What do you think?
Rate this book
304 pages, Hardcover
First published June 20, 2012
“Everything ends with a flight, I thought…”
“Dead protagonists take priority over triumphant, happy-ending characters but are surpassed by books with open-endings books that don’t have moral conclusions. Novels with open endings I consider to be of a higher rank; hence they are located before novels with happy endings, which I often call religious or “resurrection” endings…As for historical novels, they are organized based on the name of the winner of the first battle that appears in the book. For instance, War and Peace will be filed in the N section, N in reference to Napolean, of course...and here, if you look above the toilet…all libraries must submit to a certain order…“
“She called me some other name. And she laughed when she saw me naked and stared at me. Flying man, she kept on saying, flying man, let me please you. And she drew me close to her bosom and kissed my neck and her hand swept across my skin and touched me and held my erection and stroked me until I came. There you go she said now you can leave and march towards your desert and your stone.”Fly is a taxi driver in a city that sounds like New Orleans to me; there is a week-long annual Carnival that involves much of the city. He alternately calls his taxi his boat, his plane, his ride, his car. He “flies” to pick up fares or to get home. Or to escape.
“There are two kinds of taxi drivers: the Spiders and the Flies. Spiders are those drivers who wait at taxi stands for the dispatcher‘s call or for customers to walk off the streets and into their hungry cars….Flies are wanderers, operators who drive alone and around to pick up the wavers and the whistlers on the edges of sidewalks and streets…I am a wanderer.”
“There is a war out there, and believe me, Fly, it was never really between Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Crusaders, and Confucius. The final battle is between those who love, respect, and liberate the body and those who hate it, Fly…”Thus the masturbation, and the library--feeding the body and the brain. But real food is another story.
“Communists and Muslims are not the enemies to fear in this land, Fly. It is the food consumption that will eventually blow up in everyone’s face.”
We flew out of the city and we landed on the page where Moses split the sea and the Jews marched between those suspended mountains of water, hovering, humming on both sides, and the poor expelled merchants wondered if Moses knew what the fuck he was doing. What if his hand got tired and he accidentally dropped his magic cane, or got distracted by a wet desert ass, or lost his sandals, or what if that lush single malt of a God changed his mind again and the fucking Red Sea closed in on them with its menstrual red liquid?
There was nothing in the news about tourists getting robbed, fucked, or punished. Idiots like that are usually too proud to admit defeat. They just go and get drunk and numb their wounds and the next day go to the gym and pump iron and check their muscles in the mirror…There is no mirror that they pass and do not greet with a flex of biceps or the slow landing of a leg. Inflated balloons with broken cords, always walking as if they are taking their first step on the moon.
What happened afterward was more difficult to understand; the Sinforosa’s “betrayal” seemed to have been twofold: partly her having invited them into her own garden to eat fruit and then getting them beaten up by her servants; and then her having made a favorite of one of them, a certain Bel-Loré—who was still jeered at it for it—and another, a certain Ugasso, at the same time, and set them against each other…One of these episodes or some episode like these or all these episodes together had caused a break between the Sinforosa and the band, and now they talked of her with a bitterness mingled with regret.