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Lawrence Block, Small Town

Der letzte Block ist schon wieder etwas länger her und da kam mir dieses Buch, in dem Block 'das Jahr danach', d.h. New York 2002, verarbeitet gerade recht. Die Story in der über ein Dutzend Handlungsstränge und Charaktere ineinander verwoben werden, liest sich unglaublich spannend und bei allem Zynismus sehr bewegend.

One of the questions writers got asked was for whom they wrote their books. The answer he usually gave was that he wrote for himself, and it sounded up to here with artistic integrity, but he'd never been entirely happy with it because it wasn't altogether true. If it was just for himself, why bother writing it down? Why not work it all out in his mind and leave it at that? And, if he really was writing for himself, he'd have to say he was a failure at it. Because how often did he sit down with an old book of his own and read the damn thing?
No, there was someone he wrote for, but unfortunately it was a person who couldn't exist. He wrote for the reader he himself would be if he didn't happen to have written the book in the first place. He wrote for someone who would understand at once everything he did or tried to do, who would always know what he meant, and who would be intellectually and emotionally in tune with every word.
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God damn them anyway, the sons of bitches.
If he could just do something about them ...
But he couldn't, of course, and neither could anyone else. They were safely dead, gone to spend eternity with seventy virgins, and maybe that was punishment enough. He tried to imagine a Catholic equivalent, where St. Peter handed good little boys the keys to a Carmelite nunnery. Here you are, sonny boy. Enjoy yourself. Just be careful they don't smack you with a ruler.

(Lawrence Block, Small World, 2003)

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Lawrence Block, The Girl with the Long Green Heart

Ich kannte den Ausdruck 'Long Green' für einen Haufen Geld vor dem Buch noch nicht, aber obwohl Block ihn nicht erklärt, konnte ich es mir doch nach dieser spannenden Geschichte um zwei Con Men, die sich zu sehr auf ihre Verbündete verlassen, irgendwie denken. Ich hatte die Wendung am Schluß zwar erwartet, aber wie Block dann doch die Kurve zu einem recht realistischen Happy End hinkriegt, ist schon beeindruckend.

I thought about the Dream, and I thought about The Girl, and about all dreams and all girls. No dreams come true, I guess, and no girls are as perfect as the heart would have them.
And beyond all that, I thought that a man must be what he is and do what he is geared to do. He cannot permit himself to be conned out of what he truly is. Not by the scare of a prison cell. Not by the smell of a woman, or the teasing song of a dream.

(Lawrence Block, aus 'The Girl with the Long Green Heart', 1965)

Wiedergelesen:

Steven Brust & Skyler White, The Incrementalists

Ich dachte, ich hätte mehr aus dem ersten Band vergessen, aber beim Wiederlesen merkte ich, dass doch doch wesentliche noch da war. Und dieses ständige Hin und Her zwischen Phils und Rens POV fiel jetzt nicht mehr so schwer. Einmal mehr faszinierten mich die so treffend beschriebenen Traumpassagen. Jetzt wäre ich bereit für die nächste Story - aber die braucht vermutlich noch eine ganze Weile ...

Ritual is symbol in motion. Ritual mixes meaning into time where each delineates the other, and we roll it out like so much razor wire at the perimeters of power. Sex, money, death - all bordered with ritual like police tape. We cordon the sites of pivots and make taboo the words that name them.
A ritual deployed around anything but a true pivot has no power. A pivot unringed in ritual is an uninsulated wire. Phil and I were holding bare metal when the lines went live. And I still wasn't breathing.

(Aus: The Incrementalists, Steven Brust and Skyler White, 2013)

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Steven Brust, Fireworks in the Rain

Skyler White, The Strongest Conjuration

Die beiden Incrementalists-Kurzgeschichten waren mir nach der Lektüre des ersten Bandes irgendwie entgangen, aber jetzt holte ich das nach. Schon vom Stil her sind beide Stories sehr interessant, weil sie sich so sehr unterscheiden, während ich bei den Romanen nie mit Gewißheit sagen kann, welche Passage oder Charakter vom wem stammen könnte. Und sowohl Phils 'Meddle'-Strategie als auch Rens Suche nach dem Zugang zu den ihr zustehenden Erinnerungen (die weiter zurückreichen als ihr lieb ist) sind faszinierend zu lesen. Achja, um das Wiederlesen des ersten Buchs komme ich wohl definitiv nicht drumrum.

