Hole

So, picking up where we left off. I've been in a daze reading The English Patient of all things. Finished last night. How you pack a whole book into the last two sentences. We found these oranges in the market, some come wrapped in blue and red paper with a picture of woman on them. They peel like velvet, split unevenly. The interior ranges from a lemony yellow to a deep stained red (pigeon's blood?) and you think, wow, this is going to be a pretty good orange. You slip it into your mouth and if you've been distracted by anything it falls away. Like Sappho you lose your senses, become speechless. You could eat this orange for eternity. That's how I felt about this book.

So what makes a book come alive inside of you like this? For me, having some underlying intellectual structure ratchets things up a lot. And two things happened in this book: the author lets us know two things, how the book is going to play out, and where he gets his structure. In the first three paragraphs you think the the young woman making her way through an empty villa is going to end up in bed with a lover, and you quickly learn that instead she is attending a burn patient. Things will go as they say, poorly. The rest of the structure becomes apparent as characters keep mentioning Miles Davis and jazz and how sometimes you have an intro that clearly the musician doesn't want to let go of to get to the song part, called a burden, and then you see, oh, the writer set up the first half of the book as a burden...and on and on. And then, because he is brilliant, we have the added aspect of this being not just a novel of lovers but a novel of ideas about race and nationality. I am loathe to return this to the owner until I have my own copy.

And I thought just because I saw Ralph Fiennes acting in a equally brilliant adaptation that I didn't have to read the book.

But out of my head and back to Paris. Saturday we had croissants and chocolate at a neighborhood place and then visited the Red Wheelbarrow again, the lovely English language bookstore, my island of english populated with Aussies. It's like finding a vein. Just need it, just a little. Then I can get back to long lines to buy loaves of french bread and metro attendants demanding that I speak only in French and not understanding things I order on the menu.

We also had a proper brunch on Sunday at the Bonnes Soeurs, yes those kind of sisters, the ones with habits, for Mother's Day a holiday which we all seemed happy to downplay. The children made lovely drawings and photographs for me as well.

Monday involved errands, Tuesday Rach was sick, and it just gets colder each day. I will get to today tomorrow. D'Orsay. It deserves its own space not tossed with The English Patient like a salade.