Saturday, July 2, 2011

The one extra detail

From his seventh floor student room, she heard, he could see the Eiffel Tower. He could also climb out onto the roof, although he had to be careful as he could slip and fall and die for sure -- whereupon she ruined the nearly Moulin Rouge image by a too detailed description of an eighth storey suicide over twenty years before: going into the context and the reactions of middle class Istanbul, as well as the thin red line from the mouth that the journalists had drawn onto the dead woman's photograph on page three of the paper -- this last the one extra detail that ruined the effect.

No comments: