Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

A Clue to the Exit

London

Chatto & Windus

2000

"Jolting out of his rank and troubled sleep he would transcribe his dream images before they slipped beneath the horizon of consciousness."

Jean-Paul had always been fanatically curious about the nature of his own mind. At his primary school he'd been punished for hanging upside down from the fire-escape, but when he told the headmaster that he'd been testing the effects of more blood flowing to the brain Monsieur Jourdan had privately predicted that Jean-Paul would become a great savant. By the age of eleven, he was eating a plate of Roquefort before going to bed, in the hope of adding to the splendour of his dreams. He had a torch and notebook under his pillow and a chewed ballpoint tied to a string around his wrist. Jolting out of his rank and troubled sleep he would transcribe his dream images before they slipped beneath the horizon of consciousness. As he grew older, he plunged into philosophy and psychoanalysis and emerged from the usual succession of hautes French schools as an advocate of Lacan and the other giant intellos of his youth.
(p.43)

Geography::Horizon

Reading

Edward St. Aubyn, A Clue to the Exit (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000).

09/19/2015