enviousOne thing I am enjoying about this trip: spending less time grafted to a keyboard. Really must make more of a habit of that. Gym membership. Less time in chat. Anything. Get away from the damned desk.
This is kind of loosely plotted, handled like a Picasso sketch in sweeping arcs that somehow make a whole without ever quite connecting. It's brief--a novella, really, I think--and incredibly beautifully written. I think the ending may be a bit facile and the parrot-POV falters, but that didn't matter. I loved it. Loved the prose and the characterizations, loved the painful agony of it, loved the old man--although he owes more, alas, to the movie Holmes than to Conan Doyle's Holmes. (memo to me: read Mitch Cullen's A Slight Trick of the Mind.)
Such a good book. So very good. It kept me up last night wishing I could write like that.
Reading good books is both good and bad for me. Bad, because they are ego-crushing. Good, because they remind me how much I have left to learn.
I would like to be a heartbreaking genius now, please. Until then, I'll be over in the corner with Salieri.
