Love Is Desire Sustained By Unfulfilment.

I Think The Adjective Post-modernist Really Means Mannerist. Books About Books Is Fun But Frivolous.

His Contagious Conviction That Our Love Was Unique And Desperate Infected Me With An Anxious Sickness; Soon We Would Learn To Treat One Another With The Circumspect Tenderness Of Comrades Who Are Amputees, For We Were Surrounded By The Most Moving Images Of Evanesecence, Fireworks, Morning Glories, The Old, Children. But The Most Moving Of These Images Were The Intagible Relfections Of Ourselves We Saw In One Another's Eyes, Reflections Of Nothing But Appearances, In A City Dedicated To Seeming, And, Try As We Might To Possess The Essence Of Each Other's Otherness, We Would Inevitably Fail.

His Wedding Gift, Clasped Round My Throat. A Choker Of Rubies, Two Inches Wide, Like An Extraordinarily Precious Slit Throat.

So I Suppose I Do Not Know How He Really Looked, And, In Fact, I Suppose I Shall Never Know, Now, For He Was Plainly An Object Created In The Mode Of Fantasy. His Image Was Already Present Somewhere In My Head And I Was Seeking To Discover It In Actuality, Looking At Every Face I Met In Case It Was The Right Face - That Is, The Face Which Corresponded To My Notion Of The Unseen Face Of The One I Should Love, A Face Created Parthenogeneticallyby The Rage To Love Which Consumed Me.

It May Be The First In What I Trust Will Be A Rapidly Growing And Influential Genre--the Novel Designed On Purpose To Be Excludedfrom The Booker Short-list.