Two kids get on a bus...

Here's the thing, just yesterday I was sitting on the number 7 bus, and two school kids got on and started talking about Brodsky. I don't know why I was so surprised (mind you they still kept checking their mobiles as they talked).

What gets left of a man amounts
to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech. 
(Joseph Brodsky, 1976)

The Banlieue of Lompleques

Although it is an irrefutable fact that we all invent ourselves, it is seldom done with the deliberate forethought that Fabio Gerentless gave to his creation. But his first project was to construct an imaginary world in which to set his new character, for although he was at peace in his new environs in New Caledonia, Noumé itself did not satisfy his creative urge. So stone by stone, house by house, street by street, he brought into being the banlieue of Lompleques (it being understood that his use of the term banlieue had specific exotic connotations).

The Extraordinary Diary of Fabio Gerentlas

When Fabio Gerentlas reached the venerable age of fifty-six he looked back on his life with little satisfaction. He had done what people had expected, he told himself. But inside he felt he had let himself down. He had not achieved anything that he himself would accept as worthwhile.

And so in his fifty-seventh year he resolved to change everything. He resigned from his job as an administrator in the Government Actuary’s Department advising his superiors on project and enterprise risk, divorced his unsuspecting wife and bought a one-way ticket to New Caledonia. Here in Nouméa he set up household with a kanak teacher who taught French officials how speak Drehu. As Fabio's creative skills were primarily literary (he had little artistic or musical ability), he decided that he should become a diarist - but life was simple and uneventful, so he devised instead a fictional record of extraordinary complexity. And the main motif was time.