Okay. I just had to start a thread. I'm wondering if anybody else ran out and got the latest Michael Chabon novel.
I'm going to copy an excerpt here because I think it's divine.
Filaq, who is, I suppose, the boy who would be king, sent word of his intent to attack the city. In return, Buljan said he would be sending the boy an emissary, an old friend.
Buljan thinks he is insulting the boy by sending an old elephant.
"An elephant?" Filaq whispered.
"A very old one. Thin and old and slow."
Filaq stood unmoving, shaking his head.
"It has a bald patch on its forehead," he said softly.
"Yes, lord. Spotted and hairless."
Filaq crawled past the guard, shoving him aside, and poked his head out of the door flap, looking toward the great gates of Atil. Whatever he saw when he looked out made him forget himself. He leapt up and ran, laughing, snuffling, tripping over his own feet.
Amram and Zelikman went after him and arrived before the gates just in time to see Filaq encircle with his slender arms, in their baggy sleeves of borrowed quilt armor, the gnarled proboscis of a broken-dwon elephant. It loomed, skeletal and listing, its skin tuberous, lumpy, pocked with whitish scars and peeling away in strips of papery excelsior that snowed and blew in little drifts around its feet: a wagonload of ragged and mildew-blown blankets hastily arranged over the staved-in ruin of a barn. A steady rattle issued from the mysterious machinery of its interior like wind in the branches of a locust tree, over a deeper rumbling, an unmistakable continuo of pleasure as the stripling rubbed at the piebald patch between its phlegmatic little eyes, gummed with the milky effluence of tears.
Filaq spoke to it, calling it his beauty and his little mother and his queen."
I'll stop there. This is about 3/4 of the way through the book. I just read it and re-read it and re-read it. No wonder I'm a slow reader. I find these gems and just can't stop losing myself in them. The king of words has risen again.
Anybody else reading this book?
I'm going to copy an excerpt here because I think it's divine.
Filaq, who is, I suppose, the boy who would be king, sent word of his intent to attack the city. In return, Buljan said he would be sending the boy an emissary, an old friend.
Buljan thinks he is insulting the boy by sending an old elephant.
"An elephant?" Filaq whispered.
"A very old one. Thin and old and slow."
Filaq stood unmoving, shaking his head.
"It has a bald patch on its forehead," he said softly.
"Yes, lord. Spotted and hairless."
Filaq crawled past the guard, shoving him aside, and poked his head out of the door flap, looking toward the great gates of Atil. Whatever he saw when he looked out made him forget himself. He leapt up and ran, laughing, snuffling, tripping over his own feet.
Amram and Zelikman went after him and arrived before the gates just in time to see Filaq encircle with his slender arms, in their baggy sleeves of borrowed quilt armor, the gnarled proboscis of a broken-dwon elephant. It loomed, skeletal and listing, its skin tuberous, lumpy, pocked with whitish scars and peeling away in strips of papery excelsior that snowed and blew in little drifts around its feet: a wagonload of ragged and mildew-blown blankets hastily arranged over the staved-in ruin of a barn. A steady rattle issued from the mysterious machinery of its interior like wind in the branches of a locust tree, over a deeper rumbling, an unmistakable continuo of pleasure as the stripling rubbed at the piebald patch between its phlegmatic little eyes, gummed with the milky effluence of tears.
Filaq spoke to it, calling it his beauty and his little mother and his queen."
I'll stop there. This is about 3/4 of the way through the book. I just read it and re-read it and re-read it. No wonder I'm a slow reader. I find these gems and just can't stop losing myself in them. The king of words has risen again.
Anybody else reading this book?