APS TOGETHER
Day 5
New Grub Street by George GissingChapter 5
November 10, 2023 by Yiyun Li
“The photographer was a man of whims and idealisms; his wife had a strong vein of worldly ambition.”
A photographer in the mid-nineteenth-century is worthy of his own novel. (“A man who had followed many different pursuits, and in none had done much more than earn a livelihood,” is how he was presented.)
“He desired to procure a reader’s ticket for the British Museum.”
This reminds me of the 1980s when the National Library of China was not open to the general public. My father, working as a nuclear physicist, was lucky to have access. Once a month he would announce to us—"It's my day to go to the library”—which filled me with wistful envy.
“He was trying to devise a ‘plot,’ the kind of literary Jack-in-the-box which might excite interest in the mass of readers.”
Oh that cursed word plot! This is a good time to re-utter my anti-plot stance: No real life is lived by plot; only a murderer needs a plot.
