merchantivory's reviews
169 reviews

The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe

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4.0

they might as well lick each other’s wounds. but they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away 
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

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4.0

today i know it is a hopeless task to try and dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page, especially a man like sandro. he was not the sort of person you can tell stories about, nor to whom one erects monuments — he who laughed at all monuments. he lived completely in his deeds, and when they were over nothing of him remains - nothing but words, precisely. 
Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka

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(now i'm losing my name--it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

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4.5

the last bit of daylight crumbles like leftover cake in clumsy fingers
The Orange and other poems by Wendy Cope

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and that orange, it made me so happy,
as ordinary things often do
just lately. the shopping. a walk in the park.
this is peace and contentment. it's new.

the rest of the day was quite easy.
i did all the jobs on my list 
and enjoyed them and had some time over.
i love you. i'm glad i exist.
About Love by Anton Chekhov

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they didn’t love the man himself but someone who was a figment of their imagination, someone they had been eagerly seeking all their lives. and then, when they realised their mistake, they still loved him 
South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion

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at the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn't matter, doesn't make any difference, doesn't figure. the snow still falls in the sierra. the pacific still trembles in its bowl. [...] in the south they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. in the west we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it. how could it have come to this? i am trying to place myself in history. i have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it.