Speedboat by Renata Adler6/12/2023 After four days, I brought the folder back. I signed for a file, took the folder to my desk, and then took it home. Over the years, it has made the clerk ill. Reporters are always taking his files away, forgetting to sign for them, keeping them, losing them, throwing them away. “The clerk of the morgue of this paper is an irascible man. I could have plucked any paragraph from this book and it would have tasted as sweet, but it was delicious to type up these passages. Here are two gems: little windows, little story starts. To my ear, Adler’s prose is no less perfect than Joan Didion’s. And the accumulation of these bits make up an incredibly compelling voice. They read like postage-stamp-sized essays. Speedboat is knit from fragments, snapshots. I stole a copy from a rental apartment in Venice last month, trading one of the books I brought from home (which I have tried, unsuccessfully, several times to read) I stole it feeling justified, not short-changing Italy on English books.
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