Sara Mobarak’s Reviews > Independent People > Status Update

“It is for Asta Sollilja and her beloved that cheap poets and misanthropists and liars write books full of sunshine and dreams and beautiful sun-gilt palm-avenues to fool them and ridicule them and insult them. All that her loved one possessed were these dreams. And the ability to drink himself stupid.”

“The ship that in autumn lies deserted on the shore, rudderless, mastless, used no more; the bird that cowers low in shelter, likewise in the autumn, featherless and forlorn, driven before the storm; the harp that hangs trembling on the wall, silently mourning its owner's fall-all this was her poetry, all this she understood.”

“The varied life implicit in all this noise affected the bewildered child with a sad sense of her own isolation, her own insignificance; she stood outside the boundaries of life; this great house was to her comparable in its way with the book about the secrets of love, full of seductive charm, but closed.”

“It was a string in his breast that snapped, one of those delicate childhood strings which break before one has had time to realize that they are
capable of sounding; and these strings sound no more; henceforth they are only a memory of incredible days.”

“All she felt was surprise. She could not understand the woman who had risen that morning from her bed, sleepless, armed like Death with a scythe. She put on her clothes, pinned a shawl round her head and shoulders, and was the same woman as yesterday; but the sheep had stopped bleating.”