This beautiful passage feels like a stylistic aside for Cusk. Atmosphere overlaps structure with near-poetry. It has the luxuriousness of Proust...or being Greece, is it a nod to Durrell?
"At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream..."
"There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view."
At this point, I feel like this is what the novel(s) are about: perspective, point of view.
Henry VIII: Come, come, my lord, you’d spare your spoons! (V.2.200)
An expression I was unfamiliar with.
In Tudor and early Stuart England, Apostle Spoons (ornate silver spoons with a small figure of one of the twelve apostles on the handle) were traditional christening gifts from godparents.
Henry VIII: Come, come, my lord, you’d spare your spoons! (V.2.200)
An expression I was unfamiliar with.
In Tudor and early Stuart England, Apostle Spoons (ornate silver spoons with a small figure of one of the twelve apostles on the handle) were traditional christening gifts from godparents.
"Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it despite having proved that everything about it was illusory."
Cromwell: My Lord of Winchester, you are a little, By your good favour, too sharp; men so noble, However faulty, yet should find respect For what they have been: 'tis a cruelty To load a falling man.
"I said that I didn't believe people could change so completely, could evolve an unrecognisable morality; it was merely that that part of themselves had lain dormant, waiting to be evoked by circumstances."
Aphoristic lines like this are typically signposts offering clear insight into the worldview of the author or protagonist. We’re conditioned to treat them as miniature truths, endorsed by the author. But Cusk deliberately unsettles that expectation. The protagonist isn't proclaiming; just listening.
It can be somewhat disconcerting. So many of the characteristics, quirks, faults, imperfections, mistakes she reveals, I see shadows of in myself. Only excellent and subtle writing can do this.
I love this. She takes this seemingly obvious, heavy-handed metaphor and makes it brilliant, ironic. Flips it on Ryan - his symbol of change becomes a symbol of Sisyphian stagnation.
"As he spoke I saw the imaginary staircase rising in front of him once more, stretching out of sight; and him climbing it with a book suspended tantalisingly ahead of him."
