Torn

Found a great bookstore in Wellington, dealing in all kinds of second hand books, cheerfully known as Arty Bees Books. If you're in the vicinity I heartily recommend it. I picked up a copy, in excellent condition, of Charles Palliser's The Unburied at a good price, and could have bought a lot more books had we room in the luggage. Actually I slightly hesitated over the Palliser given the luggage conundrum, but then remembered how brilliant his blockbuster The Quincunx was and how his stuff seemed to have disappeared from bookstores, in Singapore at least, after his debut, and heartily made it mine.

Another mild aspect of my hesitation is the fact that I'm engrossed in Perec's Life A User's Manual and don't want to be distracted. The thing is that Perec has a lot to offer of an obsessive nature but little in the way of narrative drive. The encyclopaedic cataloguing typical of every section of his Manual makes for fascinating reading but the fragmentary nature of it all means that, for me at least, there's little forward momentum. (In fact, I only got beyond page 100 today.) If The Unburied is anything like The Quincunx it's going to be strong on pace and plot, and I feel the need for some of that, in between holidaying, but I don't want to be unfaithful to my original novel.

Not a bad dilemma to deal with.