Missing Hitch

The novel I was reading Friday was Fateless by Imre Kertész. It must have been waiting near here by the computer. I was stepping into the shower when my wife told me that Christopher Hitchens had passed. I completed the novel that day. It appears appropriate for myriad metrics.

My choice to then later read The Successor by Kadare was influenced, if not dictated, by the passing of the Dear Leader. Somewhere lurking within was my recollection that Hitchens once smirked that the loony totalitarian North Korean state would implode by the publication of an essay he penned 6 years ago. That wasn't to be, but the Albanian master sparkled in his political novel about the mysterious death of Mehmet Shehu in 1980.


Each passing day sheds more of this oblong pain which I find so awkward about someone I never met. I read two novels by David Lodge (Small World and Home Truths) and a collection of stories by Ian McEwan, (Between The Sheets) perhaps to staunch some related wound.