Brett Ashley

Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is one of the coolest characters ever created.

Her first appearance in the book is pretty engaging.

A crowd of young men, some in jerseys and some in their shirt-sleeves, got out. I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. They came in. As they went in, under the light I saw white hands, wavy hair, white faces, grimacing, gesturing, talking. With them was Brett. She looked very lovely and she was very much with them. (28)

I think that might be my favorite entrance in all fiction, but maybe I am forgetting something.

The Last Sentence

I have often thought that the best first sentence in a novel is in The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. (3)

Prior to reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, I thought the best last sentence was in the published version of A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (though, from what I understand, there are lots of unpublished endings, but I will have to look that up later).

After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. (332).

Now I think that sentence is tied for my favorite with the last one from Never Let Me Go (though, arguably, it is exactly the same in feeling and intent, if not the explicit words or preceding story).

I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. (288)

The Brief History Of The Dead

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier is now out in paperback. If you didn’t pick it up in hardcover, you should definitely pick it up now.

It is riddled with corporate intrigue and layered with environmental, apocalyptical, futuristic and globalization themes, which makes it an excellent page turner. It is the kind of book that you cannot put down and every time you are done with one chapter you must start the next.

But, its core narrative concept is what makes this such an excellent book (that those who have died have a conscious existence while they are in memory of the living). As long as someone who is still alive remembers you, you remain alive in a place called the City. In the City people work and vacation and carry on in a “normal” way.

One of the characters in the book tries to figure out how many people any given living person has ever known (basically to get an idea of how big the City actually is). It is the kind of thing that, after reading the book, I am tempted to figure out (by comparison, it kind of reminds me of Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. In Citizen Vince the protagonist tries to count up the number of people who he knows that are dead under the suspicion that he knows more dead people than living.).

Anyway, The Brief History of the Dead is a page turner and is thought provoking, but what makes it so great is the fantasy that somehow all those that we have known (and perhaps loved) have a second chance at opportunities that they missed in life. They have this chance, because we remember them.

It is a pleasant thought. Or, as Jake Barnes says in The Sun Also Rises:

Isn’t it pretty to think so? (251)