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Louis De Bernieres - A Partisan's Daughter
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1794
Now I saw this at a thrift-shop and as I like Louis De Bernieres and have been on a bit of a reading roll I picked it up.
It's good.
But, less on the review front I read it and begin to recognize myself - the plot - a middle aged man falls for a young Yugoslavian Girl (Serbian). That's plenty. No spoilers here. But there's the curious symmetries - heroin lives in Clapham - I lived in Clapham - Heroin is a Serbian Hostess in a Hostess Bar in Soho - oddly enough, my housemate was a Bosnian Hostess at a Hostess bar in Soho...and the stories, well, fictionalized for sure, but one recognizes enough places and parallels to ones own life to wonder...
A curious coincidence, timing, whatever, that took me back to the day...
David Thorne: I'll Go Home Then; It's warm and has chairs
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1740
Funniest book I've read since...well, for a while. Collections of Mr. Thorne's emails with the unwitting, unwary and, for lack of appropriate un-word, stupid. With their replies. Loads of LULZ.
Spies & Janus
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1631
(Tired, head cold, bad/odd dreams)
I'm up the street, there's a black guy, famous actor, not photogenic, he's working on a steel plate set in the road. A car pulls up, people get out, he uses a bar to pull aside the steel plate and beneath it there's a narrow hole into the earth, they walk up to it deliberately, fall into it, it's rough hewn like clay, they disappear into the earth and I think to myself "spies, definitely...". The car disappears. Another car pulls up, the situation repeats, he pulls aside the boilerplate with a crowbar, they step into the hole, one is too big to fall down so he begins whacking them with a shovel, forcing them down the hole, the whacking turns them into clay as well, like an animation by Svankmajer, eventually they disappear down the hole.
I've got to go to a friends, I walk far around the hole, I don't want the black guy attending the hole to see that I've been watching, I know he's bad news, a high rise nearby to visit some friends but now the black guy is walking towards me, a half smile on his face, slowly, he wants me to get into the hole as well, I don't want to, but he's coming after me with that awful inevitability, slowly, inviting me to step into the hole, I wake from the dream disturbed and thinking of the word "Janus"...
(made a mental note to remember that dream, there's no light or pad in the bedroom, there was more, the head cold providing an unending stream of bad inspirations and dreams...)
Outlaws and Bankers
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1542
The image of a banker, well dressed at his desk in a fit of imagination holding a pencil in his hands as if it were a gun, on an imaginary crime spree, imagining himself holding up the bank, saying "pew, pew, pew" as he fires his pencil pistol menacingly at invisible tellers...
(Inane, I know, but upon waking from it I reminded myself to remember it, it seemed to acquire a disproportionate importance, the idea of a banker imagining himself to be an outlaw, when the profession of banking offends every law already, only the suit lends it legitimacy...)
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