A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser Page A

and on, in a neat sequence.
    The book has developed an incomparable form for turning this natural sequence of events into a natural concurrence. If you read a book from the first line to the last, it adheres to the conventional pattern of all existence. But sometimes we might open a book inthe middle, fix on a sentence and then read from there, as a guest in the future, so to speak. Some books even ask to be opened at random. Then they throw out an idea such as:
    He who ordained, when first the world
    began
,
    Time, that was not before creation’s
    hour
,
    Divided it, and gave the sun’s high
    power
    To rule the one, the moon the other
    span
.
    Valerie was struck by how Michelangelo’s words had been translated and made anew for a different time by John Addington Symonds.
    Valerie became increasingly accustomed to opening books wherever she fancied. She’d get curious and would investigate what was happening at the same time at a completely different point in the story. She could have warned Anna Karenina (another of those books that the elderly bookseller had made no comments on). She could have helped Nicholas Nickleby or Harry Potter. She would have fallen hopelessly in love with Mr Darcy and she would have cheered on Hal Jam from Kotzwinkle’s cryptic parable,
The Bear Went over the Mountain
.
    Occasionally she’d put the book she was reading down on the little table outside the shop, close her eyes for a moment, listen to life going on around her, think of her old aunt or Sven (although rarely of Sven these days), before picking up the book again and reading on from where the wind had blown it. Sometimes this would allow her to rediscover a part she’d already read, but more importantly discover it in a new way; sometimes she found herself in a completely different scene, leaping straight into it as if it were a life that till then had been completely alien to her. Discovering a book meant freely rising above the demands of everyday life and uprooting your own existence from the here and now in order to plant it elsewhere.
    It was the day on which the letter from the university arrived. She had failed to re-register at the beginning of the semester. Now she was informed very prosaically that she’d been ex-matriculated. Valerie ought to have been expecting this. But she simply hadn’t thought about it. To tell the truth, thoughts of the university hadn’t crossed her mind at all. A mistake. For now reality was striking back with merciless bureaucracy.
    The note lay on the desk like a tax bill or like a love letter from the most stupid boy in the class. Itmade her feel aggressive. What had she done wrong to make them chuck her out just like that? OK, she’d missed a few tests, but she could retake them next semester or the one after that. She’d skipped a few seminars – in fact, all of them – but there was no consistent rule about obligatory attendance. If in the end she knew everything reasonably well she could get her credits and take the exam, maybe even obtain a better grade than if she’d hung around the campus the whole time slurping cappuccinos from the vending machine. In any case, what she was doing here was nothing other than applied business management – the practical application of what she could only learn in theory at university. In other words, it was far more important, it was learning by doing, it was real! ‘Damn it!’ she exclaimed, scrunching up the letter before propelling it with all her strength beyond the waste-paper basket. ‘What am I now? Student? Business economist? Bachelorette?’ She stood up, took a deep breath, suppressed the tears she could feel welling up, and sighed. Was that six semesters squandered? All her studies a waste of time? And for what? Without the opportunity to turn her bachelor’s degree in to a master’s, she could forget all her dreams of a great career in consultancy.
    She turned