I love reading novels. It’s one
of my addictions, I feel lost without one in my hand or on my mind. I love how
completely i get to wear the skin of another person when reading them, how
absorbed I am into the world that has been created in there, how everything
recedes and suddenly there are a million, million possible realities with people
I care about and fall in love with and hate and detest. I wanted to share some
of my favourite passages from the books I read this January.
100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE BY
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ TRANSLATED BY GREGORY RABASSA.
(a magical book, both in writing
and by the occurrence of magic, that
follows a family and their fortunes through 100 years of upheaval and change in
a south American country.)
…the devil had probably won his
rebellion against God, and that he was now the one on the heavenly throne,
without revealing his true identity in order to trap the unwary.
Walls eaten away by bone-salt,
the broken down wooden balconies gutted by fungus, and nailed to the outside
door, almost erased by rain the saddest cardboard sign in the world: Funeral
Wreaths for sale.
She asked God, without fear, if
he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many
troubles and mortifications.
The sun came out with such
strength that the light creaked like a fishing boat.
Time also stumbled and had
accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a
room.
BONES OF THE HILLS BY CONN
IGGULDEN.
(a historical fiction book about
the spread of the Mongol empire Genghis’ Khanship, the writer skilfully
imagines the motivations and inner desires of the Mongol rulers)
There are some who will tell you
they seek happiness, that there is nothing more to our lives than that simple
aim. I tell you now that the sheep are happy on the plains and the eagles are
happy in the air. For us, happiness is a small thing, one to be discounted in a
man’s life. We strive and we suffer because through those small things we know
that we are alive.
The Arabs judged dawn as a time
when a black thread could be distinguished from a white one.
Life was just a restless fever
dream, a short breath between longer sleep.
When you are afraid and you do
nothing that matters…it eats at men when they think they are cowards. How you
raise your sons and daughters matters. This wife who warms you at night
matters. The joy you take in being alive, the pleasure of strong drink,
companionship and stories-all that matters. But when you are dust other men go
on without you.
HALF OF A YELLOW SUN BY NGOZI CHIMAMANDA
ADICHIE
(a beautiful book based during
the 3 year Biafran civil war. The book had one of the most beautiful women in
the world and her twin sister who though she wasn’t as beautiful I couldn’t
help falling in love with.)
Perhaps it was why an erection
eluded him: the gelding mix of surprise and desire.
We don’t have dowries, we have bride prices
You and yours will live, and I
and mine will live. Let the eagle perch and let the dove perch and, if either
decrees that the other not perch, it will not be well for him.
If God could make them care so
genuinely, God was a worthy concept.
The slow sadness of missing a
person who was still there.
ON BEAUTY BY ZADIE SMITH
(this follows a family that’s
half british(the father) and half American(the mother and children because
culture matters more than genes sometimes) it is a story of the effects of beauty and adultery
and the need to laugh with the people you love.)
“Halleluiah” by Leonard Cohen
playing on her dime-store record player, that song Howard liked to call a hymn
deconstructing a hymn.
The tears you cry for someone you
never met who made something beautiful that you loved.
She called a rose a rose. He
called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around
the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
The unmistakable Poles and
Russians introducing the bones structure of Soviet Realism to an island of
chinless, browless potato faces,
It takes a lot of practice to
ensure that a whole bottle of Cabernet and a pint of beer makes only a slight
dent in your sobriety, but Howard felt he had reached this stage of
accomplishment
The smiled the kind of smile you
might employ when trying to convince a lunatic to quit holding a gun to your
mother’s head.
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF
BEING BY MILAN KUNDERA.
(the protagonist cannot be
faithful, this is his curse, he’s amazing with women this is his blessing, he
falls in love with one woman and is thus cursed to forever hurt her. It’s a
book about how painful love can be both for the person hurt and the person being
hurt.)
No, vertigo is something other
than fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and
lures is, it is the desire to fall, against which terrified, we defend
ourselves.
When the strong were too weak to
hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
It was a recapitulation of time,
a hymn to their common past, a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story
that was disappearing in the distance.
Extremes mean borders beyond
which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a
veiled longing for death
Every Frenchman is different. But
all actors the world over are similar- in Paris, in Prague , or the back of
beyond. An actor is someone who in early childhood consents to exhibit himself
for the rest of his life to the anonymous public. Without that basic consent
which has nothing to do with talent, no one can become an actor. Similarly a
doctor is someone who consents to spend his life with human bodies and all that
they entail. That basic consent(and not talent or skill) enables him to enter
the dissecting room during the first year of medical school and persevere through
the requisite years.
Es muss sein, es muss sein, ja, ja, ja, ja!(it must be, it must be,
yes, yes, yes, yes!) and the fourth voice chimes in with Heraus mit dem Beutel(out with the purse!) a year later the same
motif showed up as the basis for the fourth movement of the last quartet, Opes
155. By that time Beethoven had forgotten about Dembscher’s purse. The words Es
mus sein! Had acquired a much more
solemn ring, they seemed to issue directly from the lips of Fate. In Kant’s
language even Good Morning, suitably pronounced can take the shape of a
metaphysical thesis. German is a language of heavy words. Es muss sein was no
longer a joke it had become der schwer
gefasste Entschulss(the difficulty of weighty resolution)
Men who pursue a multitude of
women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and
unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess
the endless variety of the objective female world. The obsession of the former
is lyrical: what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an
ideal can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The
disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a
kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled
philandering. The obsession of the latter is epic and women see nothing the
least bit touching in it: the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and
since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to
be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic
womaniser strikes people as lacking in redemption(redemption by disappointment.)
because the lyrical womaniser always runs after the same type of woman, we even
fail to notice when he exchanges one mistress for another. His friends
perpetually cause misunderstandings by mixing up his lovers and calling them by
the same name. In pursuit of knowledge, epic womanisers(and of course Tomas
belonged in their ranks)turn away from conventional feminine beauty, of which
they quickly tire, and inevitably end up as curiosity collectors. They are
aware of this and a little ashamed of it and avoid causing their friends
embarrassment, they refrain from appearing in public with their mistresses.
This is the image from which he
was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of
woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a
nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has
discovered or said something essential about. But isn’t it true that an author
can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss
for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one’s own stomach during a
moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path
of betrayal; raising one’s fist with the crowds of the Grand March; displaying
one’s wit before hidden microphones-I have known all these situations, I have
experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my
curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own
unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally
horrified by them all. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
It is that crossed border(the border beyond which my own I ends) which attracts
me the most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The
novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in
the trap the world has become. But enough. Let us return to Tomas
We all need someone to look at
us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we
wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number
of anonymous eyes, in other words for the look of the public… the second
category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many
known eyes. They are tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are
happier than the people in the first category who, when they lose their public,
have the feeling that lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This
happens to all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the
other hand can always come up with the eyes they need…then there is the third
category, the category of people who need to be constantly in the eyes of the
one they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of the people
in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close and the
room will go dark…and finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the
category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present.
They are the dreamers.
LOLITA BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV.
(the main character is a paedophile.
The great success of this book is that you can empathise with such a disgusting
character, that you can bear to see out of his eyes for however long it takes
you to read it and it’s a pretty long book. It’s also so beautifully written it’s
possible to transcribe the whole book, which means that paradoxically I highlighted
much less)
As different as mist and mast
The result of considerable
literary inbreeding in modern fiction
(On asking for directions) or
else they went into such complicated explanations, with geometrical gestures, geographical
generalities and strictly local clues.
