Clara's inexplicable dedication to Ryan Topps knew no bounds. It transcended his bad looks, tedious personality, and unsightly personal habits. Essentially, it transcended Ryan, for whatever Hortense claimed, Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity. (查看原文)
She was not to know that women never stayed as daylight in Archie's life; that somewhere in him he didn't like them, he didn't trust them, and he was able to love them only if they wear haloes. (查看原文)
No white knight, then, this Archibald Jones. No aims, no hopes, no ambitions. A man whose greatest pleasures were English breakfasts and DIY. A dull man. An old man. And yet...good. He was a good man. And good might not amount to much, good might not light up a life, but it is something. She spotted it in him that first time on the stairs, simply, directly, the same way she could point out a good mango on a Brixton stall without so much as touching the skin. (查看原文)
The heat prompted rivulets of sweat to spring out all over his body, seeping through the turtleneck to the mohair and giving off an unmistakable odor of damp dog. Clara, of course, was all cat. She wore a long brown woollen Jeff Banks dress and a perfect set of false teeth; the dress was backless, the teeth were white, and the overall effect was feline; a panther in evening dress; where the wool stopped and Clara's skin started was not clear to the naked eye. And like a cat she responded to the dusty sunbeam that was coursing through a high window onto the waiting couples. She warmed her bare back in it, she almost seemed to unfurl. Even the registrar, who had seen it all--horsy women marrying weaselly men, elephantine men marrying owlish women--raised an eyebrow at this most unnatural of ... (查看原文)
In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue. (查看原文)
And this is what Alsana really held against Samad, if you want the truth, more than the betrayal, more than the lies, more than the basic facts of a kidnap: that Magid should learn to hold his life lightly. Even though he was relatively safe up there in the Chittagong Hills, the highest point of that low-lying, flatland country, still she hated the thought that Magid should be as she had once been: holding on to a life no heavier than a paisa coin, wading thoughtlessly through floods, shuddering underneath the weight of black skies... (查看原文)
Something to rationalize, to explain, why one would keep returning, like Freud’s grandson with his fort-da game, to the same miserable scenario. But time is what it comes down to. After you’ve spent a certain amount, invested so much of it in one place, your credit rating booms and you feel like breaking the chronological bank. You feel like staying in the place until it pays you back all the time you gave it—even if it never will. (查看原文)
P. K.'s was split into two halves, male and female. In the male section, as relentless Ragga came unevenly over a battered stereo, young boys had logos cut into the backs of their heads at the hands of slightly older boys, skillful wielders of the electric trimmers. ADIDAS. BADMUTHA. MARTIN. The male section was all laughter, all talk, all play; there was an easiness that sprang from no male haircut ever costing over six pounds or taking morethan fifteen minutes. It was a simple-enough exchange and there was joy in it: the buzz of the revolving blade by your ear, a rough brush-down with awarm hand. mirrors front and back to admire the transformation. You came in with a picky head, uneven coarse, disguised underneath a baseball cap, and you left swiftly afterward a new man, smelling sweetly... (查看原文)
Marcus shrank back a little. His Chalfenist confidence was always less evident when he strayed abroad, away from the bosom of his family. He was a direct man who saw no point in asking anything other than direct quests but in recent years he had become aware that this directness did not always garner direct answers from strangers, as it did in his own small circle. In the outside world, outside of his college and home, one had to add things to speech. Particularly if one was somewhat strange-looking, as Marcus gathered he was, if one was a little old, with eccentric curly hair and spectacles missing their lower rims. You had to add things to your speech to make it more palatable. Niceties, throwaway phrases, pleases and thank yous. (查看原文)
But multiplicity is no illusion. Nor is the speed with which those-in-the-simmering-melting-pot are dashing toward it. Paradoxes aside, they are running, just as Achilles was running. And they will lap those who are in denial just as surely as Achilles would have made that tortoise eat his dust. Yeah, Zeno had an angle. He wanted the One, but the world is Many. And yet still that paradox is alluring. The harder Achilles tries to catch the tortoise, the more eloquently the tortoise expresses its advantage. Likewise, the brothers will race toward the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past, that place where they have just been. Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugues, emigres, travelers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yours... (查看原文)
At first this fact seemed ineffably sad to Irie; instinctively she sentimientized the biological facts; adding her own invalid syllogism; if it was not somebody's child, could it be that it was nobody's child? She thought of those elaborate fictional cartograms that folded out of Joshua's old sci-fi books, his Fantasy Adventurers. That is how her child seemed. A perfectly plotted thing with no real coordinates. A map to an imaginary fatherland. But then, after weeping and pacing and rolling it over and over in her mind, she thought: whatever, you know? Whatever. It was always going to be like this, not precisely like this, but involved like this. This was the Iqbals we were talking about, here. This was the Joneses. How could she ever have expected anything less? (查看原文)
