Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Everything is Turgid

I am sorry, but I find this sentence hard to forgive, even in a book with brilliant moments and an interesting premise, and especially as the opening line of a chapter.


    She used her thumbs to pull the lace panties from her waist, allowing her engorged genitalia the teasing satisfaction of the humid summer updrafts, which brought with them the smells of burdock, birch, burning rubber, and beef broth, and would now pass on her particular animal scent to northward noses, like a message transmitted through a line of schoolchildren in a childish game, so that the final one to smell might lift his head and say,
    Borsht?


I'm sure other people found Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated" to be a work of unprecedented genius, but I'm here to tell you, it can only be appreciated if you can ignore that his Sasha speaks some horribly fake Ringlish (or Ruslish, however you like), and his non-Sasha narrator spews out some real stomach churners, like that one above.

As I bounce gleefully into the new Eoin Colfer, The Artemis Fowl Files, with my favorite juvie-lit heroine Captain Holly Short!

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