Fante and Bandini

I am not the first person to blog about this book. Hard to say who was first but the best was over at Mooks and Gripes.I however, fixate on a single sentence. It's what I do here.  This book was made into a film in 1989. I've never seen it.  It is probably the best known of John Fante's books.

The book was first published in 1938.  You cant tell. There's nothing dated about the language. It was reprinted in 1983 by John Martin's Black Sparrow Press.

"The world of inanimate things found voice, conversed with the old house, and the house chattered with cronish delight of the discontent within its walls."

Brilliant anthropomorphizing.the phrase "the world of inanimate things" is particularly powerful. They do have their own world wholly separate, silent and insentient. We are be-ing, and they are certainly not. Here he used it all to characterize the absence of a person, this is reflected by a secondary character projecting this sense of absence onto the inanimate.

Bruce Chatwin

"Mosquitoes bit the hard parts of my fingers."

Bruce Chatwin wrote that in Niger in 1971. The lines were published posthumously in 1993 in the book Photographs and Notebooks.  It's only 8 words but it says so much. It reminds me of the more famous six word sentence by Hemingway.

He avoids calling them callouses a charge word with a lot of connotations that are no longer there. Their presence indicates his hard living and manual labor. The mosquitoes are plural, not singular.  he's out-numbered, and that he passively lets them bite indicates either patience, indifference or masochism.

It's what I'd expect from the author of In Patagonia.