Mark Newton > Recent Status Updates

Part 6 becomes Part 7 on page 670. Okay.

Great, she’s a morphine addict now

“Anna Karenina f*cks around and finds out”

“Levin suddenly became aroused at these words because in the depths of his soul he was afraid it was true - true that he wanted to balance between communism and the established forms and that this was hardly possible.”

Tolstoy’s stand-in says in the middle of an 800-page book: “For him words took away the beauty of what he saw.” Okay dude.

Tolstoy is like “these socialites, whom I hate and all believe these things which are very stupid, had a beautiful social gathering”

“For my dog”:

Buried / unable to hear the autumn wind

A guy literally falls onto his beanbag and is immediately shot and stabbed to death

“Just think what a time it is now! And you and I are living it these days! Only once in eternity do such unprecedented things happen.”

Was not expecting “and that’s when I became……… no longer human…..”

I feel like I’m going insane trying to understand the text. Terms like “Hillman” (an old British car) get thrown around without any secondary descriptors, and it feels like every conversation is between two aliens on two different planets. The *basic* premise is clear, but Greene isn’t making this easy.

p136:
"Good to be alive, eh?” they said to each other, with characteristic English unreserve. “Glad to be alive on a night like this, eh?” - in a world toppling with monster guns and violent death.

p159:
The music swelled and fell as the waves of warm, moon-swayed water rolled round and round, and the dancers dreamed that life was beautiful, in a world toppling with monster guns and violent death.

“She had no money, she ate a great deal of butter, she was only twenty-one, and she had come, at his express and urgent request, to reside at The Eagles for life.”

Love it.

Sigh. Hysterical girlfriend is literally smacked into sense after the titular Jim breaks up with her. She walks out of the room, and thinks “what a pity she wasn’t better-looking.”

I guess this is funny to a certain kind of edgelord (which I gather Amis was), but man. This is not “the finest and funniest comic novel of the twentieth century,” as billed by nyrb.

The most divorced dad writing ever. Finder has invented discounts and bargain bins at Trader Joe’s but is aware of Two-Buck Chuck.

Onto Penelope!!

Finally past Circe. Almost hohohohohome

oh god I’m only halfway

Chugging along past Bloomsday…

Ugh the Switch 2 comes out next week