I’m getting the feeling that I’m going to be hopping from book to weblog posting on this novel. I love this:
"To be sure," says Boris, with a twinkle in his eye, "but, in the wintertime he writes. And he writes well…remarkably well."
I try to induce Mr. Wren to talk, to say something, anything, to talk about the spavined horse, if necessary. But Mr. Wren is inarticulate. When he essays to speak of those dreary months with the pen he becomes unintelligible. Months and months he spends before setting a word to paper. (And there are only three months of winter!) What does he cogitate all those months and months of winter? So help me God, I can’t see this guy as a writer. Yet Mrs. Wren says that when he sits down to it the stuff just pours out. (p. 14)
Sorry, but I’m immediately sympathetic to the tongue-tied Mr. Wren. Had e-mail and weblogs been available thirty years earlier I might have been considered quite eloquent a ‘speaker.’
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology