"The driver of the island’s only taxi was a tall, thin man, with almost invisible eyes and a sparse, brown, asymmetrical mustache. He drove his rickety old car in a kind of drunken weave, from one side to the other of the road. Shrill, improbable cries of “Taxi! Taxi! Taxi!” rang out from behind the rocks and hills, and from the sea. It turned out that the man was a ventriloquist. This cry of “Taxi” was his talent, and his only joke. He required, every few seconds, to be praised for it. “Taxi!” he would scream from a passing motorbike or donkey cart. “Taxi!” from behind a cow."
- Renata Adler, SpeedboatI am moving this week, and I successfully made it through packing my books with only two stops to read: one for a Poets & Writer’s article about online literary magazines, the other for the copy of Speedboat I picked up in The Strand last summer. I love the confidence in Adler’s sentence structure, the assurance with which she leads us away from assurance. My sense is that the novel’s strangeness is of a very different sort than today’s experimental aesthetic would necessarily endorse. It is very upfront about its cosmopolitanism; it tells rather than shows and it has a lot of opinions. A divergent branch of fiction evolution.
Mark Athitakis comments in more detail.
