The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

He did not speak to the physician, who was likewise silent.

They are both concealing something and thinking about the next move

Whenever he behaved badly, or questionably, he simply jettisoned the memory, and turned his mind to something else.

So hes a psychopath

He clasped her hands in his

He sees a potential devotee

swelling the total population to some four thousand,

Small, but a lot to be in one place at a time

Every spoke on the great wheel of luck was visible on a Saturday—there were men rising, risen, just falling, fallen, and at rest—and that night every digger would either drink his sorrow, or his joy.

Astrology

lash of wind and rain

The weather is always a threat, like Conrad

dubious oracle

Some irony here, in a book that uses astrology

Tauwhare’s was almost the size of his hand, and polished to a shine; it was made of a dark green stone, clouded with bands of a lighter green,

More precious than gold

pounamu, and the Arahura River was filled with that treasure: smooth, milky-gray stones that, when split, showed a glassy green interior, harder than steel.

He confessed that Tauwhare was the first non-European with whom he had ever spoken; his

This is amazing... I speak to non europeans all the time And even better, wells takes it as an opportunity to make a connection, as opposed to treating him badly

arrived at his cottage with a gift of food, as was their custom—he supplied the meat, and Wells the spirits, an arrangement that satisfied both men.

Love this

The Hokitika cooper had agreed to knock together a pine coffin, ready for the funeral, and to fashion a rounded wooden headstone on which he would paint Crosbie Wells’s name and the two dates that bounded his life.

here i learned a cooper makes more than barrels. I love 'two dates bounding his life'

causing the hallway to shiver. The interior walls of the gaoler’s house were made of patterned calico that had been stretched tight and tacked to the building’s frame, and when the timber creaked in the wind, or was disturbed by a heavy footfall or the sudden slam of a door, the walls all quivered and rippled, like the surface of a pool—so that, watching them tremble, one could not help but call to mind that two-inch space between the doubled cloth, that dead space around the framing, full of dust, and patterned by the moving shadows of the bodies in the room beyond.

Love the calico

carver.

Symbolic to name Franckis Carver

Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: its drift was always onward, away from the past.

The banker spoke with the controlled alarm of a bureaucrat who is requested to explain some mundane feature of the bureaucracy of which he is a functioning part: controlled, because an official is always comforted by proof of his own expertise, and alarmed, because the necessity for explanation seemed, in some obscure way, to undermine the system which had afforded him that expertise in the first place.

The gull returned; the stevedore swiped again, and missed.

no good men, killing birds for fun in shakespeare characters like this are usually murderers who have lost their humanity

Harald Nilssen, born in Christiana,

Is this Christiana the hippy gated community in the netherlands?

How shameful it was (he had thought), to have traveled half the girth of the globe only to see his fortunes fall so far—only to scrabble for scraps beneath the tables of richer, luckier men.

He ran his finger down the edge of the bill, and felt a lonely stab of outrage. He wished, as he had wished many times in the last week, that he could be given someone to blame.

A pathetic person not much strength of character. Only holds strkong feelings aboijt appearances. Vain, petty

(He was not without humor about this practice: he often recounted his abortive episode in the Hokitika gorge, exaggerating the discomforts he had sustained in light-hearted deprecation of his own constitutional delicacy—but this was an interpretation that was reserved for him alone, and he became embarrassed if another man took on this same perspective, so to speak, or agreed with

Fragile character

Nilssen’s

Played by the ghost in the tophat on mike tysons mysteries

being the kind of man who always finished an utterance once he had set his thought in motion.

fearful inhibition on hers. The woman referred to her own self as Mrs. George, and this only in a whisper; she wore the bewildered, panicked aspect of a tortured animal,

Like Conrad again - Shoembergs wife

Nilssen never refused an opportunity to provoke a hypothetical.

This guy reminds me of myself

He had always been irreproachable in his conduct, and as a consequence, his capacity for empathy was small.

Shepard

Played by "bread lion" guy from bakeoff. He was a prison warden

The route over the Alps is still treacherous—unfit for a horseman, much less for a coach.”

amazing!

until something overcame him, not remorse exactly, but a dawning fatigue, an emptiness, and he returned the button to the place where he had found it. Cousin Magnus never knew. Nobody knew. But for months and years and even decades afterward, long after Cousin Magnus was dead, that theft was as a splinter in his heart.

This man may be weak but he does know the difference between right and wrong

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

“Please be so good as to wait a moment,”

I love these manners

snapping out his top hat with such a tremendous crack that the clerk leaped out of his chair.

(Mannering did not speak Cantonese, but he knew a handful of written characters, including metal, want, and die—enough to conduct a pictographic colloquy with the aid of his pocketbook, an object that was by now so heavily marked and foxed with use that he was able to perform very sophisticated rhetorical allusions simply by leafing back through the pages and pointing with his fingers to an old quarrel, an old settlement, an old sale.)

Love this system he uses

The intimacy that he felt when he was with her owed chiefly to the fact that a man is never obliged to discuss his whores with other men: a whore is a private matter, a meal to be eaten alone.

What a line

moved to Georgia to pursue a life of cotton and red earth and (so Pritchard had imagined) an expansive slowness, made of wealth and cloudless skies.

It was a strange thing to behold a whore in mourning—rather like seeing a dandified cleric, or a child with a mustache; it gave one a sense of confusion, Pritchard thought.

No heart

Pritchard had not spoken to Anna about the baby’s death. He did not frequent her rooms with any kind of regularity, and he did not ask her questions when he was there. But he had wept, privately, when he heard the news. There were so few children in Hokitika—perhaps three or four. One looked forward to seeing them as to hearing a familiar accent of speech, or a beloved ship on the horizon, that put one in mind of home.

His mouth began to water.

This guy is weird!

wooden spools of thread,

I havent seen one of those since i was a kid

you give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life.

the next day, Pritchard dubbed the young thing Cromwell, and his father nodded once.)

I love this scene

Charlie Frost was a man of scant reputation, for such a thing is only ever claimed,

He knew the latent power of obscurity (powerful, because it aroused curiosity in others)

Frost was not proud of the fact of his birth, for it was a rare citizenship for a white man to hold,

It was not an unhappy childhood, but Frost was unhappy when he recalled it. When he spoke about England, it was as though he missed that place very dearly, and could not wait to return.

he shredded their letters into spills for lighting his cigars,

my best whore

My best horse

pressing leaves,

I didnt know thus was a female pasttime

to admit that Anna did not at all resemble the fantastic shape of Frost’s phantasmic ideal is not at all to say that the banker did not care for her, or that he did not take his satisfaction like the rest.

How disgusting

We have a saying on the fields: it’s unlucky to be lucky for long.