"Dear American Airlines," Jonathan Miles
Um... Sad. Just, sad. I had read good things about this short novel and was excited to read it, but goddamn is it sad. Aging former alcoholic takes stock of his ruined life while he's derailed on his way to his estranged daughter's wedding. Normally I'm a sucker for anything involving translation or translators, but jeez. I do have a lot of pages dog-eared, which I suppose means it's well-written.
Shortly before I left New Orleans, I was fooling around with an equally alky divorcée named Sandra ("Sahn-dra"). She claimed to have been a model once but that seemed dubious from a visual point of view.
Because of its status as a port city ("a crucial port city," the nuns said), New Orleans would be obliterated in the first wave of attacks; this, we were told, was the price we had to pay for living in such an important town. Also it was rumored that the Russians hated Mardi Gras and/or for that matter all parades of a festive nature.
I take an oversized amount of pride in the fact that I've never worn a wristwatch since my thirteenth birthday, when my father gave me a Timex and I smashed it with a nine-iron to see how much licking would stop its ticking (not much, as it turned out).
Shortly before I left New Orleans, I was fooling around with an equally alky divorcée named Sandra ("Sahn-dra"). She claimed to have been a model once but that seemed dubious from a visual point of view.
Because of its status as a port city ("a crucial port city," the nuns said), New Orleans would be obliterated in the first wave of attacks; this, we were told, was the price we had to pay for living in such an important town. Also it was rumored that the Russians hated Mardi Gras and/or for that matter all parades of a festive nature.
I take an oversized amount of pride in the fact that I've never worn a wristwatch since my thirteenth birthday, when my father gave me a Timex and I smashed it with a nine-iron to see how much licking would stop its ticking (not much, as it turned out).