"The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards"

Edoardo Ballerini's adroit narration was what kept me listening. At first there was the sense that we have seen all this before -- the story competition at school, the cold muse, but gradually one realized that Kristopher Jansma meant it that way. He's interested more in the possiblity of variations than the theme the variations are built on. The best moment was perhaps when the story of the gild painter at Tammany Hall turned up again as a hit Bollywood movie about a Tamil boy (again in love with a rich girl), and the narrator couldn't tell who plagarized whom.

Still, my quota for Unreliable Narrators is quite filled for this year. Not to mention my quota for novels about fiction writing. This one is cleverly contrived but like a remarkably real-looking fake fireplace, leaves me wishing for some real warmth.

• How did I wind up in Dubai? Well it's certainly an interesting story - one of my better ones. Unless, of course, you want the truth. The truth is only slightly less interesting than the story. But, then again, it's the truth - so it has that unique quality. Of all the possible stories out there, from the fantastic to the mundane, only one of them qualifies as the truth.
• a woman too awe-inspiring to be contained within four Anglo-Saxon names.
• Each morning I want to write something that's worth wrapping my heart in. (After Shelley.)
• Does it sting like this because I've been robbed or because it was never mine to steal? ... Maybe an idea, like love, cannot ever be stolen away, just as it cannot ever have belonged to me and only me.
• “Each time it goes around a little bit, a second goes away.”
  “Where?” I asked, as the pendulum swung again. And again.
  He winked at me. “It escapes. That’s why they call it that. Escapement.”
• And for this imperfect immortality, what prices have been paid? How many livers, lungs, and veins? Shredded, polluted, shot? How many children deserted, family secrets betrayed, sordid trysts laid out for strangers to see? How many wives and husbands shoved to the side? How many ovens scorched with our hair? Gun barrels slid between our lips? Bathtubs slowly reddened by our blood and twisting drowned that drowned us? How many flawed pages burned in disgust and reduced to ashes? How many flawless moments observed from just a slight distance so that, later, we might reduce them to words? All with an unspoken prayer that these hard-won truths might outlast the brief years of our lives.
• It was like exactly what it was. It was like a set of claws tearing through my flesh.