Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

“...the endless inspired catastrophe of New York “

“Janet didn’t know how to look at the desert. She seemed to resent it in some obscure personal way. It was too big, too empty, it had the audacity to be real.”

“He knew he wasn’t part of some superficial state that people like to borrow from when they say they’re feeling paranoid. This was not secondhand. This was real and deep and true. It was all the one-syllable words that mean we aren’t kidding. It was also familiar in some strange paleolithic root-eating way, a thing retained in the snake brain of early experience.”

Rapturous writing. I don’t care that this novel meanders all over time and space, there’s a special hand moving over this. A command of one’s craft, an incandescence in each line, a vision of the world that is unquestionably Delillo’s.

Love every moment.

“He maintains a presence near the door, a hearable something, maybe just the tension of a man standing on a linoleum floor or some tone that comes off his body, a tightness that says he’s home.”

This is how Manx Martin is introduced. Brilliant.

“We were lighter than air, laughing, and the balloon did not seem like a piece of science so much as an improvised prayer.”

P. 124

Delillo always alert to the poetry of the moment.

Waste management. Americans’ true natural gift.

So many stunning sentences: “It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.”

Amazing amazing amazing to dwell in the mind of such a writer as Delillo. His embrace of the world is cold but expansive, rich in detail and so tolerant of human failing. There’s genius in every sentence.