Daniel > Recent Status Updates

'We go down towards the Champ, walking along the blank streets. Autun is silent, but it sleeps like an ancient woman. It hears every scrap of sound without even waking. It is ageless. It can see in the dark.'

'All the way to Dijon she is somewhat disinterested in him'.

Quite a solecism for such a well-written book.

'I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that.'

'They vanish into hotel rooms - one cannot follow. There are long silences filled with things I ache to know...' (p46).

I haven't decided yet if this is beautiful writing or a parody of literary fiction. (Need they be mutually exclusive?) The double entendres. The unreliablest narrator of them all ("None of this is true"). The fixation with the colour blue. The presumably intentional vagueness that keeps you re-reading paragraphs to try and figure out how they relate to the previous paragraph, spatially and temporally.

I'm still loving this but I'm putting it aside for a few weeks to rest my eyes, which are starting to protest after weeks of staring at screens for 14 hours a day and then reading a finely-printed book.
I may consider getting an ebook version if I can be sure of getting the same edition.

'There have been times when [...] I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em'ly to have had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight; and when I have answered Yes, it would have been.' (p48)

'[...] try to think as if I died when I was little, and was buried somewhere.' (p459)

'[...] Mrs. Waterbrook, who was a large lady - or who wore a large dress: I don't exactly know which, for I don't know which was dress and which was lady - came sailing in.' (p378)

'I was going out at my door on the morning after that deplorable day of headache, sickness, and repentance, with an odd confusion in my mind relative to the date of my dinner-party, as if a body of Titans had taken an enormous lever and pushed the day before yesterday some months back[...]' (p372)