Deliberately wordlessly, Merovig Creplaczx approached Mawdrew Czgowchwz, now seated near Carmen in the shadows. Throwing out his shapely, manicured right hand—a hand accustomed neither to refusal nor to too much in the way of tender requital, the perfect hand for his purposes heretofore (Mawdrew Czgowchwz thought of Tristan, the man)—he offered a challenge: to take hers. She took his in one svelte parry.
This should be annoying, a whole novel like this, but the rocky writing is polished to terrazzo throughout. Besides, the characters make no claim to sympathy or even reality, being New Yorkers and of the opera; the manner and drama they claim, they achieve.
Presumably there's a lot of roman à clef for those who knew the 1970s opera scene, but the characters are at least a century old--
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
--well, not very solitary, except when center stage. Anyway, it isn't The Third Policeman but it's more cheerful than The Poor Mouth.
ISBN: 0940322978
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.). | TrackBack