Lecuras Julio '11

Manhattan Transfer
John Dos Passos
[1925]



El problema que le encontré al Manhattan Transfer es que, de tan caleidoscópico, me costó bastante engancharme. Y por la avalancha de personajes no es recomendable dejarlo mucho tiempo sin leer, si no es muy difícil retomarlo. Luego de un inicio difícil, las vacaciones me permitieron finalmente entrar en ritmo.

Let's have another rye Charley. That's the stuff to make a man of you. I been laying off it too much, that's what's the matter with me. You wouldn't think it to look at me now, would you friend, but they used to call me the Wizard of Wall Street which is another illustration of the peculiar predominance of luck in human affairs.

He lay on his back on top of the sheet. There came on the air through the window a sourness of garbage, a smell of burnt gasoline and traffic and dusty pavements, a huddled stuffiness of pigeonhole rooms where men and women's bodies writhed alone tortured by the night and the young summer. He lay with seared eyeballs staring at the ceiling, his body glowed in a brittle shivering agony like redhot metal.

You understand them things Mr 'Erf. but a feller like you, good education, all 'at, you don't know what life is. When I was seventeen I come to New York... no good. I tink of notten but raising Cain. Den I shipped out again and went everywhere to hell an gone. In Shangai I learned spik American an tend bar. I come back to Frisco an got married. Now I want to be American. But unlucky again see? Before I marry zat girl her and me lived togedder a year sweet as pie, but when we get married no good. She make fun of me and call me Frenchy because I no spik American good and den she kick no out of the house an I tell her go to hell. Funny thin a man's life.

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My Family and Other Animals
Gerald Durrel
[1956]

Difícilmente haya una lectura más apropiada para unas vacaciones en Corfú que My Family and Other Animals, una pequeña joya que combina destreza descriptiva y comedia en una mezcla poco habitual.

From that moment I guarded the nest jealously. I erected a protecting wall of rocks round it, and as an additional precaution I wrote out a notice in red ink and stuck it on a pole nearby as a warning to the family. The notice read: "BEWAR - EARWIG NEST - QUIAT PLESE." It was only remarkable in that the two correctly spelt words were biological ones.

Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquility, a timelessness, about it, so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colorful as a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.

'It's that bloody boy ... he'll kill the lot of us.... Look at the table ... knee-deep in scorpions....'

'Quick . . . quick ... do something. . . . Look out, look out!'

'Stop screeching and get a book, for God's sake. . . .

'You're worse than the dog..... Shut up, Roger....'

'By the Grace of God I wasn't bitten '

'Look out... there's another one.... Quick... quick....'

'Oh, shut up and get me a book or something....'

'But how did the scorpions get on the table, dear?’

'That bloody boy. . . . Every matchbox in the house is a deathtrap. . . . '