No one has
any time to read the great novels anymore. This is because we’re
too busy updating our profiles on Facebook and looking at the
photos of everyone we went to school with who have since become
D.J.'s. Many of these people have managed to feign a kind of
anonymity by adding the suffix “raw” to their name, so that Brian
for example becomes DJ BRIANRAW! In any event, it takes a lot of
time to appreciate these things and, unless we finally submit our
bodies to medical experiments or come down with swine flu, (both of
which would require long periods of quarantine) we’re really not
going to be settling down with Proust anytime soon. So in the
spirit of the
hastily-thrown-together-gift-book-spin-off-based-on-a-real-book-slash-author-that-you’re-probably-never-going-to-read,
I am here proposing something which the marketers would probably
call The Book of Last Lines, a compilation of endings specifically
tailored to those who enjoy saying things like: " Ahh, I just
finished War and Peace today tomorrow perhaps I will finish
Ulysses!" but don't have the time to mean it.
There have been plenty of compilations chronicling the best opening sentences of all time. In The American Book Review’s top 100, published a couple years ago, Herman Melville, unsurprisingly brought home the whale bacon at #1 with: Call me Ishmael. – from Moby-Dick (1851). There’s a distinct pleasure I think, in finishing a great book and turning, automatically once more to the first line. Not to begin to read the book again in its entirety, but rather to savour now, with hindsight, with nostalgia and longing, that moment, an indiscernible time ago, when we read those first lines for the first time. The pleasure such lines gives us is inseparable of course, from the novel that follows, or at least from the idea of that novel, which we have gradually accumulated even without having read it.
Last lines are different. They are heavier, sadder and more telling I think, not of the novel so much, but of the author. If you want to know who an author is, read their last lines.
Over the last year or so, someone very dear to my heart has been trying to convince me to read Ayn Rand. Now, I have the slight suspicion that Ayn Rand is a fascist. Tobias Wolff described his brief encounter with her in his wonderful little book Old School and this went a long way in confirming my suspicion, ( the fact that her two favourite books were her own, was fairly compelling evidence). But I needed to be sure, so I turned to the last page of her brick sized manifesto, Atlas Shrugged…
Ah, What Titan could stand against such a deeply horrible last line I wondered?
And so here, I put the great (giant) books to battle, last line for last line. Don’t worry, you won’t remember this. At worst, you’ll come to the end of a thousand pages one day in the distant future and have a lingering, even comforting sense of déjà vu, which you will attribute to the greatness of the literature, to the fact that it’s understood the human condition so well. For those of you who object, nevertheless to the practice of ruining secrets, I’ll tell you my pin number. It’s 7642.
Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) - Page 1168: He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.
Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Page 991: And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami) - Page 607: In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann) - Page 854: And out of this world wide festival of death, this ugly rotting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round – will somebody rise up out of this too?
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) - Page 1125: “No, no, it has to be so…right, Marie? It has to be so…”
The Kindly Ones (Jonathan Littell) - Page 975: The kindly ones were onto me.
The Vivisector (Patrick White) - Page 617: Too tired too end-less obvi indi-ggoddd
Underworld (Don Delillo) - Page 827: Peace.
