Fionnuala > Recent Status Updates

"A delicate and powerful instrument, it possesses hinges, pincers, tongs, hooks...cushions, valleys, hillocks...It is a marvelous flower with five petals that open and close like a sensitive plant at the slightest provocation! Is five an essential number in the universal harmonies? Does it belong to the order of the dog rose, the forget-me-not, the scarlet pimpernel?"

Alfonso Reyes, Major Aranda's ( what?)

The carriage door stuck as usual; at the other end of the train the big hat chief leaned on the red button and the compressed air squirted in the tubes. A strained to force the two panels apart. Drops of grey sweat zigzagged across his face like flies. The train was about to start when the chief released the button. A almost lost his balance as the door suddenly gave way and he stumbled down
Boris Vian The Dead Fish

Labrenas—a boyhood friend from Venezuela called them and I sometimes call them that too. Actually they are no more than the common gecko, the one zoologists call Plattidattilo murailio: a sort of miniature crocodile that frequents and meanders along old walls and sometimes invades inhabited rooms where as is its habit it eyes and then sneaks up on various insects particularly butterflies
Tommaso Landolfi The Labrenas

Mark Twain, writing in 1880, tells us: "When I was born [1830], St. Paul had a population of three persons, Minneapolis had just a third as many. The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and when he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years, of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons. He had a frog’s fertility."

The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. He says ‘honah,’ and ‘dinnah,’ and ‘Gove’nuh,’ and ‘befo’ the waw,’ and so on. The words may lack charm to the eye, in print, but they have it to the ear. When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England [continued below]

WHERE the river in the Vicksburg region used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight—made so by cut-off; a former distance of seventy miles reduced to thirty-five. It is a change which threw Vicksburg’s neighbor Delta out into the country. Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees—a growth which will [become] a forest and completely hide the exiled town.

The loneliness of this solemn stupendous flood is impressive—and depressing. League after league it pours its chocolate tide along between its forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the watery solitude; and so the day goes the night comes and again the day—and still the same majestic unchanging sameness of serenity

Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812 At the end of thirty years it had grown to mighty proportions and in less than thirty more it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. Of course it is not absolutely dead neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground but as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor Mississippi steamboating may be called dead

The rooster came to the pansy bed so sereneWhat a joy he felt to be of the world of wordless creatures where crowing or whirring of wings or the brush of legs together said everything, said praise, we live. To be of the grassy world where things blow and bend and rustle; of the insect world so close to it that it was known when an ant hauled an imperceptible grain of sand from its tiny cave.
W Goyen The White Rooster

"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.…[continued below]

When De Soto took his first glimpse of the Mississippi [1542], Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo’s paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens…[continued below]

"'What's your fee?' I asked.
She looked at the horses then glanced at me, then worked one toe into the ground and looked at that. She was wearing blue cloth shoes with thick white laces—all very clean. Too clean. I didn't think she knew snot about horseflesh. I figured she was straight out phony.
'Your fee,' I said.
She scratched a little itch behind her ear..."
Leon Rooke, 'The Woman Who Talked to Horses'

"I cast my eye round the collection of books, instinctively noting whether they were for use or display. Here, they were not dressed by the right according to size; individual volumes of sets were occasionally misplaced; a few bookmarks protruded. Use, then; or extremely cunning display."
Julian Barnes, 'A Self-Possessed Woman'

"She looked idly about her, and the swaying of the streetcar so determined that her eyes fell on a small slim man sitting beside the entrance...Her whole attention was taken by this man, although no one else seemed to observe him, and as the body of someone swaying beside her interposed between her and the small man, she did not see him, and then she saw him again..."
Ethel Wilson, 'Mr Sleepwalker'

'The Brute' by Joseph Conrad begins as follows: "Dodging in from the rain-swept street, I exchanged a smile and a glance with Miss Blank in the bar of the Three Crows."
The story ends in a similar way: "On going out I exchanged a glance and a smile (strictly proper) with the respectable Miss Blank, barmaid of the Three Crows."
What happens in between is as mysteriously hilarious as those two sentences. I loved it!

