Garh!

So I wrote this really concise and excellent review of VS Naipaul's A Bend in the River, then my computer automatically restarted for a security update while I was talking on the phone with S and swatting cats away from my crotch. Sigh.

Thus, without further ado, quotes I liked. Damn hell ass.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. (Pretty damn good opening line, eh?)

Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful stamps. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things; there was one called 'Arab Dhow'. It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, 'This is what is most striking about this place.' Without the stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them.

Satisfaction solved nothing; it only opened up a new void, a fresh need.

Later he said, 'Strange, reading those diaries. In those days you used to scratch yourself to see whether you bled.'

There came a moment, with the coming of the light, when suddenly the night became part of the past. The brush-strokes on the white-painted window panes began to show, and at that time, out of my great pain, I had an illumination. It didn't come in words; the words I attempted to fit to it were confused and caused the illumination itself to vanish. It seemed to me that men were born only to grow old, to live out their span, to acquire experience. Men lived to acquire experience; the quality of the experience was immaterial; pleasure and pain -- and above all, pain -- had no meaning.

What's next? The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway.

Tags: reading, books, literature, modern library, VS naipaul, a bend in the river, postcolonial, africa