Primeiros parágrafos

«He should have seen it coming.»

[in The Finkler Question, de Howard Jacobson, Bloomsbury, 2010]

publicou o Bibliotecário de Babel às 23:23 de Terça-feira, 12 de Outubro de 2010 para o arquivo Excertos, Geral.

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Comentários

2 Responses to “Primeiros parágrafos”

  1. isabel ribeiro on Outubro 13th, 2010 8:41

    And why didn’t he see it?
    Onde estão os primeiros parágrafos? …
    you should have written them… ou será que estou a ver mal? :)

  2. José Mário Silva on Outubro 14th, 2010 11:59

    Isabel,

    A secção chama-se ‘primeiros parágrafos’ porque vai recolhendo o primeiro parágrafo de várias obras. Acontece que neste caso o primeiro parágrafo é só uma frase, e curta.
    Mas, por ser para si, deixo aqui os cinco parágrafos seguintes:

    «His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one.
    He was a man who saw things coming. Not shadowy premonitions before and after sleep, but real and present dangers in the daylit world. Lamp posts and trees reared up at him, splintering his shins. Speeding cars lost control and rode on to the footpath leaving him lying in a pile of torn tissue and mangled bones. Sharp objects dropped from scaffolding and pierced his skull.
    Women worst of all. When a woman of the sort Julian Treslove found beautiful crossed his path it wasn’t his body that took the force but his mind. She shattered his calm.
    True, he had no calm, but she shattered whatever calm there was to look forward to in the future. She was the future.
    People who see what’s coming have faulty chronology, that is all. Treslove’s clocks were all wrong. He no sooner saw the woman than he saw the aftermath of her — his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light, the bed sheets billowing like clouds, the wisp of aromatic smoke winding from the chimney — only for every wrack of it — its lattice of crimson roof tiles, its gables and dormer windows, his happiness, his future — to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past.»

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