In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her.
Recite this opening line of the novel out loud, in a deep voice, at a slow tempo and with a long dramatic pause between “and” and “did not speak to her.” It is difficult to determine whether the author intended his opening line to sound like narration in a movie trailer, but if that was the intention: job well done. Could very well be intended since the narrative is quite cinematic, covering the globe at a breathless pace like an action movie while telling a story about trying to romance amid a world of political upheaval like Oscar bait.
Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist…Or perhaps the sheer number of places where there were now doors had made it useless to fight in any one.
Taken out of context, this quote likely seems impenetrable. Even without excluding the few missing words that link the two “perhaps” it would not make much sense to anyone unfamiliar with the text. Suffice to say that doors—specifically mysterious “black doors”—play a huge role in the narrative and become the element that allows the novel to be defined as an example of Magical Realism.
Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.
Combatants like to espouse propaganda that the war they happen to be fighting at any given time is about human rights, or religion, or ideological differences, but the simple plain truth of history is that 99% of the wars ever fought were battles to establish the rights of ownership to property. Ownership of property is also central to the plight of refugees who have been forced to leave their homeland. Compounding this injury is often the insult of being told that the reason they have been uprooted is for reasons having to do anything other both sides wanting the land they called home.
A thriving trade in electricity was under way in dark London…Saeed and Nadia were able to recharge their phones from time to time…and once as Nadia sat on the steps of a building…she saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street…and she had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her…and she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this moment there would be two Nadias…and she thought she was losing her balance, or possibly her mind…and saw that the woman in the black robe reading the news on her phone was actually not her at all.
The excessive use of the ellipsis […] here to convey the spirit of the quote while not adhering to the exact letter of the quote is necessary for the purpose of conserving space. In the actual quote from the book, all the dot-dot-dots are more descriptive prose expanding upon the scene summarized here. What makes the description of this scene worth quoting and analyzing is that in its original published form it just one single, long, perfectly coherent sentence comprising just under three-hundred words. The long, complex (and coherent) sentence has almost become obsolete in modern fiction. In a world where some books feature entire chapters that are no more than seven or eight words, it is a sign of hope for the future that such dazzling displays of control of language over the course of a single sentence did not die with William Faulkner, the acknowledged master of the form.
