Status Updates From Angelica's Grotto

and the book goes splat!

and the book goes THUD

and the book wiiiiiiiiilts

'At three o'clock in the morning the ward was fully itself, a place of darkness behind the membrane of apparent reality, a realm where nothing was certain and everything in doubt, an enclave of enforced intimacy where strangers hawked, spat, snored, farted, and peed in bottles while nurses ministered to them in stealth and whispers.'

'Do you think I'm a danger to myself and society at large?'

'I think everybody's potentially a danger to himself and society; everybody is like a grenade that's safe until you pull the pin but it isn't always easy to know when the pin's been pulled.'

'Yes, I abased myself at her feet. Do you want her shoe size?'

'It's the final landfall and I'd like to fetch a good one, maybe die in the middle of a really classy paragraph or a wholly improper act. But not in hospital.'

'The dead sail with us....'

'He had no instruments, only himself, his thousandfold memory and the dead who sailed with him, chanting the names of winds and swells and stars.'

'....she was a creature of quickness and memory, a magic of wind and wood, winged with a landfall-hungry sail, rigged with ropes of nothing-forgotten, keeled with the shape of answer-the-sea.'

'When the partridges had left the pear trees....'

'Being a Jewish atheist....'

'The strangeness of things....'

'There is a never-enoughness in such looking....'

"Confusion is nothing new to me; I'm like those people who divide their time between a house in London and a villa in Tuscany except that I do it between confusion and panic."

OMG, allcaps chat logs. This is worse than the rape fantasy

rape fantasy ack

'....entranced by Angelica's beauty, the suppleness of her body, and the expression on her face as she was penetrated in every orifice.' welp, here we go

The Underground was Klein's favourite means of transport; in the end-of-September dusk the trains were poignant as they rumbled westward to Wimbledon, eastward to Tower Hill, Barking, Upminster. Look at our golden window, they said. Ride with us; we are the safe haven between the troubles at either end.

On the cover of the edition I'm reading says: "a novel about Internet sex". Don't be misled by this. It is about much, much more. Deep, disturbing, beautifully touching at times and questing.