2. Profane Friendship - Harold Brodkey

The language in this book is so inventive. I've honestly not read anything quite like it before. But it's hard going. At times I wanted to put the book down. The incessant detailing of complex relationships or emotions proved tiring. At times it became difficult to appreciate everything he was saying. The detail he puts into Onni! I can't imagine anyone analysing or thinking about someone with such excruciating depth. But he comes up with gems! Some of it reminded me of Henry Miller - perhaps not so much in style, but in boldness? Some quotes along the way:

At recess in school, taken on the roof of the palazzo the school occupied, he was wilful, he was drunk with will in play, largely serious and untalkative, and vivid in movement, and greatly interested in being who he was.

... Something in Onni's face, a fluctuation of something like a cloud of feeling or like a sheaf of the cold rain that comes and goes briefly in Venice sometimes around us in the shifting light, was the look of an inward scream phallically.

The sunlight shiftingly flickers among the movements of eyelashes, and the world rolls slightly in its customary Adriatic-afternoon fashion. One hears his vocal inflections - his trained vocal inflections.

The darkness of the interior of his mouth in the very hot early sun housed crows and blackbirds, croaking objurgations... I said, "Let's not pretend to talk... Let's pretend not to talk." Meaning that silence was talk anyway.

One thing I kept thinking through this book was that Brodkey is offering the reader insight. So much of what he says seems so deep, so valuable, that you know if you absorb it it will change you. He laces together metaphors, and images so wildly at odds with each other, but so oddly suited to the task that the effect is almost surgical. He is (in actuality - a favourite word of his in this book) modifying the way you think about and address situations and people. But this makes it pretty heavy. Great book - but I'm tired now.

On to no. 3 - "The Heart of a Dog" by Michail Bulgakov.