Category: Book Passages

Book Passage of the Week – from The Corpse Walker (9/17/2016)

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Just finished The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu. I’m writing a full review as we speak.

From Zhou, the Public Restroom Manager:

My monthly profits are about two hundred to three hundred yuan. I’m pretty content with that. And for an old guy like me, managing toilets is easy work. Life is tough and tiring. All my nerves are strained. One of these days, one of the nerves will snap, and then I’ll be gone.

Luo, The Corpse Walker:

Country folk seldom got to visit the city and had no access to entertainment all year long. Public denunciation meetings offered free drama for many onlookers. None of them wanted to miss it.

Huang, the Feng Shui Master:

At the moment, my life is coming to an end, reaching zero. Zero is nature. The mountain is my home.

Deng Kuan, The Abbot:

When you turn one hundred, and look back on the early part of your life, a couple sentences are sufficient.

And let’s not forget the introduction, written by Wen Huang:

During the famine, [Liao Yiwu] suffered from edema and was dying. Out of desperation, Liao’s mother carried him to the countryside, where an herbal doctor “held me over a wok that contained boiling herbal water.” The herbal steam miraculously cured him.

There is a lot of mythologizing about Liao Yiwu. Not only was he born the year The Great Leap Forward was launched, he was also “miraculously cured”, a presumably divine act that would later allow him to live on the lam as a dissident writer, barely known in his own country.

Also, this is an abridged work; according to the introduction, Wen Huang chose twenty-seven stories they felt were both representative of the work and of interest to Western audiences.

I’ll be covering this and more in my full review.

Book Passage of the Week (4/16/2015) – from Requiem for a Dream, by Hubert Selby Jr.

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Like Atonement, it helps if you’ve seen the movie…though the book Requiem for a Dream is far better than Atonement.

The writing style? Let’s say it might take some getting used to. It’s also brilliant. I haven’t read Hubert Selby Jr.’s other books, so I’m not sure if this is his regular style, but it works great in Requiem for a Dream:

They looked at Marions sketches of the coffee house they were going to open, but with diminishing frequency and enthusiasm. Somehow there just didnt seem to be time for it though they spent a lot of time just lying around and not doing much of anything in particular and making vague plans for the future and enjoying the feeling that everything would always be alright, just like it was now.

 

 

 

Book Passage of the Week (3/19/2016) – World Gone By, Dennis Lehane

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I recently finished World Gone By. It’s the third book in the Coughlin Trilogy that begins with The Given Day.

I loved The Given Day and Live by Night. This one? I didn’t enjoy it as much as the others. World Gone By is much shorter than the other two books. Things are smaller scale, more like wrapping up the loose ends than telling a full story from beginning to end.

It’s Dennis Lehane, so there’s going to be some good prose. Here’s a couple passages I really liked:

He only saw Montooth’s face in the muzzle flash, it appeared out of the darkness like something disconnected from the man’s body, like a death mask in a fun house, and then the windshield spiderwebbed.

And this, which might spoil Live by Night:

The light took flight from his wife’s eyes. He watched her cross whatever transom led to whatever world or void lay beyond this one. In the final thirty seconds of her life, her eyelids fluttered nine times. And then never again.

And you know what? Fuck it, here’s one more:

[Joe] waited for others to come. He hoped they would. He hoped there was more to this than a dark night, an empty beach, and waves that never quite reached the shore.

If you’re going to read World Gone By, you’re better off starting with either The Given Day or Live by Night. Live by Night is more essential since both it and World Gone By have the same main character.

Book Passage of the Week (2/28/2016) – from The Alchemist

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The Alchemist is one of my favorite books. I read it my senior year of college, right after France decided they didn’t want me as a teacher and a few months before China did.

I’ve read it several times since then. I underlined a lot of passages, took a lot of notes. What you see below is just one of many:

“Well, why don’t you go to Mecca now?” asked the boy.

“Because it’s the thought of Mecca that keeps me alive. That’s what helps me face these days that are all the same, these mute crystals on the shelves, and lunch and dinner at that same horrible café. I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.

“You dream about your sheep and the Pyramids, but you’re different from me, because you want to realize your dreams. I just want to dream about Mecca. I’ve already imagined it a thousand times crossing the desert, arriving at the Plaza of the Sacred Stone, the seven times I walk around it before allowing myself to touch it. I’ve already imagined the people who would be at my side, and those in front of me, and the conversations and prayers we would share. But I’m afraid that it would all be a disappointment, so I prefer just to dream about it.”

The plot of The Alchemist borrows from the folk tale “The Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream“, which itself has many variations throughout the world, such as Pedlar of Swaffham.

And the passage above reminds me of the following exchange from Collateral, a very underrated movie:

Vincent: Look in the mirror. Paper towels, clean cab. Limo company some day. How much you got saved?

Max: That ain’t any of your business.

Vincent: Someday? Someday my dream will come? One night you will wake up and discover it never happened. It’s all turned around on you. It never will. Suddenly you are old. Didn’t happen, and it never will, because you were never going to do it anyway. You’ll push it into memory and then zone out in your barco lounger, being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life. Don’t you talk to me about murder. All it ever took was a down payment on a Lincoln town car. That girl, you can’t even call that girl. What the fuck are you still doing driving a cab?

Guy gets on the subway and dies. Think anybody’ll notice?

 

Book Passage of the Week (2/15/2016) – from In the Country of Desire, by Leslie Garrett

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I just finished In the Country of Desire, by Leslie Garrett.

This, and Beasts, his other book, are both out of print. They’re easy to come by — I grabbed a used copy off Thriftbooks — while information on Leslie Garrett is not so easy to come by. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. He was a contemporary of Cormac McCarthy, and the best I could find was this page:

As my friend Leslie Garrett lay dying of cancer that clutched him by the throat, news came that his old comrade and competitor, Cormac McCarthy, had just realized his greatest professional triumph–winning the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses. The award catapulted McCarthy to the front ranks of American letters. Less last book, In the Country of Desire, meanwhile, was dying like its author–a slow, painful wasting in obscurity.

I’ll cut to the chase: I didn’t enjoy the book. It was fairly well written, but I didn’t care about the people  that much. I do plan on checking out Leslie Garrett’s first novel, Beasts.

Here’s a couple passages that stuck with me:

There is a street in the city dedicated to lonely men. It serves not the ordinary loneliness of ordinary men, which is wistful and longing, but that loneliness which deadens the spirit and makes the mind and body scream. And yet these are the quietest of men.

And:

Willa had asked where God lived, and her grandmother had told her that he lived so far up in the sky that no one could see him. Later Willa went to the woods and climbed as far up in a tree as she could go and searched the sky for hours, but she could not see God. Now she thought that perhaps, in her own way, that was what her mother had been searching for too: the face of God that no one ever sees.

An average book despite some nice writing. Worth checking out if you’re into obscure books.