The neighborhood's old men were single, too, some inhabiting sagging sacks of
bodies over which gravity had exerted far too much power, others grizzle-chopped
and letting themselves go in dirty T-shirts and pants with unbuttoned flies,
while a third, jauntier contingent dressed sharply, affecting berets and bow
ties. These natty gents periodically tried to engage the widows in conversation.
Their efforts, with yellow glints of false teeth and melancholy sightings of
slicked-down vestiges of hair beneath the doffed berets, were invariably and
contemptuously ignored. To these elderly beaux, Max Ophuls was an affront, the
ladies' interest in him a humiliation. They would have killed him if they
could, if they had not been too busy staving off their own deaths.
India saw it all, the exhibitionist, desirous old women pirouetting and flirting
on the verandahs, the lurking, spiteful old men. The antique Russian super, Olga
Simeonovna, a bulbous denim-clad samovar of a woman, was greeting the ambassador
as if he were a visiting head of state. If there had been a red carpet on the
premises she would have rolled it out for him.
"She keeps you waiting, Mr. Ambassador, what you gonna do, the young. I say
nothing against. Just, a daughter these days is more difficult, I was a daughter
myself who for me my father was like a god, to keep him waiting unthinkable.
Alas, daughters today are hard to raise and then they leave you flat. I sir am
formerly mother, but now they are dead to me, my girls. I spit on their
forgotten names. This is how it is."
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
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