I’m conflicted. On the one hand I really am not a fan of drugged out freak out scenes in books (nor dreams). I also don’t really like we learn so much about Lewis via this method. However, it is well written – I love the bit about describing the fat lady as a dinner feast dumped into a bag – and there is a feverish to everything (the heat), so I’ll leave it.
“How long can a man hold his heart in silence?”
It’s funny how French never really became the global language like English or Spanish. Every court in Europe spoke French from medieval days right up into the days of Tolstoy in Russia. But this class based language meant it never trickled down to regular people and here Tuchman points to another interesting twist of linguistics: the Black Death itself. Teachers in French outside of France died; the vernacular lived
This is amazing!
Basically this is the story of a town and some of the events that happened before the town fell. However, time is meaningless here; everything is memory and sadness and violence and sin and shame.
I love the notion of ‘falsifying boundaries’: here the living and the dead intermix (in fact couplets are common in this story), there are holes in the roof to heaven – no boundaries: all flat plains.