Alexandrai or the Buffybot

Now that I’ve finished Endangered Species I can begin to read a little fiction again. Since my early twenties I’ve avoided fiction while writing stories because I am such a language sponge. Great stylists are deadly to me. Josh used to quote Joyce Carol Oates at me. It’s like getting hit over the head with a water balloon. Apparently she spends some time writing through whatever fiction she’s reading each day. That’s wonderful, if you happen to have that kind of time. I’d rather avoid the issue altogether.
This isn’t a law or anything. Sometimes I deliberately read fiction so it will influence me. But these are usually translations. While writing Endangered Species I read German and Austrian novels from the fin de siecle. Aside from the inherent cheeriness of such things they are an instructional manual on rueful observations of exhaustion and collapse.
I’ve decided to spend the summer with Plato, reading Paul Friedlander’s Plato and a novel I have always wanted to read, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. So far Justine is one of those books I want to underline every line of. And it would have definitely poisoned my Alexiad. Here are a couple of paragraphs from early in the book with a Buffybot:

Capodistria sits remote from it all, in his immaculate shark skin coat with the coloured silk handkerchief lolling at his breast. His narrow shoes gleam. His friends call him Da Capo because of his sexual prowess reputed to be as great as his fortune–or his ugliness. He is obscurely related to Justine who says of him: “I pity him. His heart has withered in him and he has been left with the five sense, like pieces of a broken wineglass.” However a life of such striking monotony does not seem to depress him. His family is noted for the number of suicides in it, and his psychological inheritence is an unlucky one with its history of mental disturbance and illness. He is unperturbed however and says, touching his temple with a long forefinger: “All my ancestors went wrong in the head. My father also. He wasa great womanizer. When he was very old he had a model of the perfect woman built in rubber–life-size. She could be filled with hot water in the winter. She was strikingly beautiful. He called her Sabina after his mother, and took her everywhere. He had a passion for travelling on ocean liners and actually lived on one for the last two years of his life, travelling backwards and forwards to New York. Sabina had a wonderful wardrobe. It was a sight to see them come into the dining-saloon, dressed for dinner. He travelled with his keeper, a manservant called Kelly. between them, held on either side like a beautiful drunkard, walked Sabina in her marevllous evening clothes. the night he died he said to Kelly: ‘Send Demetrius a telegram and tell him that Sabina died in my arms tonight without any pain.’ She was buried with him off Naples.” His laughter is the most natural and unfeigned of any I have ever heard.