Sunday, October 02, 2005

A Suitable Boy

‘But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they’re bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they’re good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.’

The character, Amit, in A Suitable Boy, chapter 18:2 by Vikram Seth.
Amit is perhaps mocking himself and his snobbish literary audience, but Seth himself may be writing with irony at this point, as the book this appears in heads towards its 1000th page.

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