"He was a hard thin-faced man with an air of being scarred. His eyes were a sort of taunt to the whole human family—the eyes of an animal sleepy and quiescent in the presence of another species. They were helpless yet brutal, unhopeful yet confident. It was as if they felt themselves powerless to originate activity but infinitely capable of profiting from the weakness of another"
FS Fitzgerald: A Short Trip Home

"'My old woman,' Toddy shouted, and she saw him pointing to the power-house below. In England his habit of personalizing an electric generating plant had charmed her, fitting her picturesque notions of the Canadian north. But now she felt uneasiness prod her. It was such a sinister-looking building, and the sound of falling water was so loud and engulfing..."
Joyce Marshall, The Old Woman

There were two new graves in the cemetery; the names on the small temporary wooden boards set up at the foot of each mound: James Bull; George Whitelegg. Poor chaps—no one would ever know why they had fallen; they were climbing guideless. Bull—well, he was a nasty bit of work. Poor Whitelegg was quite under his spell; Bull had that power of dominating another person, almost of possessing them
Ann Bridge: The Accident

She pulled open the door of the power-house and the thunder of the waterfall was suddenly replaced by a low even whine.For an instant she did not see Toddy. Then she saw him, leaning towards one of the turbines. As she looked, he moved, with a curious scuttling speed, to one of the indicators on the wall. She saw the side of his face then, its expression totally absorbed, gloating...
Joyce Marshall, The Old Woman

The light, gritty, wind of a spring morning blew in on the doctor's desk, and on the tall buttonhook of a man who leaned agitatedly toward him.
'I have some kind of small animal lodged in my chest,' said the man. ‘Animal?' said the doctor, after a pause which had the unfortunate quality of comment. His voice, however, was practised, deft, coloured only with the careful suspension of judgement.
H Calisher, Heartburn

The canon bore it meekly. It even seemed to him that he knew why heaven had so punished and rewarded him. And only at times, in the evenings, when he was sitting down with the doctor for a game of dominoes, he would ask timidly: 'But still, perhaps you've found something in your books?' But the reply was always the same: 'Nothing. What can you do, my friend? It is a miracle.'
Y Zamyatin The Miracle of Ash Wednesday

I learned 49 years ago that life as ayah means living close to floor. All work I do, I do on floors, grinding masala, cutting vegetables, cleaning rice. Food also is eaten sitting on floor after serving them at dining-table. And my bedding is rolled out at night in kitchen, on floor. No cot for me. Nowadays my weight is much more, and is getting very difficult to get up from floor
R Mistry The Ghost of Firozsha Baag

There was nothing to appeal about our new class mistress; she was small and stocky with a red face and thick refracting glasses. Through the glasses, her small dull eyes appeared enormous, like the eyes of an insect. Somehow we knew that her father had gone blind and that her parents had made her spend an hour every day alone in the dark so that if she too were to go blind she would be less helpless
A White The Saint

Mariana leans out of the window. Mum, come back soon, she begs. But she no longer knows to whom she's begging, or why. She shuts her eyes and the world disappears; she opens them and it appears again...If she can't think about her mother, she won't have a mother any more..Too many things to think about all on her own. And why she, alone? Why she alone in the universe?

Liliana Heker, Berkeley/Mariana of the Universe

"Ten years ago I had twenty-twenty vision. Now one of my eyes is ruined. Time shifted, launched itself from the springboard of an eyeball squashed by a stone.
When I first met that sentimental madman I had only a child's understanding of time. I was yet to have the cruel awareness of time drilling its eyes into my back and time lying in wait ahead..."

From 'Aghwee the Sky Monster' by Kenzaburō Ōe
 

Then she lay back and watched the yellow moonlight from the window. Yellow was the middle light, and as they drove behind Goddard in the cart - Goddard who gave barley-sugar — with Granny smelling of flowers, they would say yellow that was the middle light, and green we move, and red we must stop, and green we move, and yellow was the middle light, and red we stop …
Angus Wilson, 'Mummy to the Rescue'

So the young man kept to the quieter, older streets on his solitary errand home. In one such street, a pavementless alley between old yellow houses, a street that in Rome might suddenly blossom into a secret piazza of fountain and baroque church, a grave secluded treasure-place, he noticed that he was alone but for the single figure of a woman walking down the hill towards him...
William Sansom, A Woman Seldom Found

The sausage...is red. It is speechless. It swells. Its tips are rounded... It lies there...The sausage smells delicious...The sausage is tender. It is firm. The fingernail leaves on it a half-moon shape. The sausage is warm. It is plump...A penknife opens its blade. The sausage squirts...
Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Die Wurst/The Sausage
This is an explosive introduction to Dürrenmatt's writing. I'll read more...

...we Italians consider the Great Humanist to be the highest form of being. The chance of now finding myself in daily contact with a representative of this subtle, almost magical branch of knowledge flattered and perturbed me; I felt the same sensations as a young American might feel on introduction to Mr Gillette: alarm, respect, and a form of not ignoble envy...
The Professor and the Siren by Giuseppe di Lampedusa