The Last Days of New Paris

by China Miéville

He keeps staring at her journals, thinking of those he once carried. He left them, years ago, when he took his leave of training. An odd homage to his instructors, those spare copies, pages full of their own work.

Raymond Couraud—his nickname, “Killer,” Mary Jayne insisted unconvincingly, a reference to his ongoing murder of the English language

From an overlap in the middle of a Venn diagram, Colquhoun watched him.

In the war notebooks he showed me, Thibaut describes a fishing village of tents below the Quai d’Auteuil. “People dredge with wire, bring up spiral crustaceans that crawl the wet sand sluggishly on human fingers and thumbs. Painted nails. The locals boil them. They winkle steaming hand-meat from the shells and eat without cannibal shame.”