Estrangement

Stephen Mitchelmore on Night Work:

He holds his hand under the cold tap and inspects the cut.

No
one, himself included, had ever seen what he could see. He’d lived with
this finger for thirty-five years without ever knowing what it looked
like inside.

The unique presence of the inside of his finger and the unique experience of witnessing
such unique presence heralds many other moments like this. In effect,
his entire existence becomes a round of unique moments. By coincidence
or not (and it makes no difference) indeterminate epiphanies like those
experienced by Jonas also appear on the opening page of My Year in the No-Man’s Bay
by Glavinic’s illustrious elder compatriot Peter Handke. The novel
lists extreme experiences which seem to signal both something and
nothing at all including, as it happens, the accidental cutting of a
finger to the bone. The narrator also rinses it under a stream of cold
water: "Part of me was numb" the narrator says. "The other part carried
on with the day as though nothing were amiss". They prompt him to
become, or try to become, a passive observer and, in his work as a
writer, to present the world as it is; bone white. To write, what’s
more, against what until then had been a self-contained universe,
itself a kind of death; a world without others. The work of the outside
- something working through him – proved fruitful to his life as nothing else had . . .

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