Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

In medias res, thrust into a situation we know nothing about. The common mysteries of the outsider who is us. Watching two people angry with each other and yet gentle.

So mysterious and mysteriously satisfying. After the cathedral of DeLillo’s Underworld, I am ready for Davis’ spare rooms of the mind. Clinical precision, the miniaturist’s touch, the Zen eye for behaviors.

“I was a stranger here. I knew Manhattan only at street level, fitfully, and felt a little isolated, and the place scared me with its knowingness, its offhand vaunt, a style of mind and guise that can be harder to learn than some dialect of the Transvaal. Everybody knew the same seven things. But it could take you years to work through the list and by that time the number would be different, or the whole list.”

I feel like I’ve finally passed the point at which most readers give up. And there are treasures abounding. The Black and White Ball. J. Edgar Hoover and his Clyde. The Jesuit priest quizzing Nick on the names for every part of the shoe.