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[Oilcandide]

RIP Martin Amis who, in writing Time's Arrow, penned one of the weirdest and most fascinating novels it has been my pleasure to read.  His skill as a writer was on a par with Nabokov, Updike, Lawrence, Greene, Orwell...one of the great talents. 

[Hairy Lime]

 No country for this old man:

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/cormac-mccarthy-author-death/index.html

[Oilcandide]

Read Signs and Symbols.  As usual with Nabokov - at any length - there is the sense that not one word is wasted or written carelessly.  There's a richness of details about the old couple that you don't expect in so short a piece.  I got the feeling that N. was inducing in me, the reader, a sort of mild version of "referential mania" by means of a quiet persuasion to go over the details and somehow decode some latent message.  I felt an eerie slippage into a state of overthinking the, erm, signs and symbols, which seemed to get me closer to the son's mental state.  This is the kind of metafictional and fantastic realm also explored by Borges.

What was the third phone call?  Maybe nothing, another wrong number, but I'm left primed for significance and imagining that it is either the son himself or bad news of his demise.  Or perhaps, as per the son's worldview, it is the vast phone system speaking of him. 

Too clever by half, Vladdy boy!

[Hairy Lime]

Hopefully, the punctuation on this will not upset the forum God's.

One.of my all time favorite passages.

She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

[Hairy Lime]

More Vlad,.from something originally a short story later collected in the highly underrated Pnin. Nabokov is often considered sort of a bloodless technician more concerned with wordplay than emotion, but this has always broken my heart.

If one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira s death were possible. One had to forget because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one

[Hairy Lime]

Missed an apostrophe.

If one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira s death were possible. One had to forget because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one s lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one s mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline soaked pile of Beachwood.

[Hairy Lime]

Beachwood,  by the way, being one English translation of Buchenwald. Because Nabokov just cannot help himself. Or spell beech...

[Oilcandide]

Hopefully, the punctuation on this will not upset the forum God's.

One.of my all time favorite passages.

She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

I liked that passage.  Exquisite prose. 

A small step for my local public library today, btw - they have ordered a copy of Pnin (I made several suggestions and they accepted that one).

[Oilcandide]

Have also ordered what is sometimes called the greatest novel of Soviet Era Russia, after reading one sample chapter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita

Am a little surprised this small city library went for it, but my plea included some rather strained linkings of present day Russian events with Bulgakovs satire of Stalinist Era. 

[Oilcandide]

Terra Nullius, by Claire Coleman

This novel seems to be about historical events we are familiar with.  Until the author cleverly and deftly pulls the rug out from under us. 

[Food for Thoth]

The Road to Roswell, by Connie Willis.

An entertaining farce about True Believers, nonconforming aliens, and getting to a wedding on time.