MixedThe London Review of Books (UK)Erica is a twin whose sister played the piano fast and moved slowly: ‘The slowness took her away, drew her in like an abyss.’ Is Carrère’s slow book attempting a similar trick? He is learning to type on typing.com. His editor, who always wanted to read him ‘immediately’, has died. A writer who in the past always placed himself at the centre of the most intense scenarios – sometimes to the point of trashiness, sometimes to the point of nightmare – is decompressing, spreading out, taking his lithium, exhaling from cow pose to cat pose. We are left with the ‘I’ of self-care, and the image of the author watching his new girlfriend move into a handstand, which as an ending may not lack romance in the way a wheelie suitcase does, but is nonetheless unchic.
