Before that, before it was ever a hotel at all, five full centuries ago, it was the home of a wealthy privateer who gave up raiding ships to study bees in the pastures outside Saint-Malo, scribbling i...
Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn't life a kind of corruption?
Audubon,
At night she’d close her eyes and imagine: over a hundred million billion insects hatching and dying every year—all those bristling, pointed, winged lifetimes: murderers and egg raiders, cooperators a...
At night she runs her fingertips over her father’s model: the bell tower, the display windows. She imagines Jules Verne’s characters walking along the streets, chatting in shops; a half-inch-tall bake...
And yet by early autumn, once or twice a week, at certain moments of the day, sitting out in the Jardin des Plantes beneath the massive hedges or reading beside her father’s workbench, Marie-Laure loo...
A voice materializes out of the distortion in his headphones, then fades, and he goes ferreting after it. There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, : a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling y...
A memory rises: Etienne was in a field east of the city with his brother. It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for th...
A corner of the night sky, beyond a wall of trees, blooms red. In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, r...
Воздух – библиотека и патефонная пластинка всякой прожитой жизни, всякой прозвучавшей фразы, и в нем по-прежнему отдаются все когда-либо сказанные слова.
I spend ten entire minutes trying to open a plastic package of Weeble-wobbles...,my fingers raw, the three little Weebles obstinate in their PVC clamshells. I can't help but wonder, as I saw with a br...
The) Gray wagtail...doesn’t look like much, does he? Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire.
Suave y con acento. «Niños, el cerebro está envuelto por una oscuridad total —dice la voz—. Flota en un líquido transparente en el interior del cráneo y jamás recibe luz. Pero a pesar de eso el mundo...
And Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio in his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed.
The fires pool and strut; they flow up the sides of the ramparts like tides; they splash into alleys, over rooftops, through a carpark. Smoke chases dust; ash chases smoke. A newsstand floats, burning...
So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light? Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.
Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel is forty-one years old, not so old that he cannot be promoted. He has moist red lips; pale, almost translucent cheeks like fillets of raw sole; and an instinct for c...
Quantos labirintos existem neste mundo. Os galhos das árvores, as filigranas das raízes, a matriz dos cristais, as ruas que o pai dela tinha recriado nas maquetes. Labirintos nas saliências de conchas...
Neumann One, if he were not scheduled to die ten weeks from now in the Allied invasion of Normandy, might have become a barber later in life, who would have a smelled of talc and whiskey and put his i...
In her memory, Marie-Laure hears the two policemen: People have been arrested for less. And Madame Manec: Don’t you want to be alive before you die?