Pages: 119
Finished: April 2009
Challenges: Read and Review
First sentence: "This story is unlikely"
I read this little novella during the read-a-thon this month. It was a sad, sweet little story.
From The Washington Post
What would you do if you found out that your life would end in 30 days? Set your legal and financial affairs in order and contact the people at hospice? Forgive your enemies and send loving messages to friends and family? Or would you take a trip, stopping at all the places in the world you have loved and all those you wanted to see but never visited? When Ambrose Zephyr learns around the time of his 50th birthday that he has only one month to live, he makes frantic plans to travel the globe alphabetically from Amsterdam to Zanzibar with his beloved wife, Zappora (Zipper) Ashkenazi. These two people have been everything to each other for all the years of a quietly happy marriage. If he wants to travel at this time, she will go, wherever the journey takes them and whatever her own feelings may be.
The surprise of this little book is not that it is poignant but that it is delightful: graceful, stylish, humorous, intelligent and lacking even the faintest whiff of sanctimony. Each page shimmers with life at its gentle, everyday best: always unraveling at one end of the alphabet or the other, laced with love.
This certainly was a gentle and graceful novel. I bookmarked a couple of the passages that leaped out at me:
"She opened her journal and thought of writing. E is Eiffel's tower, standing in Paris. L is for London and home. Z is Zipper. T is for terrified. H is for hopeless."
"-- I think I am an unbelievably lucky man who is married to a woman who I think looks a little like the Rokeby Venus and I think if I open my mouth to say something I think is important I think she will discover she 's married a fool.
--You are many things, my love. A fool is not one of them. You're imagining things.
--I am keeping things to myself. Having an opinion doesn't require sharing it with everybody.
--It requires sharing it with me. Because I get to know what you think. I get to know you better than anyone else.
--You do. Always have, always will, full stop. Let it go.
--One more thing
--What?
--You're wrong.
--Am I?
-- Luck had nothing to do with us."
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