Posted in Quotable, tagged quotations, quotes, word love on September 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Wish I’d said it myself: Lisa Moore’s astute argument for character driven novels (From Saturday’s Globe) :
Character is plot, because character moves, leaves traces, is formed and reformed and doesn’t stand still. Character is action. Character is a shifting, mesmeric entity in the hands of a skilled writer, and it is the changes in a character that create energy in a novel, that propel it forward.
Posted in Quotable, tagged alice munro, globe and mail, quotations, quotes, word love on September 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »
This week, not a passage from a book, but from Anne Enright’s eloquent and elegant Globe and Mail review of Alice Munro’s new collection, Too Much Happiness:
Most importantly, these stories are not asking for our praise, they ask for our attention. They are not written for the crowd, but for the individual reader. They don’t ask for noise, but for silence — an not an awed silence (though awe is certainly possible), but the silence that happens when you close a book and pause, and continue with your life, less lonely than you were before.
Posted in Quotable, tagged quotations, quotes, word love on August 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
One of my favourite opening paragraphs (from one of my favourite books). It’s got it all — humour, foreshadowing, history, and a wonderful inversion of the fairy tale opening while maintaining many of its fantastical elements:
I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesized me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate – at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time.
– Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
