The Gone Away World - Update

Thanks to Jeanne at Necromancy Never Pays, I've been reading The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway. I'm only about a third of the way through at the moment, but the prose is so unique, and the ideas so exciting, that I really wanted to share two of my favorite quotations so far.

I made a failed attempt to twitter these earlier tonight, but when I realized that just one of my favorite sections would take up about 5-6 tweets, I gave up and thought I'd update on the blog! So enjoy, and I'll definitely be posting a review of the novel when I finish.

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"What I am about to tell you...may make me sound like a crazy person. So I need you to remember, to bear in mind very carefully, that I have an IQ of such monstrous proportions that if, for the sake of argument, I were totally insane--if the palace of my intellect were a scary ivy-covered mansion in Louisiana with peeling paint and dead flowers and a garden full of murdered corpses planted by a man named Jerry-Lee Boudain--I am so much more intelligent than anybody else you will ever meet that there would be no way for anyone to tell."

"Modern war is distinguished by the fact that all the participants are ostensibly unwilling. We are swept towards one another like colonies of heavily armed penguins on an ice floor. Every speech on the subject given by any involved party begins by deploring even the idea of war. A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetorico-circumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don't want to and aren't allowed to, so what we're doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to un-war."

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So far I am highly enjoying this book, although it did take me awhile to fall into the authors rhythm. Now....back to reading!