"The Buried Giant", ("The Drunken Botanist")

[fiefoe]

James Wood's review of this book in the New Yorker is (or used to be?) entitled "Kazuo Ishiguro's Folly", which is quite harsh. I do sympathesize with Wood's view that a lack of texture enervates fantasy books, and this novel about loss of memory is itself quite delible.

• As Beatrice says: “If that’s how you’ve remembered it, Axl, let it be the way it was. With this mist upon us, any memory’s a precious thing and we’d best hold tight to it.”
• “She went on speaking, about how this land had become cursed with a mist of forgetfulness,” Beatrice tells us of this woman. “And then she asked me: ‘How will you and your husband prove your love for each other when you can’t remember the past you’ve shared?’ And I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Sometimes I think of it and it makes me so afraid.”
• I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn't like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I'm wondering without our memories, there's nothing for it but for our love to fade, and die.
• The years can be a rich disguise.
• They know the infants they circle in their arms will before long be bloody toys kicked about these cobbles.
• A long fall to stony ground and hot smoke already around me, listening to my enemies below I asked, 'Do I mingle with them even when we become ash together? Or better to be smashed alone under the night sky?'
• "But this she-dragon all but parted you in two, " I tell him, "if I must carry you to water, I'd have to go under this summer sun, a separate part of you under each arm before we reach any such place."

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Amy Stewart's "The Drunken Botanist" is very interesting in between the cocktail recipes.
__ 'Head' and 'tail' being the start and the end of a distillation process.
__ Barley is great at converting starch back to sugar, allowing easy fermentation.
__ Pear trees are planted for the next generation.