Some meandering thoughts about nothing special

One of my friends recommended me Memoirs of a Geisha. I had simply not been able to start it. Finally, when I had 'time', I started right from the Translator's note. Right there, then I was hooked. I decided to take note of the interesting points in the novel.

{I will keep on updating this post until I am finished with this novel so keep coming back.}

{February 19, 2007}

I still haven't finished it. I perused through five more pages. Reading a novel somehow is not anymore one of my favorite pastime.

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Memoirs of Geisha - Notes
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- As a historian, I have always regarded memoirs as source material. A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of memoirist's world. It must differ from biography in that a memoirist can never achieve the perspective that a biographer possesses as a matter of course. Authobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in better circumstance to tell us - so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

- When I asked Sayuri's permission to use a tape recorder, I intended it only as a safeguard against any possible errors of transcription on the part of her secretary. Since her death last year, however, I have wondered if I had another motive as well - namely, to preserve her voice, which had a quality of expressiveness I have rarely encountered.


- Well, I felt as a bird must feel when it has flown across the ocean and comes upon a creature that knows its nest.

- "You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That's like making tea in a bucket!"

- When I was six or seven, I learned something about my father I'd never known. One day I asked him, "Daddy, why are you old?" He hoisted up his eyebrows at this, so that they formed little sagging umbrellas over his eyes. And he let out a long breath, and shook his head and said, "I don't know."

- I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

- He wore no shirt but only his loose fitting skin...

- Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

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posted by dipeshb @ 11:24 AM