Fait Accompli

From John Lanchester’s Family Romance:

My father used to tell the story of a tutor at his university, a Viennese professor of something or other. Once there was a general conversation about what people would have, if they could have anything in the world . . . When it came to the old professor he sucked his pipe for a moment, and then said, ‘Well, if I could have anything I wanted, anything at all, I think I would choose . . . permanent delusions of grandeur.’

NOTE TO SELF: Make a comparison of the evolution of Japanese food from its Chinese ancestry to famous Stalin’s quote, ‘Lenin left the people a great legacy, and we, his heirs, have fucked it up.’

Another possible epigraph from the New Statesman, 5/8/02 (direct quotes, which I have converted to dialogue):

WOMAN: Congratulations, Michel. You wrote a great book, and you deserve the Impac prize, every penny of it.

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ: But you know, I sometimes ask myself, must you deserve something in order to enjoy it?

From The World Is What It Is:

         Would he sign a petition supporting Salman Rushdie, who had been sentenced to death by
         Ayatollah Khomeini and was now being defended by every right-thinking littérateur in the
         world, with Harold [Pinter] and Antonia [Fraser] leading the charge of the righteous in Lon-
         don? No, and for good measure he added, ‘I don’t know his books, but I’ve been aware of
         his statements. I found them usually left-wing and trivial and antiquated.’ And what of
         Khomeini’s fatwa? ’It’s an extreme form of literary criticism.’

The World Is What It Is contains plenty of scandal — the wife- and mistress-beating; the whoring; etc. — so when I read this:

            Margaret told him once more how much she adored him, illustrating the point with
            a 1:1 scale drawing of his erect penis, done in dark-brown felt-tip; the penis wore
            sunglasses and a lime-green cowboy hat.

I was disappointed at the unexpected coyness. How big was it? Why wasn’t the letter reproduced in the illustrations?

I’m reading the French biography, now that it’s out in paperback.

A couple of quotes I liked:

<<I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.>>

Aged 14, on Jane Austen: <<Her work really bored me. It is mere gossip.>>