Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City by Edward Carey.
Title: Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City.
Author: Edward Carey.
Genre: Literature, fiction, fantasy, family.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2003.
Summary: Alva and Irva Dapps are identical twin sisters. They live in the city of Entralla. Alva is by nature an explorer; she longs to travel the world. Irva is a recluse, for whom a step outside the house is an ordeal. But the twins belong together - they feel each other’s feelings, think each other’s thoughts, suffer together, love together, and hate together - they cannot survive without each other. Since childhood, the twins have built fantastical cities of Plasticine. But when Irva finally refuses to leave the house at all, the major work of their lives begins. Alva, attempting to return Irva to life, brings the city of Entralla into their home; she wanders its streets, observing, taking notes, measuring, and reports her findings to Irva, who painstakingly constructs a miniature Entralla of Plasticine. And the model city comes to serve Entralla in a way its creators could never have imagined.
My rating: 9/10
♥ Together these features lend the vague impression of a classical temple, and perhaps Acropolis of Athens were it not for the fact that the building is so caked in filth (soot, bird excrement, vehicle exhaust, industrial grime) that its neglect gives it away for what it is: an ordinary public-service building. Abused, ugly, useful.
♥ The bell tower, and there's nothing exceptional in this, is tall and thin. The baptistry, and this is unexceptional news too, is short and fat. I think of Father and Mother. I think of bell tower and the baptistry.
The bell tower looks down and loves the squat baptistry, the baptistry looks up and loves the beanpole tower. Now let me cast these buildings in the forthcoming event. Let me label the bell tower Linas-father, for if he was a building rather than a person he would indeed have been a tall, gangly type of structure. And let me label the baptistry Dallia-mother, for were she to be built out of limestone, she too would be only one storey in height, and she too would spread herself out in a horizontal fashion. So now, lower the light of day into a more romantic atmosphere, turn on the moon and see the beginnings of us, of Alva and Irva. Hear a faint rumbling as the bell tower pulls himself from his foundation in Cathedral Square, and lays himself down on top of the baptistry. And as the city vibrates with this act of love, to the happy groans of the bell tower and the baptistry: we begin. That's how it should have been marked, not by a little panting from two adolescents on the top entrance step of a building, but by the loud ecstatic bellowing of great architecture as it bangs away, building against building.
♥ Some men love power, some men love women, some men love boys, some men love cars, some men love firearms, some men love matchstick buildings; well, Father was one of those men who love stamps, a small breed admittedly but a breed nevertheless.
♥ This was true - soon Father would have as much time as he desired to linger over each new stamp as he went about the city, from house to house. But those stamps, Father would protest, had been franked; they were no longer the pure virgin stamps that could be found at the post office counters. Oh, he would sigh, there was something magical about those unused stamps arranged neatly in blocks, still with their serrated edges untorn and their glue unlicked. They were the nearest thing, he believed, to innocence.
♥ After a week of aching limbs father brought a wooden stool with him which ever after lived side by side with Mother's plastic chair in the twelfth counter booth. Perhaps that plastic chair and that wooden stool were slowly falling in love too - they seemed somehow to belong to each other. Perhaps this abandoned child and this half-orphan were instinctively drawn together by a profound yearning for absent people. Perhaps each immediately felt the want that surrounded the other, and instantly closed ranks for desperation for a whole.
♥ How the people loved the matchstick cathedral - more eager, it would seem, to relinquish their money if it might help to keep the matchstick model in good order, than to aid the vast and echoey religious warehouse itself. This is not uncommon; miniature things move people.
♥ With matchsticks Grandfather built his fragile defences against all the sorrows and difficulties of his life, with a little glue to bind them he was able to construct a kind of contentment.
♥ Their home, a building divided into many small flats, was called Sirkin House. What a tiny little place their fraction of it must have been. Pokey-home. Poxy-home. How inappropriate it is that their love, so huge a thing as it felt to them, could fit within so paltry a container. A thousand, thousand rooms, a palace the size of Versailles in France would have seemed a little more adequate to house the limitlessness of their adoration. But love, how extraordinary this is, does not generally require large quantities of space.
♥ Let us turn instead to Louis himself, for he is invariably there, or at least his body is - his mind travels increasingly longer distances until one day, surely not far from now, it will never come back.
♥ There are many people on this earth who believe the earth to be solid, who trust the surface that they step upon every day and trust it so implicitly that they scarcely even think of it. Terra firma they call it. But the earth is not to be trusted. There is a mighty subterranean engine beneath us and sometimes that engine vibrates and in those vibrations can be heard a roar, a roar of something that will dismiss any faith in that ground beneath our feet. Cracks open and from somewhere down below terror pours out.
♥ Suddenly, with each new morning, with each new minute more precious than ever before, came a strange bravery. The quake had tried to teach us that we had little control over ourselves, that we were insignificant and flimsy; but some Entrallans rebelled from that lesson. In those days it was possible to see people wandering about the city suddenly stop dead with a vast smirk on their face, stick out their tongues or raise their fingers in a salute of derision and yell (either down at the ground or up at the sky, depending on whether they were religious or not), filled with this new boldness: 'Give that to your hunchback daughter!' And afterwards they might run off to murder procrastination. Yes, now timid people, who without the earthquake might ever have remained so, proclaimed love to shocked friends or neighbours or bust into their offices and, filled with a flowing inspiration that sped them onwards, became great achievers - freed from their chains of shyness. There was a great sense of doing in the city then; the prostitutes in the Sex District were exhausted...
♥ I've always found libraries sexual places. I cannot say why exactly. Perhaps it is because there are so many other people sitting around quietly, and it is a good place to people-watch, and because it is often easier to spend time dreaming up imaginary romances with people just a few desks away from you, who seem so reachable, than to return to the second chapter of a five-hundred-page volume. Perhaps it is because all that studying makes me feel hungry, and that hunger turns to another type of hunger. Perhaps it is because all that silence seems so peculiar and suggestive. Or perhaps it's because of the warmth inside libraries, a warmth which makes so many people fall asleep, sprawled on top of tolerant sentences. Perhaps it's simply watching those people in the intimacy of sleep, which generally they do under covers, behind closed doors, that now I feel I've been given a privileged view of something so private, something that lovers see.
♥ Learning to ride a bike, once you have changed out of your post office uniform into something less sacred and once the saddle and the handle bars of the bicycle have been raised to their highest setting, contains the following ingredients: uncertainty, fear, perseverance, trust (in the teacher), betrayal (when the teacher first lets go of the bicycle), belief in the possibility of it, an intuitive understanding of the laws of gravity, desperation, exhilaration and plasters.
♥ It is simply a fact that some people long to travel the entire world, and do not flinch from nights in wild forests or from the heat of the desert or from the anger of a tempest. It is simply a fact that some men long to climb the loftiest of mountains, others to explore the harshness of Antarctica, others still to circumnavigate the world in hot-air balloons. Why do they do it? For the challenge, we are expected to believe. And the newspapers and the journalists will not shut up about these people. But there are other, more modest people, whom for the most part the journalists avoid, who are frightened to step out into a street. It is a fact that it is too challenging for them. They cannot do it. This latter group of people, who almost always exist in solitude, are so panicked by the world that they close themselves up inside houses, inside rooms, and never leave again. The longer they stay inside the harder it is for them to peer out; they may be brave enough at first to touch door handles but very soon it will be impossible for them to turn them.