After several years of observing the barrage of praise that’s been heaped upon Cloud Atlas by friends and critics, I finally sat down to read it, convinced it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. One hundred pages in, I’d already dismissed David Mitchell’s well-loved book as nothing more than a garish, sprawling, unfocused coterie […]
“I asked Meronym if Abbess spoke true when she said the Hole World flies round the sun, or if the Men o’ Hilo was true sayin’ the sun flies around the Hole World. Abbess is quite correct, answered Meronym. Then the true true is diff’rent to the seemin’ true? said I. Yay, an’ it usually […]
“Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world’s. This slippage will stretch your skin, sag your skeleton, erode your hair and memory, make your skin turn opaque so your twitching organs and blue-cheese […]
“Implausible truth can serve one better than implausible fiction.” ––Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, pg. 49
In this novel’s table of instructions, Julio Cortázar states that Hopscotch “consists of many books, but two books above all.” The reader is given a choice: read the book in normal fashion and stop at the end of Chapter 56 (in which case a large portion of the book will remain unread), or jump between […]
“‘We’d all like to have a millenary kingdom, a kind of Arcadia where it would probably be much more unhappy than here, because it’s not a question of happiness, Doppelgänger, but where there wouldn’t be any more of this dirty game of substitutions that occupies us for fifty or sixty years, and where we could […]
“Emmanuèle lay down on the floor of the truck, face down and wailing, and Oliveira put his feet on her behind and settled himself comfortably on the bench. Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a […]
This book’s title might connote a tense battlefield, with ruler-brandishing teachers firmly entrenched against the remonstrations of an angry citizenry. But, like any serious student of history, author Dana Goldstein knows such simplistic images belie the messy truth about wars, which is that they are rife with broken borders, double crossings, unexpected victories, and crushing […]
“All pain attacks me with a double-edged sword: it makes me aware as never before of the divorce between my ego and my body (and its falseness, its consoling invention) and at the same time it brings my body close to me, dresses me in it as pain. I feel it to be more mine […]
“‘Why fool ourselves? It’s impossible to live with a puppeteer who works with shadows, a moth-tamer. Someone who spends his time making pictures out of the iridescent rings the oil makes on the Seine is unacceptable. Me, with my padlocks and keys that I make out of the air, me, writing with smoke. I’ll save […]