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Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Amsterdam, A Novel


Savouring the Châteauneuf du pape that Jasper had bought to celebrate the première of his oboe concerto, Sebastian looked forward with relish to that pompous little twerp on the Standard swallowing his words when it came to reviewing this, he thought, patting the completed score that even now Claudio Abbado was pulling his hair out to receive.

Contemplating the vulgarity, the sheer nothingness of the man, as he reached for another helping of the leftover saumon en croute, Benjamin wondered again what Viola had seen in him to have chosen such a buffoon over Jeremy and Robin, not to mention himself.

By a tragic, yet pleasingly symmetrical coincidence, Cordelia and Eve, independently yet simultaneously, cut their fingers on the opening page of Oscar’s shocking yet brilliant first novel, bleeding to death swiftly yet agonisingly.

Kazuo had come over immediately after receiving Ian’s disturbing yet oddly collected and lucid phone-call. ‘What is it Ian?’ he asked, helping himself to another glass of his host’s transcendent yet quaffable Château d’Yquem. ‘I want us to make a pact’, Ian replied. ‘If I ever write a novel that loses its mind, that manages to maunder on interminably despite being the length of your average jumped-up short story, in which two ambitious yet tedious, driven yet soporific alpha males poison each other rather than endure another page, please promise me you’ll put it out of its misery by deleting it from my computer and never mentioning it to anyone again.’

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