Good choice, is what Bastien said when Ellis picked three, for the record; not too big and not too small. And then Ellis was rescued from further conversation by some commotion elsewhere in the dining hall. Rescued from the explanation, too, which is really very dull. There are six books Bastien might name as favorites currently in his possession. One he’ll never let anyone borrow. The remaining five are arranged on a single shelf in his room, separate from the revolving stacks he reads and returns to libraries or sells back at book stalls. It’s the one in the center he plucks out for Ellis.
The title is The Life of Katrin Lindner, after the protagonist, who begins life as the clever, bored, spoiled teenage orphan charge of an aging aunt who frequently misplaces her in Cumberland. But Katrin is the subject of hardly a tenth of the words. The remaining nine-tenths meander through the folkloric history of this or that landmark she passes, the history of the neighborhood she’s lost in, and the pasts and passions of the various characters she encounters, and several stories-within-the-story told by an old beggar. All of it is related in loving, exhaustive detail.
Interspersed with all of that meandering, there is a hint of a plot, a sense of building toward something, a crossed-dagger symbol mentioned on the person of several different characters, a blind washerwoman who drops her washboard at the sound of Katrin’s name. At its pace, and with its hints that the story will not be resolved until Katrin is grown and married and looking back on all of this from a safe distance and comfortable chaise, the novel might be expected to reach a conclusion about all of this several thousand pages in.
Instead, it stops after two hundred and twenty, just as Katrin is sneaking away from her aunt. She slips out a window, determined to go see an elephant purportedly on display outside the city. Then there is a single page of the now-defunct Le mélange de Marie, in which the publisher apologizes for the lack of new installments of the serial and promises more will be forthcoming as soon as possible. Then there is a note from the publisher of the collected chapters, noting no further installments were ever published.
The book is handed off to Ellis without more comment than hello and here, in passing in the corridors. It’s tied up with the book and pamphlet Ellis passed along to Bastien before—each now several times more read than they had been before, but no worse for the wear. Also included is a short book of folktales, recently scrounged up in the market, illustrating the Orlesian adoration (at least in some corners) of a vague Jean hero to whom nothing ever happens entirely by accident.
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delivery.
The title is The Life of Katrin Lindner, after the protagonist, who begins life as the clever, bored, spoiled teenage orphan charge of an aging aunt who frequently misplaces her in Cumberland. But Katrin is the subject of hardly a tenth of the words. The remaining nine-tenths meander through the folkloric history of this or that landmark she passes, the history of the neighborhood she’s lost in, and the pasts and passions of the various characters she encounters, and several stories-within-the-story told by an old beggar. All of it is related in loving, exhaustive detail.
Interspersed with all of that meandering, there is a hint of a plot, a sense of building toward something, a crossed-dagger symbol mentioned on the person of several different characters, a blind washerwoman who drops her washboard at the sound of Katrin’s name. At its pace, and with its hints that the story will not be resolved until Katrin is grown and married and looking back on all of this from a safe distance and comfortable chaise, the novel might be expected to reach a conclusion about all of this several thousand pages in.
Instead, it stops after two hundred and twenty, just as Katrin is sneaking away from her aunt. She slips out a window, determined to go see an elephant purportedly on display outside the city. Then there is a single page of the now-defunct Le mélange de Marie, in which the publisher apologizes for the lack of new installments of the serial and promises more will be forthcoming as soon as possible. Then there is a note from the publisher of the collected chapters, noting no further installments were ever published.
The book is handed off to Ellis without more comment than hello and here, in passing in the corridors. It’s tied up with the book and pamphlet Ellis passed along to Bastien before—each now several times more read than they had been before, but no worse for the wear. Also included is a short book of folktales, recently scrounged up in the market, illustrating the Orlesian adoration (at least in some corners) of a vague Jean hero to whom nothing ever happens entirely by accident.