June 2010
29 posts
5 tags
valtat continued
“Hadn’t I already begun to suspect that with feelings, as with revolutions, the more spontaneous-seeming were actually the outcome of long and involved tactical maneuvers? And if, unfortunately, you had to make do without being ‘natural,’ wasn’t it better to act as consciously, as deliberately, and therefore as forcefully as possible? Just because a feeling had been...
3 tags
jean-christophe valtat, 03
“Whatever its literary merits, the poetic force of the name provided much of its appeal and gave me easy food for thought. On the one had, it demonstrated, according to a tacit law almost universally observed, a sort of national principle by which the more pastoral a place-name sounded, the more safely you could assume that the official Arcadia hid the empty eye-sockets of blight: moldering...
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(and back to) nicholls continued
“She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two year-old self would think of today’s Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two year...
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(back to) jones, continued
“Note Found in February’s Pocket by the Girl Who Smells Of Honey and Smoke: I wanted to write you a story about magic. I wanted rabbits appearing from hats. I wanted balloons lifting you into the sky. It turned out to be nothing but sadness, war, heartbreak. You never saw it, but there’s a garden inside me.”
What Jones does here is construct a fable, a non-realist story to...
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david nicholls, one day
“Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we...
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nicholls continued
“What, Harry and Sally and me? Oh, I don’t think so, do you?”
Hm. Emma thinks she’s in a Muriel Spark book, and that makes sense. But does Ian know, when he asks this, that he’s only being looked in on by the reader once a year, on July 15th — the ‘one day’ of the title, that we see pass year by year and chapter by chapter for twenty years?
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nicholls continued
“… but here, face to face, there was nothing but a compulsion to riff. Emma got this a lot. The boys on her PGCE course were all pro-am gagsters, especially in the pub after a few pints, and while it drove her crazy she knew that she encouraged it too, the girls sitting and grinning while the boys did tricks with matchsticks and jammed on Children’s TV or Forgotten Confectionery...
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shane jones, light boxes
“February was kidnapping the children and burying them at the edge of town. Anytime he looked into the town and felt sadness he sent a group of priests armed with shovels to dig a new hole. What February didn’t know was that not all the children were dead. Some were learning to survive underground, had built an elaborate series of underground tunnels. Someone was helping them.”
...
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brackmann continued
“I see the green-and-white Starbucks sign, and all I want to do is sink into that familiar environment, with the wood-grain tables and the cool jazz music and the nice coffee smell and the hiss of steaming milk.” And again, the mochaccino. The best stuff Brackmann does comes in her descriptions of the expat strangeness of China, and the overwhelming desire for the familiar (not to...
6 tags
brackmann continued
“The way the military determines if you have post-traumatic stress disorder is, they look at how many traumatic and stressful things you personally experienced. Things like being in combat, seeing your buddies get blown up, things like that. So, I wasn’t in combat, and even though I was a convoy medic for a while and that was pretty fucking stressful, I never saw my buddies get blown...
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lisa brackmann, rock paper tiger
“Two weeks later, I got transferred to this new FOB because they were down a medic, who I later learned had gotten shrapnel in his head and throat from a mortar round. He didn’t die, though, and I heard he only drools a little, so consider him Private Lucky Motherfucker. Because this FOB just sucked. No mochaccinos there. The place was just about the size of a football field, if that....
“… and I would tell them that what mattered in the French language was not...”
– Alain Mabanckou, Broken Glass
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mabanckou continued
“… I’m opposed to accepted beliefs, as far as I’m concerned the earth is as flat as the Avenue of Independence that runs past the door of Credit Gone West, that’s all there is to say about it, I delcare the earth is sadly immobile, that it’s the sun that goes whizzing around us, because that’s what I see as it rises over the roof of my favorite bar, so...
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mabanckou continued
“… I won’t go back over all that because even when I’m drunk I hate useless repetition or padding, as used by certain writers known to be first-class drivellers, who serve up the same old stuff in every new book and try to make out they’ve created a world, my eye”
Laila Lalami’s very good, very long review in the UAE’s The National opens with this:...
“I just pretended I had no interest in his story, I’d heard so many...”
