McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Amsterdam

New York

Double Day

1998

"Though he sounded it guiltily on his inner ear, he would not let the word reach his lips."

There were moments in the early morning, after the mild excitement of dawn, with London already heading noisily for work and his creative turmoil finally smothered by exhaustion, when Clive stood from the piano and shuffled to the doorway to turn out the studio lights and looked back at the rich, the beautiful chaos that surrounded his toils, and had once more a passing thought, the minuscule fragment of a suspicion that he would not have shared with a single person in the world, would not even have committed to his journal, and whose key word shaped in his mind only with reluctance; the thought was, quite simply, that it might not be going to far to say that he was ... a genius. A genius. Though he sounded it guiltily on his inner ear, he would not let the word reach his lips. He was not a vain man. A genius. It was a term that had suffered from inflationary overuse, but surely there was a certain level of achievement, a gold standard, that was nonnegotiable, beyond mere opinion. [...]
(p. 143)

Body::Ear

Reading

Ian McEwan, Amsterdam (New York: Anchor Books, 1999).

05/14/2011