Unausweichlichkeit

It is late at night when I finish Gilgamesh. Two hundred and fifty-one resonant pages of “economical prose”, exposing the characters, the thickening fog of war, and its imminent brutality. And on the far side of the tunnel, all those stories told to me as a child – the toil of the sugar beet fields in Skåne in the fifties – narratives so dense that I can feel them under my skin.

It is the mark of a good book. The English language seems to lack a word here, somewhere between ”inescapable” and “relentless”. As so often, the adjective "unausweichlich" comes to me immediately in German.

03:06. It is high noon along the Eastern seaboard and already six in the evening in Europe. In other words, time to depart for dreamland.