A Widow for One Year
“Dinner afterward in a former monastery with vaulted ceilings—I drank too much.
Each time I’m in Germany I’m reminded of the contrast, in a place like the lobby of the Vier Jahreszeiten, between the expensively dressed hotel guests—the business class, who are so formal—and the deliberately disreputable appearance of the journalists, who appear to revel in their grubbiness like teenagers intent on offending their parents. A society in ugly confrontation with itself—so much like ours, but at the same time in advance of ours and even more deteriorated.
Either I’m not over the jet lag or a new novel is beginning in the back of my mind—I absolutely cannot read anything without skipping ahead. The room-service menu; the list of the hotel’s amenities; Norman Sherry’s The Life of Graham Greene, volume one, which I did not intend to bring with me—I must have put it in my carry-on without thinking. All I can read are the last lines of paragraphs that seem important, those final sentences... before space breaks on the page.MoreLess
Each time I’m in Germany I’m reminded of the contrast, in a place like the lobby of the Vier Jahreszeiten, between the expensively dressed hotel guests—the business class, who are so formal—and the deliberately disreputable appearance of the journalists, who appear to revel in their grubbiness like teenagers intent on offending their parents. A society in ugly confrontation with itself—so much like ours, but at the same time in advance of ours and even more deteriorated.
Either I’m not over the jet lag or a new novel is beginning in the back of my mind—I absolutely cannot read anything without skipping ahead. The room-service menu; the list of the hotel’s amenities; Norman Sherry’s The Life of Graham Greene, volume one, which I did not intend to bring with me—I must have put it in my carry-on without thinking. All I can read are the last lines of paragraphs that seem important, those final sentences... before space breaks on the page.MoreLess
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