William Rohner > Recent Status Updates

I read the first seventeen pages while on vacation and then left this book on the plane flying home. This may be my unconscious offering an early review.

"He refilled my glass to its previous level and set the bottle down. The alcohol said: So a man of ninety is forgetful, has some gaps, moments of confusion. So a ten-year-old has growing pains. Apple Stores will open by nine."

"And the behaviour of the cat was somewhat peculiar. It was soon noticed that when there was work to be done the cat could never be found. She would vanish for hours on end, and then reappear at meal-times, or in the evening after work was over, as though nothing had happened. But she always made such excellent excuses, and purred so affectionately, that it was impossible not to believe in her good intentions."

"...to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable –– else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?"

"Sometimes after listening to the droning voices in the chapel and in the classrooms, he had fled from the confines of Cambridge to the fields and woods that lay southwestward to it. There in some small solitude, standing on bare ground, he felt his head bathed by the clean air and uplifted into infinite space; the meanness and the constriction he had felt were dissipated in the wildness about him."

"He rubbed his rump ruefully."

"Johnny, yawning still, burst into noisy tears and was slapped by Bill till he choked on them."

"In the firelight Hannah's eyes seemed to have the colour and texture of the skin of crème brûlée."

"The two older boys flinched when they heard the shameful syllable. Snakes were not mentioned now, were not mentionable."

My favorite -- or second favorite -- reread every year! Every time I seize on new sentences that are super-cool, like the second one above.

"The reporter kept using the word dacha. He stood at an angle to the camera, allowing a clear look at the villa, the dacha, through an alley of pines. . . . Then she talked about the dacha. Found dead facedown outside his dacha. They searched for security in the word, self-confidence. It was all they knew about the man and the crime, something Russian, that he was dead outside his dacha outside Moscow."

"Goda has the affronted air of someone who lurks in corners to hear herself spoken ill of so that she can hold tight a grievance to suckle."

I know some people must like it, but to me there is nothing so boring and banal as detailed descriptions of food, which are served up on seemingly every page of this overlong book.

I am finding this aspect of the book, among others, to be terribly tedious and tiresome.

"...war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious."

"I felt then, as I remember having felt in childhood, very unhappy, somehow humiliated, but determined not to think, determined to seek refuge in sleep. I knew that I would sleep very well and I did. I rushed towards unconsciousness as a ship that flies towards a black storm cloud which covers the whole of the horizon."