A few choice sentences

Adios, Cowboy
Olja Savičević

At the start of this novel, the narrator tells us that her city is in the midst of a heatwave; reading these pages in the during the UK’s own spell of extreme heat, I felt an affinity – I couldn’t, I thought, have come to this book at a more appropriate moment. I was struck by the narrator’s description of the way ‘the heat rises from the earth; by seven it’s up to one’s ankles’ and especially enjoyed her account of ‘looking up into the blue cleft above the street where, instead of the freshness of nocturnal dew, a moist, lukewarm blancmange is sliding over the town’. I could feel the heat the narrator described; I liked that I now had a name for it – ‘lukewarm blancmange’ seemed so apt.

Yet, I have to admit that, beyond this fortuitous beginning, this novel and I ceased to get along. But here’s the odd thing – as I was reading, I’d highlighted some passages that stood out to me (as I always do); when I came to write this account, I looked back over them, hoping for some clue as to why, ultimately, I’d not enjoyed this novel. To my surprise, I instead found a collection of sentences I in fact enjoyed very much:

One in which the narrator speaks of ‘a hallucination’ she has ‘while perfectly rational’ – ‘that I am the white contents of a capsule or yoghurt being poured out in a single drop’.

A rejoinder to the idea that one can ‘drive out the demon’, the narrator reflects that ‘one has to sit down beside one’s demon and mollify it until it’s calm, that’s all, perhaps, that can be done’.

A playful riff on language in which the narrator asserts that ‘the past ensures, that everything that once happened goes on simultaneously, and that in fact only the pluperfect tense exists – that perfect verbal era and that thin, little borderline of shining conditionals: what would have happened if, a bordered stretched to infinity between the pluperfect and the future perfect’.

Re-reading these sentences (which I’d completely forgotten having come across), I delighted in the narrator’s quirkiness. I admired her clever use of language and was entertained by the randomness of my collection.

Why, then, did I not fall in love with this novel? Overall, I’d say I found it jarring, and I wasn’t in the mood to be jarred. The narrative is fragmented, and I wasn’t quite paying enough attention to fully follow it, and the narrator (in passages I failed to highlight) can also be abrupt, and at times crude. All for good reason, of course, but not what I was after from a book this past week.

But what a marvellous collection of quotations!