[.ca] The Bread of Those Early Years (ISBN 0810111632)

I felt as if I had never seen anything but that door.:
My favorite novel is _The Stranger_ by Albert Camus. _The Bread of Those Early Years_ reminds me of some of the brilliance of _The Stranger_. This novel is absurdist and existential. Walter Fendrich, the narrator, states: "I did not pull the covers over my head... for whether I amounted to anything or not, it was all the same to me. I didn't care," (p. 13). Yet Fendrich cares. Boll navigates through a day in Fendrich's life, a day wrought with obsession, greed, cynicism, and irresponsibility. Fendrich's words present this day in a manner often akin to the nihilistic philosopher Freidrich (Nietzsche). The real genius of this text shines through Boll's dense, dark, and, at times, brilliant prose. Two snippets of Boll's brilliant prose follows. "This is what it must be like, I thought, to be drowning: gray water runs into you, a lot of water; you see nothing more, hear nothing more, only a muffled roar, and the gray, stale tasting water seems sweet to you," (p. 52). "And I thought again of the woman on Kurbel Street who had wept into the phone as only women weep who can't cope with machines, and all at once I knew there was no further point in avoiding Ulla in my thoughts, so I thought about her: I did it the way you suddenly decide to turn the light on in a room where someone has died: in the half-light, it was possible to believe he was asleep, possible to persuade yourself that you could still hear him breathe, see him move; but now the light falls harshly on the scene, and you can see that preparations for the funeral have already been made: the candelabra are in place, the potted palms -- and somewhere to the left below the dead person's feet there is a hump where the black cloth bulges incongrously: that's where the undertaker has placed the hammer in readiness to nail down the coffin lid tomorrow, and you can already hear what won't be heard till tomorrow: that finals, naked hammering that has no tune," (p. 60-61). This text is ripe for considerable literary study. Here are some topics I have analyzed through close reading of this text: names, shadows, light, bread, theft, obsession, darkrooms, machines, dust, death, colors (yellow, gray, white, scarlet, red, golden, blue, black, green), and symbolic interactionism (especially with yourself).