NOVELS
Photograph by Adam Birt
TRIO 2
[Please click on the title, either above or in the column to the right, for more information on this book.] Excerpt 1: The Baroness sipped champagne. "I am often told, Herr Brahms, that I resemble Emilia Rontgen. Do you not find that it is so?" Emilia Rontgen was an actress, renowned for her roles onstage and off, also for her beauty. Brahms gripped his champagne glass in his left hand, his third refill, a cigar wedged between the fingers of his right. "Hahah! Yes, I find it so - indeed, I do." The Baroness smiled, standing closer. "Do you really?" Brahms laughed again. "Yes, really. I simply cannot tell the two of you apart. When I am next to one of you, I invariably wish it were the other." Excerpt 2: They continued to hold hands. Brahms was visiting for just a day. His train left within an hour. When Marie came to remind them of the time the two had risen but held each other tightly, Clara’s cap askew against Brahms’s shoulder, her face wedged against his beard but lit by an inner brilliance as they swayed gently together, seeming to dance – in three-four time and prestissimo though they hardly moved – and Marie said nothing, shuffling softly backward out of the room. SERVANT, MASTER, MISTRESS
[Please click on the title, either above or in the column to the right, for more information on this book.] Excerpt: In the eyes of the world they had a successful marriage, but such success had less to do with love than a willingness to do what the world wanted, whatever you wanted for yourself. Such marriage was a matter of commerce masquerading as a matter of the heart. If you were rich you married someone who was rich, but if you were rich and somehow handicapped (either irascible or enfeebled or stupid or old) you married someone less rich – and less irascible, enfeebled, stupid, or old. The continuums ran from rich to poor, healthy to sick, young to old, smart to stupid, fairskinned to dark, beautiful to ugly, vivacious to drab, powerful to powerless, upper class to lower – and English to Indian. You defined yourself by the person you married. His parents exemplified the principle: Dolly spirited, unworldly; Savak dull and rich. That they also loved each other he found incidental, too immature to see beyond the complementaries, blind to the Gordian knot of affection between them. A WOMAN MADLY IN LOVE
[Please click on the title, either above or in the column to the right, for more information on this book.] Excerpt 1: "It’s no big secret. The difficulty is putting it into practice. The way to be loved is to be loving – selflessly loving, without expectation of return. A loving person is a loved person, and a loved person is a loving person. If you have been loved as a child, it is easier to be loving as an adult – but if you haven’t been loved as a child it is imperative to be loving as an adult. It is the only remedy – the only recipe for happiness." Excerpt 2: Toiling in the vineyards of genius, scholars manufactured themselves from the assembly lines of universities parroting dogma in the name of freedom of thought – experts certified by degrees rather than the lash of life, bottling in books the lives of the great in the quest to be bottled themselves. TRIO
[Please click on the title, either above or in the column to the right, for more information on this book.] Excerpt: Beethoven had been the first thunderer, sweeping arms like windmill vanes, preferring the catharsis of expression over the taste of the moment, but he differed from Liszt in one important aspect: the accuracy of his notes may sometimes have been in doubt, but never his emotion; Liszt’s notes were never in doubt, but his emotion was always suspect. His hands appeared to multiply, now above the piano, now to one side, now to the other; his fingers multiplied no less, separating from his hands like so many lizard tails, scurrying across the keyboard. ASYLUM, USA
[Please click on the title, either above or in the column to the right, for more information on this book.] Excerpt: Let me elaborate. People lose limbs, they lose livelihoods, they lose children. Starving beings feed on themselves as malignly as any virus or maggot or carnivore, turning muscles to food, until skin wraps like paint around bones. We have attestations from Ethiopia, from Treblinka, lives full of flesh and blood reduced to figures by Giacometti. Whole species have been lost, whole races, we have perpetrated Nagasaki, Chernobyl – and what had Riff lost? One woman? Oh, boohoohoohoo. What was that again? She had lied to him? yes? betrayed him? yes? with her heart? yes? Oh, poor little boy, so sad, so sad. Oh, boohoohoohoo again and deepdeepsigh. So sad, so sorry, so what? Who cares? Let it go. For the great part of his life the great part of his needs had been met. THE MEMORY OF ELEPHANTS
[Please click on the title, either above or in the column to the right, for more information on this book.] Excerpt: How does a six year old cope with the loss of his sweetheart? He puts himself in quarantine, he lowers his resistance, he searches out toxins as if they were grail, he dreams of reunitemnt (pupal angels in a Hansel and Gretel heaven). In the two years that followed I contracted mumps, jaundice, chicken pox, typhoid, two kinds of measles, three kinds of flu; I underwent a second tonsillectomy, an appendectomy; I had yet to run through cholera, small pox, tuberculosis, and whooping cough, but something I read and someone I met so exposed the selfindulgence of my quarantine that even the most benighted eyes (mine) began to see. |
|
