By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Yann Martel

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       FOREWORD by Yann Martel

      At one point in this beautifully sad book, Elizabeth Smart says of herself, ‘I am more vulnerable than the princess for whom seven mattresses could not conceal the pea.’

      The more appropriate fairy tale for the sake of comparison would be Sleeping Beauty, because By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is the story of a woman who was asleep for a hundred years until the kiss of a man (more precisely his poetry) woke her up to life and to love.

      Smart’s evocation of love is sweeping, aching, exhilarating, rapturous, incantatory:

      When the Ford rattles up to the door, five minutes (five years) late, and he walks across the lawn under the pepper-trees, I stand behind the gauze curtains, unable to move to meet him, or to speak, as I turn to liquid to invade his every orifice when he opens the door. More single-purposed than the new bird, all mouth with his one want, I close my eyes and tremble, anticipating touch.

      And again:

      What is going to happen? Nothing. For everything has happened. All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was. There are no minor facts in life, there is only the one tremendous one.

      I know, I know this is merely the introduction and not the book itself, but one more:

      But the surety of my love is not dismayed by any eventuality which prudence or pity can conjure up, and in the end all that we can do is to sit at the table over which our hands cross, listening to tunes from the wurlitzer, with love huge and simple between us, and nothing more to be said.

      In this high-wire act of sustained emotional resonance, the following might help anchor the reader in the great wash of language: in August of 1937 in London, Elizabeth СКАЧАТЬ