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213 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
"Back then, the gates of Paris where all in vanishing perspectives, the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots. And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner."
“The world to which these people belonged revived some memories from childhood: it was my father’s world...... I rescue them from the void one final time before they sink back into it forever.”
"April 24, 1933. A young married couple commits suicide for no apparent reason.
It’s a very strange story that occurred that night in the building at number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, near the Pantheon, in the home of Mr. and Mme T."
"for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation".
"form a single work...I thought I'd written them discontinuously, in successive bouts of forgetfulness, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences recur from one to the other."
"After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”― James Agee, A Death in the Family
Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind--Alan and Marilyn Bergman, 1968
Every time I look at that picture, it hurts. It's like in the morning when you try to recall your dream from the night before, but all that's left are scraps that dissolve before you can put them together. I knew that woman in another life and I'm doing my best to remember. Maybe someday I'll manage to break through that layer of silence and amnesia.Unfortunately, these few gems were buried in a confusing, disjointed welter of impressions which would make no sense at all to someone unfamiliar with the Nazi occupation of France and Parisian geography. I gave 2 stars to "Suspended Sentences" only because I was able to find enough information on the Rue Lauriston gang on the Internet to understand who the characters were. The story went nowhere and ended so abruptly that I actually noted on my Kindle "That's it?"