I touched my fingers to the ash smudges on the cave wall: two circles and a line - the first shape infant eyes pattern, when all our world is I and entire comfort, or its terrible lack. Not until that world splits into Me and Not Me, I and Thou, do we learn that we, too, look into the world from behind two circles and a line.

(Skyler White, The Strongest Conjuration, 2014)

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Diane Duane, Uptown Local and other Interventions

Noch mehr Fantasy-Stories vom Feinsten, und jede einzelne wäre schon den sowieso lachhaften Preis des Buches wert gewesen. Besonders "The Fix" faszinierte mich mit seinem lebensnahen Setting im Kolosseum in Rom der Antike, dann natürlich "Bears", das mir schreckliche Lust auf Bern und den Bärengraben machte, und "Theobroma". Bei "The Back Door" und "In the Company of Heroes" verdarben mir einige ziemlich krasse Fehler bei den deutschen Stellen beinahe die Freude, aber die Unterhaltung mit Duane via Twitter machte alles wieder gut.
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"Hold still. The spatial dislocation is handled by limbic and subcortical keleological transit processes," Uli said, putting another electrode in Rob's skull. "Does that sound better to you? And if it does, why? All instrumentality or intervention useful to humans in this world can at base be classified in one of three ways: as science, magic or chicken soup."
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(Diane Duane, In the Company of Heroes, aus: Uptown Local and other Interventions, 2011 - 2015)
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"How did you do that?"
"I asked nicely," Ken said.
"Magic!" Ana said.
"Same thing," Ken said. "Ssh! Come on."
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(Diane Duane, Theobroma, aus: Uptown Local and other Interventions, 2011 - 2015)
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Wiedergelesen:

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

Ich hatte schon fast - aber nur fast - vergessen, was für eine Wonne es ist Pratchett auf der Höhe seines Schaffens zu lesen. 'Small Gods' habe ich vielleicht nicht so oft wiedergelesen wie The Truth oder Going Postal, aber so wie alle richtig guten Bände - d.h. alle vor, sagen wir mal, Making Money - blieb er mir fast vollständig im Gedächtnis, mit einer kleinen Anregung ab und zu wiedergelesen zu werden. Das schaffen nicht viele Bücher.

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. AS if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time ...
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People have reality dampers.
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.
Because if this was not the case, the human beings faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of the plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They'd say "Wow!" a lot. And no one would do much work.
Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.
Part of the brain exists to stop this happening. It is very efficient. It can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels.
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That's what happens, Om thought. Being a small god was bad, except at the time you hardly knew that it was bad because you only barely knew anything at all, but all the time there was something which was just possibly the germ of hope, the knowledge and belief that one day you might be more than you were now.
But how much worse to have been a god, and to now be no more than a smoky bundle of memories, blown back and forth across the sand made from the crumbled stones of your temples ...
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It had been like this when his very first believer had been stoned to death. Of course, by then he had dozens of other believers. But it had been a wrench. It had been upsetting. You never forgot your first believer. They gave you shape.
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'I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts,' said Brutha. 'That way, everyone's happy. Think about it.'

(Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods", 1992)

Wiedergelesen:

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Wenn ich mich recht erinnere, war das eins der ersten Discworldbände, wenn nicht der erste überhaupt, die ich las, vor langer Zeit als Regina mich infizierte. Auf jeden Fall gehört er zu meinen Lieblingsbänden in der Serie, und ich finde gerade an oder nach Weihnachten liest er sich besonders gut.

Aus dem Annotated Pratchett File, Chapter 3:

- When Hogfather was being written, Terry answered the question what it was going to be about as follows:

"Let's see, now...in Hogfather there are a number of stabbings, someone's killed by a man made of knives, someone's killed by the dark, and someone just been killed by a wardrobe.

It's a book about the magic of childhood. You can tell."
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Aber nicht nur.
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Und der folgende Dialog gehört mit zu den schönsten Stellen im Buch für mich:
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"Thank you. Now ... tell me ..."
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?"
"Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"
NO.
"Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
She turned on him.
"It's been a long night, Grandfather! I'm tired and I need a bath! I don't need silliness!"
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
"Really? Then what would have happened, pray?"
A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

(aus: Terry Pratchett, Hogfather, 1996)
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Eigentlich wollte ich als nächstes noch 'Small Gods' lesen - aber vielleicht ziehe ich doch 'Thief of Time' vor. Noch habe ich einfach nicht genug von Susan.