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192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
The fact that the huge ship Titanic, with its deck lights and searchlights, with its roaring boilers and its cabin fires, with its freight of smiles, music, and champagne, with its women’s unshaven love nests, should have smashed into the guardian of the glacial realm now seemed to Mark to be the most natural thing in the world.
In chains, with eyes swollen from beatings, the prisoner is dragged right to the top of Olympus. Rubberneckers congregate to get a look, and all around they exclaim, "So it was Tantalus who did this monstrous thing!"
[...]
When it wakes up again, Olympus seems all sleepy-eyed. After its indeterminate absence, dawn doesn't quite know how to come upon the world, having lost its old habits. Here and there you can see a few puddles of night lying around, with rubbish collectors trying to shovel it up as if it were night soil. The whole place is buzzing with rumours about immortality. Some people think of it as an infinite number of particles spread around the body; others imagine it as a device that can be redirected towards the impossible; but most people see it as a key to some secret door. But these ramblings do not last long. By noontime, the stories have become utterly muddled... In the taverns, people say that Tantalus was less greedy for immortality than he was for food and drink. The crimes he committed - which still cannot be named - should be put down to his insatiable appetite. They even say he's going to be sent down to hell for voracity.
In the early days of the new era, people no longer gave a penny for official opinion, as they became free, from one day to the next, to adopt the opposite point of view. But to their great surprise, no significant change occurred. As in the past, once they got home from work, they would hear about events in such a mangled way that the stories were often completely distorted. Gradually, it became clear that, as for many other things, such distortions of the truth had nothing to do with politics. Apparently, for reasons still not understood, rumor, vivified over the weekend by the smells of good food and Grandmas burps, had a hard time when it encountered the atmosphere of the office, the clacking of typewriters, the secretaries' lipstick, and, last but not least, the stern gaze of the boss.
Even if you could never say that the office had won out completely (as soon people got home, they had to negotiate the mule-like persistence of grandmas, often reinforced by children just back from school), even if, in this constant ebb and flow of home and office, office and home, rumor was never quite exempt from further shaping before it settled down into its definitive form, the first major impact on it, what might be called "the Monday spin," was always the principal determining factor.