Relations

11. PattayaIt was a national holiday in Thailand, on the occasion of a Buddhist festival: floating floral arrangements with lit candles, representing the souls of the dead, were cast into the rivers. Universities had a few days off, so I took some myself and went to the

excerpts Friday EveningGood evening. I am Andreea. Maybe I don't give a fuck about who you are. Ok, I was trying to be polite; I'd like to know whom I'm talking to. Listen, sweetheart, cut the crap, say eiteen. I beg your pardon?Eiteen! Say eiteen, what the

excerpt When I first met her, she said she adored Pablo Neruda's poetry and La Fontaine's erotic fables, which are un petit secret délicieux and, once a month, she would listen to a fragment of Le Petit Prince, interpreted by Gérard Philippe. She also told me

He went out of the smoky-glass building without looking back. He was treading slowly, looking at the tips of his impeccably polished Timberland shoes. He hadn't even managed to answer the porter, who may have wished him well, smiling as in a dental-floss commercial.

Dies estexcerptsHe would kiss her and caress her breasts clutching them (as if her breasts were mere rubber balls), and he couldn't figure out just how much cheap male instinct, and how much true passion, was hiding behind his gestures. Those were the gestures of a

Years ago, I experienced a peculiar evening. My life is far from eventful, and the few significant occurrences I do remember have been sucked for all they're worth in my books. There are, nevertheless, among their number some which, for a variety of reasons, I couldn't

I lived in Amsterdam for a while, it now feels like a different lifetime, perched in the attic of a Flemish house along Watergraafsmeer. The rest of the three-storey building accommodated the owner, a lady of Polish descent, and her rubicund daughter. They would have a bath

excerpt I paused a little in order to recall better the dark areas of my teenage years. I don't know why it is only about them that I feel like writing. But do I only have to write about them? Maybe the journal that I'm struggling every second not to finish the

excerpt The second time I went to Alina's parents', the neighborhood seemed too familiar not to imagine that my memory was playing a prank on me, and not a nice one. I had got off the tram a few steps away from the barber's called The Merry Whiskers, which

excerpt Diogenes remembers he was not even ten when, together with other children, he would creep in mock secrecy among the neighbors' maize shocks, particularly if the neighbors in question happened to be in possession of a daughter of marriageable age, known to repair

excerpt All his anxiety, that apoplectic fit, was proof he did not know Clara. That was precisely the state of their relationship at the time. In order to know and understand and accept her manner of thinking, the style of her infinitesimal psychic reactions – allowing

It is amazing how many children are begotten from the sentimental exultation that one or the other of their parents feel for a third person, another than the partner in the respective action, irrespective if the person in question be a man or a woman. Sometimes this third