July 2012
17 posts
3 tags
khair continued
“It is best not to be forced into a defense of your habit, an accountancy of your hours — which is what the law will demand. Once you have to explain, defend, justify yourself, it hardly matters whether you lie or speak the gospel truth — every word rips a bit of you out of yourself and strews it where anyone can trample it.” But even if the book is kind of a muddle, I do think this...
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khair continued
“It is difficult for Amir Ali to follow Fetcher’s conversation, not just because of the way he speaks but also because of the sediment of other languages — all that have ever been deposited in the nooks and crannies of London — swirling around in the muddy torrent of his English. Amir has never been able to figure out how many of these are languages Fetcher understands, at least in...
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tabish khair, the thing about thugs
“What do we call this gentleman? John May calls him M’lord. The heavy portals of his city house swing open almost at the very moment he alights from the fly, as if his servants keep vigil all through the deepening night, and the servant who holds the door open also has no other name for him but ‘M’lord.’ No name could be more appropriate for him, and dare we decipher from the family arms on the...
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child continued
“No point in being the bait in a trap and then hiding your light under a bushel. Not that I had ever been sure what a bushel was. Some kind of a small barrel, I assumed. In which case the light would go out anyway, for want of oxygen.” You get this every so often in these novels: Reacher as The Man Who Fell To Earth. Some kind of a small barrel?
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lee child, the affair
“This was 1997, remember. Four and a half years before the new rules. A long time ago. A much less suspicious world.” So I spent some time on the beach. Anyway. This is apparently the one they’re making into a Tom Cruise vehicle, which is an impressive example of miscasting. You can make Jennifer Lawrence a brunette; you can’t make Tom Cruise a great huge physically imposing guy. But anyway...
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kay continued
“Two butterflies have landed on Anton’s candytuft hanky chief. Red admirals. “‘Red admirables,’ I says.” But even in tiny slices you can see the movement. Here’s a younger Louise, showing the difference between her perception and her self-presentation, with the right name for the butterfly sitting next to hanky chief, and then her out loud mispronouncing. A page or two later — and this is...
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kay continued
“I see me striding through shadow and light. I buy a bottle of fizzy pop from a kiosk and sit down in the shade to drink it. I see me asking the bright women about the stuff, spread on the mats. Coffee? Beans? They pour through my fingers hot from the sun. I see me arranging my pillow hands and laying my weary head on them. I see my fingers feeding a suggestion of food into my mouth. I’ve got a...
5 tags
“Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things”... →
Alice Gregory, in the Observer, writes a very well-thought-out, very negative review of Joe Meno’s Office Girl. She’s driven crazy by slightly different things than those that disappointed me (“Jack and Odile think of themselves as different but don’t have the intelligence to articulate why or the motivation to do the things that would prove it to be true;” “there is...
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i j kay, mountains of the moon
“The fluorescent light strip is everywhere, painfully clean, liquid in the white flor, solid in the black window, curving on the metal kidney dish, in the arms of the chrome tubular chair, turning lethal off the needle. Brilliant light, Armageddon white has finally come to take me out.” The highest register of Kay’s style here, which only comes through very occasionally, but which illustrates the...
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josh bazell, wild thing
“The real answer is that, like for most scientists, lake monsters, ghosts, superpowers, and UFOs are part of what got me interested in science in the first place. So my heart’s been broken for that shit for years. You get old enough, you make your choice: you accept what science actually is and decide to do it anyway, or you find something that lets you keep the illusions you have...
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flynn continued
“Boney keeps clutching my hand and murmuring, My God, what you’ve been through, do you think you feel up to answering a few questions? That fast, from condolences to brass tacks. I find ugly women are usually overly deferential or incredibly rude.” Again, acid; but also another unfortunate point for Detective Boney. Do you ever find yourself sympathizing with fictional characters for the...
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flynn continued
“The waitress, a plain brunette disguised as a pretty brunette, drops by, sets our drinks on the table.” One thing that clearly happens is that Flynn’s writing — the strength of her prose, her imagery — gets markedly better the meaner her characters get. She flounders a little with earnest, or pathetic, or even creepy, but is perfectly at home in tones of acid and poison.
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flynn continued
“I sometimes leave out details like that. It’s more convenient for me. In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn’t have to stoop to the womanly art of self-articulation. I was sometimes as guilty of playing the figure-me-out game as Amy was. I’ve left that bit of information out too.” The book starts out on the day of Amy’s disappearance, alternating chapters between Nick’s present-day...
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gillian flynn, gone girl
“Finally, the cops came in and sat at the table across from me. I fought the urge to laugh at how much it felt like a TV show. This was the same room I’d seen surfing through late-night cable for the past ten years, and the two cops — weary, intense — acted like the stars. Totally fake. Epcot Police Station. Boney was even holding a paper coffee cup and a manila folder that looked like...
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dorothy b hughes, the expendable man
“Hugh took off his dinner jacket and hung it in the wardrobe. He put on his gabardine topcoat. He looked like a musician at the end of a party, the soft dress shirt and black tie, the tuxedo trousers.”
This description comes just after the explicit reveal of Hugh’s secret, the reason for his extreme nervousness in picking up a runaway, his fear of the police. None of it has anything to do with...
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wilson continued
“‘What I don’t get,’ she said in a more conciliatory tone, ‘is how non-Westerners can move back and forth between civilizations so easily. I mean, look at all the Eastern writers who’ve written great Western literature. Kazuo Ishiguro. You’d never guess that The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go were written by a Japanese guy. But I can’t think of the reverse — any Westerner who’s...
