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adam_mcphee 's review for:
The Lone Woman
by Bernardo Atxaga
A big cigarette book. One even becomes a weapon. A woman gets released from prison after a four year stint on terrorism charges for helping the Basque ETA or some splinter group. The novel is about her bus ride home to Bilbao. She meets a nun, a sick woman, and some undercover cops who aren't done with her. The prose is good and there's a lot of talk about poetry, but I don't know what it added up to, if anything. A short, brisk read. I assume I found out about the author through Mark Kurlansky's Basque book.
Does anyone know if this is real?
She didn’t know what the filter of a cigarette was made of, but, thanks to a self-defence course she had taken when she was a student, she did know that if you lit it and worked it into a point with your fingers it became a sharp weapon, like a bradawl made of black glass.
She retrieved her packet of cigarettes and took one out. They were Havanos, the only kind she could find in the dive where they had drunk their last beer the night before.
“You’ve lit the wrong end! I can smell it from here!” said the man, lying down on the bed.
“You’re right,” she replied while she sharpened the point. She burned her fingers slightly, but she felt no pain.
After a few seconds, she felt the base of the filter. The material had become completely crystallized. It now formed a sharp point. Holding the weapon between her index finger and her thumb, she hurled herself on the bed.
The man let out a howl when she lunged at him with the filter and drew a line across his belly; he tried to beat her off with his fists. But the two cuts that followed the first – in parallel, from his penis to his throat and from his throat back down to his penis – stopped him in his tracks. Maddened by pain, terrified by the blood pouring from his wounds and beginning to stain the sheets, he fled from the room, not out into the street, since he was naked, but to some other part of the hotel.
Does anyone know if this is real?
Spoiler
“There’s no need to shout. Just give me time to light a cigarette.”She didn’t know what the filter of a cigarette was made of, but, thanks to a self-defence course she had taken when she was a student, she did know that if you lit it and worked it into a point with your fingers it became a sharp weapon, like a bradawl made of black glass.
She retrieved her packet of cigarettes and took one out. They were Havanos, the only kind she could find in the dive where they had drunk their last beer the night before.
“You’ve lit the wrong end! I can smell it from here!” said the man, lying down on the bed.
“You’re right,” she replied while she sharpened the point. She burned her fingers slightly, but she felt no pain.
After a few seconds, she felt the base of the filter. The material had become completely crystallized. It now formed a sharp point. Holding the weapon between her index finger and her thumb, she hurled herself on the bed.
The man let out a howl when she lunged at him with the filter and drew a line across his belly; he tried to beat her off with his fists. But the two cuts that followed the first – in parallel, from his penis to his throat and from his throat back down to his penis – stopped him in his tracks. Maddened by pain, terrified by the blood pouring from his wounds and beginning to stain the sheets, he fled from the room, not out into the street, since he was naked, but to some other part of the hotel.