Lines in Books

It, [a piano], is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. An accessible, insightful book about a man who, due to a medical condition, expects to live till he's about 950 years. At time time of writing, he's a few centuries in... The book highlights that all that really matters is love.

...better to be content with ignorance, I've always thought, than be haunted by the truth. The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival's just a matter of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down. [....] This is the way life's eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.  A book about a man's relationship with dog. Endearing, up to the point when one realises he'd asked about the dog killing rats as he'd stashed the corpse of his less-than-ideal dad who'd once abandoned him on the side of the road. He didn't kill his father; he simply chose not to lift a finger to help him as he choked on a sausage. ​

It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned. A fictional retelling of the legal battle between Westinghouse, Tesla, and Edison to claim the light bulb focusing on the role of a young lawyer named Paul Cravath who went on to found a major New York law firm.

"My last book was just a clumsy, incomplete attempt to get closer to something ungraspable. A way of telling the story through a distorting lens, a prism of pain and regrets and denial. And love. You know all that anyway. As soon as you elide, or prolong, or tighten up, or fill the gaps, you're writing fiction. You're right, I was looking for the truth. I brought together sources, viewpoints, versions. But any writing about the self is a novel. The story is an illusion. It doesn't exist. No book should be authorised to have that printed on its cover." After the publication of an autobiographical book, a writer falls into a slump seemingly overwhelmed by its success. She meets L about whom there are plenty of questions — Who is she? A person? A figment of the writer's imagination? A play on 'elle', any/every woman? All unanswered. The relationship the writer & L develop, presented as toxic for the writer though reassuring to her for a time, i...

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like  'Poo-tee-weet?' An American who's been through WWII seemingly with PTSD appears to cope by escaping into his own book-inspired world where he's captured by extraterrestrials who can see the fourth dimension, time, and who believe what occurs does so because it must, because that's how the moment's structured. His sense of time also seems entirely disjointed, to say the least.

I know as no one else knows that the gods are distant, they have other concerns. They care about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree. I know the leaves are there, they wither and grow again and wither, as people come and live and then are replaced by others like them. There is nothing I can do to help them or prevent their withering. I do not deal with their desires. A reimagining of the tale of Agamemnon beginning with Clytemnestra speaking of her daughter Iphigenia being sacrificed. A book that I wanted to read through but which also seemed strangely sanitised and left me wondering what, if anything, the author knew of rage and helplessness and revenge ask put together.

‘I see that you have the wrong idea about poets. We are makers, you know. We do not sit about admiring words. We must seize hold of them and chisel at them until they do what we want. Or what the poem wants, perhaps – but that is another question. [....] ' Against the backdrop of the French revolution, a woman in England, whose mother firmly believed in and wrote of liberty, equality and fraternity, married to a possessive and jealous property magnate who killed his first wife unbeknownst to her. The lies he told her, the lies she told herself, the lies she told her family. He ultimately lost their money and was forced to flee seeing her free. Her mother, dead by then, was later forgotten despite all her writing. Of women's lives and how readily they are forgotten. 

Lilly had spent a long time wondering what her friend would like. Bringing something from her own shop seemed cheap, so she had gone to the competition and bought a silver candelabrum that would look good on the long table in the dining room. Stories of women intertwine. A violinist, Rose, born to a European man & his native wife has an illegitimate daughter, Helen, born of a night with an English nobleman, who is given up. That daughter has two daughters of her own but the family was involved in a shipwreck when the daughters are aged 9 and 2. They are then separated, adopted by different families, and lose track of either other. In a bizarre twist of fate their daughters, however, become best friends without knowing that they're cousins. The relationship becomes clear when one of them, the recently-widowed Lilly, is given the violin by a man who seems to have rescued it after the shipwreck. The two friends embark on a mission to uncover the history of the violin and, i...

There is only so much expansion one can take. We go into our dying with a handful of memories, as an explorer might take a knife, a flint, length of cord and a twist of tea into the wildness. MacCaig knew that. Who we truly are is not in our obituaries but in those final items. A tribute to landscape, poetry, friendship, and, most of all, to Norman MacCaig.