Something came up, and I had to interrupt reading James Salter and start reading Gideon Lewis-Kraus instead. I know Gideon from a few years back, he was recommended by a friend, Christopher and I were looking for somebody to help us with this 80*81 research about the great and overlooked shift in world history, Reagan, Thatcher, the Chomeini, The Human League etc. He did work with us, I think, for the briefest of time and then left, left us, left Berlin, it had all become too boring for him, it seemed, too flimsy, too n*importe quoi: “Everybody else in Berlin was either twenty-two, just out of leafy liberal arts colleges and in flight from the responsibilities ahead, or they were thirty-nine, just out of a career or a relationship and in flight from the responsibilities behind.” This is how he describes it when he came, it must have been around 2008, I would guess – and when he left, a few years later, he was not convinced that there was much much more to it. He had partied, he had made friends, it had been “an experiment in total freedom from authority” as he writes in his compelling, light-hearted yet sufficiently melancholic memoir A Sense of Direction which I read. It has come out a while ago in the US and comes out now in Germany and is full of beautiful sentences about this enigma that Berlin is, always will be, the naughts in Berlin will be like Weimar without the big bang, they will just all leave at some point, I am afraid, all the people that make this city worthwhile, and we will be left with dead old stones or ugly new stones. “The whole point of living in Berlin was being an agent in the world of total possibility”, Gideon writes, and it is a fare-well. He went on to walk through Spain and Japan and the Ukraine, he might be back in Berlin someday or on these pages. For the moment there is his book, it is a bit like Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel just funnier and better written and full of live, less fenced-in, it is also a bit like Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, just even more personal and memoirish and open. There is a sense of no direction, obviously, that is common to these books. They are the male equivalent to the prose of Miranda July or Leanne Shapton or Sheila Heti. In the future, when people will want to understand everything about these times, about these wars without a sound reason, about these budget crisis, financial crisis, demographical, spiritual, individual crisis, about this treck of people moving forth and moving back or sitting still while moving, in the future they will look at these books in total incomprehension. They know the grammar, but they don*t know the grid.