Passages I loved from novels I read this year
As I did last year, rather than make a big year-end list or rankings, I’m going to select some passages that particularly struck me from the novels I read this year. Most of these books I’ve written about in the newsletter before, and linked to the posts.
I sat down to collect these and found that there are far too many for one email — there are so many I want to share. Part two to follow next week.
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From The Good Soldier, perhaps one of the most sneakily fucked-up novels I’ve ever read (see what I wrote about it earlier this year):
Yes, Leonora was extraordinarily fair and so extraordinarily the real thing that she seemed too good to be true. You don’t, I mean, as a rule, get it all so superlatively together. To be the county family, to look the county family, to be so appropriately and perfectly wealthy; to be so perfect in manner — even just to the saving touch of insolence that seems to be necessary. To have all that and to be all that! No, it was too good to be true. And yet, only this afternoon, talking over the whole matter, she said to me: “Once, I tried to have a lover but I was so sick at the heart, so utterly worn out, that I had to send him away.” That struck me as the most amazing thing I had ever heard. She said: “I was actually in a man’s arms. Such a nice chap! Such a dear fellow! And I was saying to myself, fiercely, hissing it between my teeth, as they say in novels—and really clenching them together—I was saying to myself: ‘Now, I’m in for it and I’ll really have a good time for once in my life—for once in my life!’ It was in the dark, in a carriage, coming back from a hunt ball. Eleven miles we had to drive! And then suddenly the bitterness of the endless poverty, of the endless acting—it fell on me like a blight, it spoilt everything. Yes, I had to realize that I had been spoilt even for the good time when it came. And I burst out crying and I cried and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine me crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the poor dear chap like that. It certainly wasn’t playing the game, was it, now?”
I don’t know; I don’t know; was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not county family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the time, for the matter of that? Who knows?
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From Speedboats, by Renata Adler:
“Can you have dinner Thursday night?” Simon asked. Jim was in Atlanta. “It will be very late. Have a sandwich or something before. I’ll pick you up at seven. Don’t ask where we’re going. It will be a surprise.” The surprise was a five-hour performance of Parsifal. This implied a misunderstanding so profound that I kept looking at Simon from time to time to see whether he meant it as a shaggy-dog sort of joke. Mostly, he was asleep. Whenever he woke up, he was so evidently happy to be there, at that interminable spectacle in that vast auditorium with too few aisles. He would grin. I would grin. He would go back to sleep. The worst part, I think, comes near the end, when the hermit sings to Parsifal about how wonderful it is that Parsifal has brought the Spear, which will, after so many years, relieve the suffering of Amfortas, the Fisher King. The aria itself lasts nine years. One is aware of Amfortas, waiting in pain, while this long-winded hermit and Parsifal exchange congratulations and amenities. Narrative conventions do make it quite impossible for them to bring the king the Spear, and then, when he is no longer in pain, sing on about their sympathy for him, in all those years, and their great gladness that a remedy is at hand. The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with. Yet there one is, with an emotional body English almost, wishing that pole-vaulter over his bar, wanting something to happen or not to happen, wishing somebody well. Amfortas was not even on stage. In fact, there was no Amfortas. Yet, more than I wished that I were elsewhere, more than I wished that the opera were over, I did wish that they would bring that king his Spear.
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From The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford:
There is no betrayal like voice betrayal, I can tell you that. Women hate it. Sometimes X would hear me say something — something as innocent as saying “Wis-sconsin” when I usually said “Wis-consin” — and turn hawk-eyed with suspicion, wander around the house for twenty minutes in a brown mood. “Something you said didn’t sound like you,” she’d say after a while. “I can’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t the way you talk.” I, of course, would be stumped for what to answer, other than to say that if I said it, it must be me.
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From Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates:
The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until, each was saying what the other most wanted to hear — until he was saying “I love you” and she was saying “Really, I mean it, you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you’d started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying “I’m sorry, of course you’re right” and “Whatever you think is best” and “You’re the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world” and the next thing you knew, all honesty, all truth, was far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people.
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From The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampadusa:
“I’ve explained myself badly; I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than foreign dominations and ill-assorted rapes; this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous slackness and hellish drought; which is never petty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as a country made for rational beings to live in should be; this country of ours in which the inferno around Randazzo is a few miles from the loveliness of Taormina bay; this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of a hundred and four; count them, Chevalley, count them: May, June, July, August, September, October; six times thirty days of sun sheer down on our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success; you don’t know it yet, but fire could be said to snow down on us as on the accursed cities of the Bible; if a Sicilian worked hard in any of these months he would expend energy enough for three; then water is either lacking altogether or has to be carried from so far that every drop is paid for by a drop of sweat; and then the rains, which are always tempestuous and set dry river beds to frenzy, drown beasts and men on the very spot where two weeks before both had been dying of thirst.
This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere; all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”
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I didn’t write about this one, but here’s An Apprenticeship, or: The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector:
she sat down to rest and was soon pretending that she was a blue woman because the dusk later on might be blue, pretends she’s spinning sensations with threads of gold, pretends that childhood is today and silver-plated with toys, pretends that a vein hadn’t opened and pretends that from it in whitest silence scarlet blood isn’t pouring, and that she isn’t pale as death but this she was pretending as if it really were true, amidst the pretending she needed to speak the truth of an opaque stone so it could contrast with the glinting green pretending, pretends that she loves and is loved, pretends that she doesn’t need to die of longing, pretends that she’s lying in the transparent palm of the hand of God, not Lóri but her secret name that for the time being she still can’t enjoy, pretends she’s alive and not dying since in the end living was no more than getting ever closer to death, pretends she doesn’t drop her arms in confusion when the threads of gold she’s been spinning get tangled and she doesn’t know how to undo the fine cold thread, pretends she’s clever enough to undo the knots of ship’s rope that were binding her wrists, pretends she has a basket of pearls just in order to look at the color of the moon since she is lunar, pretends that she closes her eyes and beloved beings appear when she opens her eyes moist with gratitude, pretends that everything she has isn’t pretend, pretends that her chest is relaxing and a weightless golden light is guiding her through a forest of silent pools and tranquil mortalities, pretends she isn’t lunar, pretends she isn’t crying inside.
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From Saggitarius, by Natalia Ginzburg:
Towards evening the place began to fill up and my mother tried to eavesdrop on the conversations around her; these conversations always struck her as fatuous, but even so she would have been more than happy to join in; but where were all the cultured people, the intellectuals, the writers and painters, those to whom my mother was planning to offer cups of tea in her gallery? She had attended a few meetings at the literary club, but even here she had been disappointed: the lectures were infrequent and dry and only attended by a few old people who fell asleep in the middle. My mother had been to one lecture on a composer called Béla Bartók; the name had sounded suspiciously Polish, and from the Poles, according to my mother, one could hardly expect anything of quality. On another occasion a slender, pretty young man with a tiny button nose had flitted about the room on the tips of his toes, reading extracts from a novel about a whale; the whale had been very boring and all the little old people around her had dozed off, but my mother endured to the end, sitting motionless in the front row and fixing the youth with her bright black eyes. Seen close up, the youth had the face of a worn forty-year-old, like a rosy fruit pinched by the frost. But the youth, the little old people, the room and the whale did not, it seemed to my mother, add up to real culture. Where then, was real culture to be found? Where were the real intellectuals? Where were they hiding?