glx

4 Comments

1. glenl
   Posted 23 February 2007 at 11:37 pm | Permalink

   This passage has had a sticky note on it for some time. Jake is at Dave’s “homosocial” gathering and he wishes to relieve himself of his suitcase:

   [...] With my foot I pushed my suitcase under the table beside Finn.
   “Can I leave this here?”
   How do you know which is your real self anyway? someone was asking.
   “You can leave them both here,” said Dave.[p28]

   Dave (and Jake) have more respect for Finn than is implied here but I am drawn to the economy of that last line.

2. Randy Fromm
   Posted 24 February 2007 at 5:47 am | Permalink

   Both of these caught my eye, as well. I have to admit that, in reading the bit of dialog concerning the suitcase, it never occurred to me that Dave was including Finn in his remark. I still had in my mind the image of Finn carrying one of the two suitcases Jake brought back from France and needed moved from Madge’s (refer to page 13, center of the page). But, in retrospect, realizing that Finn appears to have taken up residence at Goldhawk Road, your reading is indeed one way to add layers of meaning the character relations. And, it is not inconsistent with the way in which Jake characterizes Finn at the opening of the story.

3. Randy Fromm
   Posted 25 February 2007 at 7:45 am | Permalink

   Other Favorite Moments

   He was dressed in tweeds and had the look of an outdoor man who had lived too much by electric light. (69)

   This introductory description of Sacred Sammy brought a spontaneous burst of laughter (out loud) from me. I cannot say why, but the simile (similes again!) was simultaneously apt and incongruous; and the incongruity, while adding the humorous element, also drove the image unforgettably home. I know people like this. I am afraid I might be one.

   . . . and as I wandered towards the Seine I felt sure that, wherever the line was to be drawn between appearance and reality, what I now experienced was for me the real. [ . . . ] I leaned for a long time, looking into the mirror of the Pont Neuf, whose round arches make with their reflections a perfect O, in which one cannot tell what is reflected and what is not, so still is the Seine with a glassy stillness which the tidal Thames can never achieve. (168-169)

   This bit of text, from when Jake is wandering Paris after turning Madge down, of course refers back to the “fictitious” article Gellman is writing and the “real” article written by Pears, “The Incongruity of Counterparts,” Mind, volume 61, January 1952, pp 78-81. Again with incongruities . . . And, many of the similes used in the text are, in fact, incongruous. Simile—similarity. Not quite mirror images of one another.

   She turned quietly to face me, with the quietness of somebody who knows that quietly is how they are turning. (173-174)

   This also made me laugh out loud. It is the kind of line one would expect to find in a badly written detective novel. Can you see/hear the Continental Op reeling this line off?

4. glenl
   Posted 26 February 2007 at 9:43 am | Permalink

   I have mentioned how much I enjoyed chapter 18 and after finishing the book I enjoyed re-reading it. I had a post-it on this passage with a question mark:

   “You mean Anna, yes,” I said.
   “I mean Sadie!” said Hugo.
   The names of the two women rang out like the blasts of a horn which echo through a wood. A pattern in my mind was suddenly scattered and the pieces of it went flying about me like birds.” [p225]

   On page 239 we find the forward occurrence to which the above proleptic passage refers. You do realize that this would have simply passed me by if I had not been marking the text? How many of these have I lost in my life of reading?

   And here, possibly (I’m not giving up too easily!), I do see the unreliability of Jake, who has misunderstood a substantial amount of the Hugo:Sadie:Jake:Anna quadrangle.