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M Sarki
Besides being a poet with four collections published, M Sarki is a painter, film maker, and photographer. He likes fine coffee and long walks.
M Sarki has written, directed, and produced six short films titled Gnoman's Bois de Rose, Biscuits and Striola , The Tools of Migrant Hunters, My Father's Kitchen, GL, and Cropped Out 2010. More details to follow. Also the author of the feature film screenplay, Alphonso Bow.
Currently reading
L'Appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home
We Learn Nothing: Essays
Elmet: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived: Short Stories
The Double Life of Liliane
At Home with the Armadillo
American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank
Autumn
Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd (Reading Edition)
American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank
I was hooked immediately to this book after reading the first hilarious paragraph. The narrator had over-confidently entered the Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest held annually in Key West but he was the only person who thought he actually looked like Hemingway. Because he had a beard and was fat, and the fact that he was a writer I suppose, gave him reason to believe he qualified. Problem was nobody else did. The judges ruled him ineligible to participate as they determined him as bearing absolutely no resemblance to Hemingway at all. Short synopsis of the book is the narrator attending some conference and giving a three day lecture about how he became a writer, how he began his writing career while living in a Paris garret he rented from Marguerite Duras in the early seventies, how he hung out with other eccentrics, writers, and artists, continually dropping the names and anecdotes involving personalities such as Samuel Beckett, Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, and more often than not, his beloved hero of the page as well as life itself, Ernest Hemingway. It was in Paris where the narrator completes his first novel that actually initiates the true beginning of his writing life.
Enrique Vila-Matas came to me via Roberto Bolaño's book Between Parenthesis where Bolaño championed the work of Vila-Matas. I immediately ordered the Vila-Matas Bartleby & Company novel that was nothing less than charming and gave me options aplenty for new and interesting Spanish-speaking writers to discover as well as an education regarding the preference of certain writers to decide not to do anything rather than write or publish their work. But this review is about Never Any End to Paris and as the story unfolds Vila-Matas draws you into his world. The experience feels natural and by fits quite delightful. Not as good in my opinion to Bartleby & Company, Never Any End to Paris is certainly worth the time, and money well spent.