Try to remember it always, he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. Remember that you and I made this journey tog...
To Travel without moving an inch.
There were black mountains on which nothing, no grass or trees, seemed to grow. Thin lines that twisted unpredictably, with tributaries arriving nowhere. Not rivers, but roads.
There had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come; the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days.
The view induces the opposite of vertigo, a lurching feeling inspired not by gravity’s pull to earth, but by the infinite reaches of heaven.
The job was a sign of his failings. In his youth he’d been a devoted scholar of foreign languages, the owner of an impressive collection of dictionaries. He had dreamed of being an interpreter for dip...
She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating.
She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day’s headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At ev...
She speaks reverently of her summers here. This is her favorite place in the world, she tells him, and he understands that this landscape, the water of this particular lake in which she first learned...
Sexy means loving someone you do not know.
Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.
It’s not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ash...
It was that she had already fallen in love, and been married, and had a child, and had her heart broken. He had yet to experience any of those things.
It was only then, raising my water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months.
It made him shy, they way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror.
Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there wou...
I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music?We are searching, t...
I think it's a hesitant book and at the same time bold. A text both private and public. On the one hand it springs from my other books. The themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, bel...
I just wanted to go home, to the language in which I was known, and loved.
Be sure to keep my ruby choker and the pearl and emerald set for the person you will marry, she said during one of these walks. I’m not planning on getting married any time soon, I told her, and she s...