The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson’s.
I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it – nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasnt up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.
I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I’m not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.
I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.
Some people don’t realize that a straight ‘No’ can be the kindest answer in the world.
These days, every politician is a laughing-stock, and the laughter which occasionally used to illuminate the dark corners of the political world with dazzling, unexpected shafts of hilarity has become an unthinking reflex on our part, a tired Pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly.
Well, he and his wife had both been devout evangelicals for a while. They had these two kids and then she had an incredible job giving birth to the next one. The upshot was that she lost her religion – with a vengeance – and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda.
Am I the same person that I dream about?
And so they sit at home, getting fat on the proceedings and here we all are. Our businesses are failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down, the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath. I hate the Winshaws, Fiona. Just look what they’ve done to us. Look what they’ve done to you.
You know she wanted you to vote the other way. It’s her future, you know. She’s the one who’s going to be around the longest.
Politics can make people do terrible things.
C’ erano poche cose altrettanto intime per lei che curiosare insiemeba qualcuno tra i libri.
Whatever else it throws at you, life will always have pleasures to offer. And we should take them.
The gods would be moving on, in other words; and I, a mere mortal, would be left behind, forgotten.
Here I sat down and closed my eyes, tilting my face towards the sun and listening to the gentle lap of the blue water against the rocks. Perhaps it was my destiny, after all, to be always alone: that was the tragic, self-dramatizing thought that came to me, and in some paradoxical way it also brought me a kind of comfort, reconciling me to what seemed, at that moment, to be my essential nature: introverted, melancholy and solitary.
So as well as hating you, they also hate them – whoever they are – these faceless people who are sitting in judgement over them somewhere, legislating on what they can and can’t say out loud.
Billy might have known it for several months by now, and I might only just have begun to grasp it, but we had both come to the same realization: the realization that what we had to give, nobody really wanted any more.
My daughter was right: young people do not notice the feelings of their parents, are not even aware that they have feelings, most of the time. They live in a blissful state of sociopathy, as far as their parents’ emotions are concerned.
As you get older, the hopes get smaller and the regrets get bigger. The challenge is to fight it. To stop the regrets from taking over.
My poverty was always a source of disappointment to her. If only she could have waited a few years.
In circumstances this desperate there is only one thing that can console me. I always keep at least three different kinds of Brie in the kitchen for emergency situations.