jacob graham’s Reviews > The Vorrh > Status Update

2/2: "The Frenchman was amazed and embarrassed at such a poignant answer to the question that had formed between his mouth and his mind, in the vapour of his heart, and evaporated in exact proportion to the intensity of their physical response."

1/2: "They turned . . . to look more intently at the Limboia, who instantly stopped moving and turned into their enquiry, staring back. Then, in unison, [they] unbent the index fingers of their left hands, raised their arms, and pointed to their own hearts . . ."

". . . [W]hite men always told you where they were. They sent out a bow wave, so that the earth and its animals would murmur, well in advance of their arrival. Their wake was immense. Crushed and contaminated, the land was forced to repair itself, even after the gentlest of their journeys."

"He possessed, or was possessed by, something else: a crippled soul, which might just pucker into genius, if only he allowed his wretched shred of joy to grow. She had seen it . . . The fruitless mangle of emotions, spurred and strangled by the auto-cannibalism of guilt. The humiliation of being animal, the whipping into cruelty of lost affections."

". . . [T]here was a . . . steep, carboniferous limestone valley. Glaciers had edged their razoring weight through, cutting twisting canyons and gouging out riverbeds, so that overhanging walls of jutting cliff leered above. At one point . . . the lofty, sheer sides almost touched, either side approaching the other with a heightened tone of suspense; remembrance, perhaps, of historical connectedness."

2/2: "This is the breath of the sickly wind called Burascio by the natives of the land; a wind that sucked rather than blew, it's hot, inverted breath giving movement but not relief. It toys with expectation by animating suffocation, tantalising the arid earth with its scent of rain, while beneath the reservoirs, caves, and cisterns strain their emptiness towards its skies."

1/2: "The heat of the day has become saturated with weight, the brightness sullen and pregnant with change. Clouds have thickened and coagulated with inner darkness; water is being born, heavy and unstable."

2/2: "It grabbed at his memories and perverted them with elaborate motivations, succulent in their weirdness, making stupidity and pride fuck on the hallowed ground of his genius."

1/2:". . . [H]is own mechanism of creative invention had turned on him . . . the brilliance of his literary deceit had a vindictive twin, who could not see why his little word game, if it was so clever, should function only in his languid fiction. Each day it had started to apply the same rules of composition and invention to his life, twisting pleasure and experience into worthless jokes."

"It was the museum that changed everything and explained the volume of their lies . . . [I]t was lofty and dark; everyone whispered . . . respectful of the gods who lived there . . . On the far wall were pictures. Almost in a trance, he walked closer to these, a memory of his village, pinned to the wall and drained of color. This was the final sacrilege; the exposure of the sacred, the dead, the souls of the living."