"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the extra person in the room."
- Sylvia Plath / The Bell Jar
"I felt like a race horse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like a date on a tombstone."
- Sylvia Plath / The Bell Jar
"I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
- Sylvia Plath / The Bell Jar
"He sat down in his living room and looked at the walls. They had once been white, he remembered, but now they had turned a curious shade of yellow. Perhaps one day they would drift further into dinginess, lapsing into grey, or even brown, like some piece of ageing fruit. A white wall becomes a yellow wall becomes a grey wall, he said to himself. The paint becomes exhausted, the city encroaches with its soot, the plaster crumbles within. Changes, then more changes still."
- Paul Auster / The New York Trilogy
The Lemur
Just finished the wafer-thin novella, The Lemur by Benjamin Black and for a while couldn’t believe this limp suspense coming from the same person who authored the Man Booker winner The Sea (one of my favourite reads). Well even if this is under a different pen name.
I’d admit I was more seduced by its cover - a somewhat poetic mugshot of a man masked by a cloud of smoke, presumably cigarette smoke. Never judge a book by its cover hasn’t been more true - the barely-there run-of-the-mill plot is as thin as the number of pages (132) could offer, the unlikeable characters flat as the book. Despite the skimpiness, the story proceeds at turtle pace and all the frustratingly slow build-up culminates in a whimper.
The novella suffers from the limitations from its original format - a New York Times Magazine’s serialization (you can read it online!). And undoubtedly, it worked better in that format or better still, like what the NYT Mag’s illustrations suggest, a graphic novel. But as a full fledged novel, disappointing.
