🦋 I Love When That Happens!
An experience that I've had many times: I am browsing in a bookstore (usually by the shelves marked "Fiction" or as the case may be, "Classics"), pulling down titles that intrigue me, looking at quotes on the back jacket or the inside front cover, first sentences, etc. After a little while of this I get into a rhythm, the browsing is what I'm doing, I melt into the bookstore a little... and then some new book that I've never heard of before pops into my hand, and it suddenly seems like just the right thing for me to read. Today I was looking in the new bookstore in Maplewood and found a book which I had never heard of, and which seems like just the right thing. It is Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier (a Swiss author with a French name, who writes in German) -- the three epigraphes are from Jorge Manrique, Michel Montaigne, Fernando Pessoa. (The Montaigne quote is especially to my tastes -- "We are all patchwork," it begins, and ends, "There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.") The initial sentence has a slightly formulaic whiff about it: "The day that ended with everything different in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like countless other days." -- But it is a formula that has worked on me many times, and I have high hopes for this time.
posted afternoon of Saturday, February 14th, 2009
➳ More posts about Night Train to Lisbon
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➳ More posts about Fernando Pessoa
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