nancy babich

July 12, 2012



There are books i will return to.
Orlando, Brideshead Revisited, Great Expectations.
Not due to a love for the story but because of a lack of connection.

I first read The Catcher in the Rye when i was in my early teens.
I hated it.
Loathed it.

Picked it up again a few years later and fell hard for Holden Caulfield and his placid rage against the 'norm'.

Why did i go back to this book?
Easy.
I already knew why people hated it so vehemently, but i wanted to know why people loved it beyond reproach.

Thus why i found myself attempting to read Don DeLillo's, Cosmopolis for the second time.
Yes, there's a movie now and yes, i like to read books before the adaptation so i can get really pissy at everything they do wrong.
Hello Francis Lawrence, why did you bastardise one of my most beloved novels?
Why?

Unfortunately, i still feel absolutely nothing for Don DeLillo's Manhattan, let alone his frigid lead character.
Maybe that's the point.

I guess this is one i'll come back to, later.

There were a couple of lines in the centre of the story that i'd like to keep hold of though:

'Then came the flower cars, ten of them, banked with white roses rippling in the breeze. The hearse came next, an open car with Fez lying in state at the rear in a coffin angled upward to make the body visible, asphodels everywhere, fleshy pink, the flowers of Hades, where souls of the dead come to find meadowy rest.'

'Yes, they spun on their heads, bodies upright and legs spread slightly, and one of the breakers had his hands cuffed behind his back. Eric thought there was something mystical about this, well beyond the scan of human encompassment, the half-crazed passion of a desert saint. How lost to the world he must be, here in the grease and tar of Ninth Avenue.'



Listening to: True Widow 'I.N.O.'
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