. George MacDonald Frazier’s Flashman was consumed on one of many train-rides from Bucharest to Drobeta Turnu Severin. Milovan Djilas's Conversations with Stalin turned heads in a series of restaurants across Lyon, France.  Something of Value by Ruark
 was read and re-read over endless, relentlessly sweltering nights in a tent just outside the provincial capital of Shamal Darfur in Sudan.

Mircea Eliade wrote extensively on the heterogeneity of space in the Sacred and Profane (read in a small guest-house in the North Cascades). Sacred space, locations where revelations or important events occur, are perceived differently by man. This space is treated differently than profane or normal space. When the revelation is profound, location’s significance becomes theophanic. For me, some locations are literarily theophanic.  Enough…to the flung aside book.

Late 2017 found me on a small project in Kosovo, inspecting recycling facilities around Pristina and points north. The site manager for a small used-oil recycler in Mitrovica was gregarious and once the work was completed, we went out to lunch at a restaurant along the banks of the Ibar on the outskirts of town. Discussions about work transitioned to philosophy, anthropology, and literature. I had been reading Andric’s Bridge on the Drina on this trip, a risky choice given the lingering ethnic tension between those who share the author’s Serbian background and the predominantly Albanian inhabitants of the Region. My host, a proud Albanian nonetheless familiar with Andric, discussed the book’s significance and the revolutionary approach of its narrative. Sensing I would not be disappointed, I asked him if he had any recommendations for a quintessentially Albanian or Kosovar novel, something that captures the voice and ethos of the people or region. I hit pay dirt. The next hour was spent discussing the poetry of Mijeni, the satire of Fishta, and the depths of Kadare
. Of Ismael Kadare, much was discussed. Kadare, he insisted, captures the Albanian experience more than any other author. He paused when pressed on which of his works he would recommend. He vacillated between Broken April and General of the Dead Army. Both had profound significance to him. Finally, after much discussion, he settled on General of the Dead Army. “I re-read it on an annual basis. For that, I think it is the more thought-provoking work.”  A copy was sitting on my desk by the time I returned home later that week.

I set it aside for my next major trip, a two-week series of meetings that would take me from Tokyo to Nagasaki and back. I devoured the book on the trip. It accompanied me to every restaurant, every bar. The story, of an Italian General charged with scouring the post-war countryside of Albania to recover and repatriate the remains of dead Italian soldiers, was compelling. The descriptions of the people, the locations, the actions were astounding in their detail. As the story progressed, I anticipated redemption, perhaps a cathartic reconciliation between erstwhile antagonists. Altruistic hopes seldom materialize in reality and Kadare was, if nothing else, a consummate realist.  The conclusion was so unexpected, so indescribable that I couldn’t control my reaction. The book was flung to the ground. Not in disgust or outrage, but in confused shock. I could not articulate words to describe the ending…the noble wrath of an aggrieved relation? The savage justice of vendetta? Neither encapsulated the action, the motivation, the genetics within Kadare’s brutal denouement.

Through instinct, we destroy what we don’t understand…and so, an American abandoned an Albanian book about an Italian General at a train station in Japan. The purpose of the author is to tell a story and elicit a reaction. Kadare excelled in both prongs. I think about this particular book often and my hope is that someone chanced across a discarded book at a train station, picked it up, read it, felt it, and now has their own story to tell. Altruistic hopes seldom materialize in reality.