– Alain Mabanckou, Broken Glass | Soft Skull 06.01.10
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cronin continued
“He found himself wondering if Van Helsing’s trick with the jewelry-box mirror wasn’t some version of what had happened with the pans in Las Vegas, and if, as Van Helsing claimed, a vampire ‘must sleep each night in his native soil.’ Was that why they always came home, the ones who had been taken up? At times the movie seemed almost to be a kind of instruction...
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cronin continued
“In fact, there would come a time, not much later, when Peter would learn to expect such things from her — extraordinary things, unbelievable things. But that night, in the howling space between the Humvee and the train, what Alicia did seemed simply miraculous, beyond knowing. Nor could any of them have known what Amy, in the engine’s aft compartment, was about to do, or what...
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cronin continued
“He was telling a story, Wolgast could see, gesturing with his cup to make some point or pace a punch line, inhabiting the role of the handsome fiber-optic salesman from Indianapolis — just as Amy had done with the woman in line, spinning out the detail of the sick grandmother in Colorado. It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon...
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justin cronin, the passage
“There were visiting days, of course, but Carter hadn’t had a visitor in all the time he’d been in Terrell except for the once, when the woman’s husband had come and told him that he’d found Jesus Christ who was the Lord and that he’d prayed on what Carter had done, taking his beautiful wife away from him and his babies forever and ever; and that through the...
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mina continued
“Bannerman had judged it wrong, he was too angry, too loud, and everyone sat still around the table. Morrow watched a bubbled fleck of Bannerman’s spit that had landed on the tabletop. The skin thinned and the bubble burst.” Interrupting the high-stakes interrogation where our investigators bring out a chief piece of their puzzle; just three sentences breaking up a long stretch...
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mina continued
“Pat reached out to pick up a copy and felt the texture of the rough paper kiss his fingertips, smelled the hot fat as sweet, the daylight glinting on the greasy wall as a sparkle. That she existed made the tawdry present bearable.”
Here the incompetent crim picks up a newspaper in a bodega, with a picture of the sixteen-year-old girl he’s shot in the hand the previous night on...
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denise mina, still midnight
“He strove to be different because he wasn’t. Her ambition was to fit in and she couldn’t. Jealousy made her focus on him, notice small vulnerabilities like the occasional sunbed flush to his skin, how he often implied credit to himself for other people’s work, and although superficially confident, how lost he sometimes looked in the company of other men.”
...
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lepan continued
“No doubt a novel of this sort will provide fodder for philosophical debate on the wider arguments concerning whether or not humans should kill and eat non-human animals; indeed, I hope it does.”
In fact, LePan distances his horrors enough to require a conclusion, written in his own voice. Setting aside the question of the book’s future impact, as a novella-sized paperback...
“But over the years the mistrust started to wear away, and all the things that...”
– Don LePan, Animals | Soft Skull 06.01.10
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lepan continued
“It was individuals of this sort who established the new cuts, and adapted old butchers’ vocabulary to describe them. As a rule there were fewer points of connection between the names and the specific parts of the carcass than there had been with beef, pork, or chicken. Terms such as rolled roast or circle steak or Denver slice were used in preference to flank steak, say, or shoulder...
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don lepan, animals
“It was asserted on a variety of fronts that the loss of dogs and cats was in its way as great a loss to humanity as that of beef or pork or cod or chicken, some said an even greater loss. The loss of meat had allegedly left a yawning gap in human nutrition — at least in rich countries. The gap left by the loss of dogs and cats was not one of nutrition (except in China, Vietnam, and a...
1 tag
“There’s a big default notion that ‘spare,’ or ‘precise’ prose is somehow better....”
– China Miéville. You know when you discover a writer and they remind you why you started reading in the first place? I’ve just started Perdido Street Station. (via marginalgloss)
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schupack continued
“Poor Margolis, Billy thought. He was the last to realize that money had lost its currency on Sylvan Street.”
Groans softly, puts head in hands.
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schupack continued
“That the money had found a better home on Sylvan Street, among deserving people, seemed all right to Daniel, although his wife, and, he gathered, other neighbors, had turned it into some kind of morality play, though just who the enemy was no one knew. Everything was black and white with Shoshanna. With him, it was all gray. How could their marriage survive?”
This from the...
