The Forgiven Kindle Notes

The Forgiven: A Novel by Lawrence Osborne
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Last annotated on November 22, 2013

The suburbs of Tangier were ruined, but the gardens were still there. And so were the crippled lemon trees and olives, the dogged disillusion and empty factories, the smell of seething young men.
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Not massively, but slightly. Lies are excusable, but it depends on what they are, and when he searched David’s boxy, hypermasculine face, he found it half open like a box that hasn’t been properly closed. The eyes were in eclipse.
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He said it again and again, while his companions watched him impassively. They were middle-aged men with grizzled half-beards and large, blunted hands. They were thin desert men of the far south, with bird-beak noses and stony eyes set close together, their teeth half silver. Their faces were covered; their clothes were white and indigo. Their hands were scarred. They spoke Tamazight.
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quiet, communicable rage spread among them and they clenched their fists out of view. The old man, meanwhile, conducted himself with considerable restraint. His stupefaction was written all over him, but his lips did not move; he did not blink. He did not give way to that same stupefaction. He merely approached the terrifying object and drank it in with his eyes. It did not seem to move him outwardly. It merely sucked him into its supernatural spell. The son that was living had gone through a metamorphosis that he could not comprehend or accept; gaiety and love had turned into pure materiality. It was as if his son’s beauty was only now revealed to him and he was stunned by it, so much so that his motor reflexes could not respond to this emergency. His hands dangled limply at his sides and he absorbed and absorbed until he could absorb no longer, and when his capacity to absorb was exhausted he found himself not full with grief but emptied with it, and at that moment his mind went away, and his heart with it, and he was left standing like something hanging by a filthy little string, a small animal that has been strung up by a primitive trap and is about to die.
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They had a grudging envy of them on that account, but the envy never quite became respect. But who can say that the two things are not sometimes identical?
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They were just efficient pessimists, and therefore astute readers of human nature. They always assumed the worst, and that made them correct nine times out of ten.
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“The tongue has no bones, but it crushes all the same.”
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HIGH AS A KITE,” DAVID THOUGHT AS THE DOOR closed behind Anouar. Perhaps they were all high now. A house full of high Berbers: it was not a particularly comforting thought, but then again, perhaps it was a comforting thought,
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Day was peeling the foil from the bottle slanted in its ice bucket, and he was telling her that, technically, the wire cage underneath was called the muselet. Here, he was saying, is how you open a bottle of champagne, by holding it firmly by the base and turning the bottle, not the cork. A red wine is held by the neck, a woman by the waist, and a bottle of champagne
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Truly, as was said, a woman without discretion was like a gold ring in a pig’s snout.
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Deep in his grave, his son remembered his past, but no one else was admitted to it, and the riddles from now on would recede and grow more complicated, since life is but a sport and a pastime, as the Koran carefully reminds us, and because it is a game and nothing more, one forgets that the point of life is death.
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“Yes. I just don’t feel guilty anymore. I don’t need to be forgiven by anyone.” “I’ve been saying that all along, haven’t I?” “You have, but it’s such a huge thing to believe, isn’t it? That one doesn’t need to be forgiven by anyone.
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He had, in a sense, switched allegiances. For all his brutishness, Abdellah had impressed him. To live in a place like that and survive was magnificent in its way, and the greed David had feared from them had not in the end materialized.
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They looked down at Azna, suddenly revealed in its entirety as in a military map. The restoration was so lavish that it now appeared, Richard thought proudly, as it might have a century ago in its heyday. It was a personal triumph, a vindication, and it seemed to him that he had never seen anything as beautiful. Since he would never have children, it was the next best thing. It was a genuinely personal creation.
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A sleeping face can be as terrifying as a flight of steps leading down from a trapdoor and disappearing like a rope cast into a well.
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They kissed, shook hands, said what people say when they are reluctant to concede that they might not be seeing an acquaintance ever again.
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