Friday 18 February 2011

Another convert to the cult of Denis Johnson? My work today is done...

There have been many occasions over the years when I have stopped to wonder why?  Why bookselling?  Why bother?  


Well, this is why.  


I received the following e-mail a moment ago:


Just finished Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (by Denis Johnson, what a great book!  best contemporary (ish) novel I've read for a long long time....

"There was a sweet shyness between them now, a moment that didn't live through the little conversation with the waiter, the declining of desert and the business of paying the check. English conceived that he hadn't, from the start, ever been in charge of this romance, if that's what it was, and he gave up. Waiting for the change and thinking nothing at all, he hit on the idea that the way to deal with this woman, with his time on this eerie peninsula, maybe with his whole life, was to stand back and look at it as he would a painting he didn't understand and probably couldn't appreciate. Climbing up from the dark underground into the decadent glitter of vending, he watched this shopping centre as he might one of Jerry Twinbrook's beaches, the arrested moment of it, and he thought he caught the somber heart of each bright color, the moons, so to speak, of which these colors were the suns..."

amazing.....

thanks







The opening lines to this song resonate: I looked at the sun through filters. I filter the world through words. Reading and thinking, writing and speaking, they are my medium.  Unreliable, slippery, often confusing, occasionally inducing visions of such clarity into the heart of things - they make me tick.  To turn someone on to a book they love is like reaching into the darkness expecting to feel the scales of a snake or the fur of a tarantula's leg and instead finding the strong, true grip of a friend.


Incidentally you can buy Resuscitation of a Hanged Man here...

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