"The Art of Fielding" [.]

[fiefoe]

I read some rather dismissive Amazon review that was right on the money about the relatively disappointing last 100 pages. Have you ever seen such a tidy death?

• The menu itself seemed to be an insult - she didn't give Mike one.
• He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? .. You told it with a hint of doom... Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense.. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.
• Had he learned - would he ever learn - to discard the thoughts he could not use?
• That would be like Owen - to control the room with his torpor.
• He wanted to chase down the holy vacancy that marked his best workouts, to sense his body as a hollow drum.
• Another error, his fifth in a week; they were piling up like bodies in a horror movie.
• ... that Owen found their afternoons worth repeating... This was the dreamy, paradisiacal side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.
• Baseball: you loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
• "I... we drink coffee." Hey sounded pleading and inane, trying to imbue these three simple words, this banal act, with all the import and sentiment it held for him.
• curdled marriage / the soundless trough of a late Sunday morning / the tender meaninglessness of adulthood
• More like a joke Owen wanted him to live up to.
• Affenlight found this hypothesis exciting, if dubiously constructed. Then he glanced at Aparicio, hands folded mournfully in his lap, and his excitement curdled to embarrassment.
• Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life.. the life in which you were chained to your one true wish.
• Why was the younger person always the prize, the older person always the striver?... That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed.
• who knew how to convert money into pleasure and pleasantry / their superfluously detailed lives
• He was like a minor Greek god you've barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier's soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.
• If you were Henry and you needed Mike you were simply screwed. Everyday ... you had to invent yourself and your friendship from scratch.
• a sidelong and almost casual love
• 'a soul is something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love.'

<<