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jwharris28
Posted 2015-05-27 6:05 PM (#10631 - in reply to #9162)
Subject: Re: The Definitive 1950s Reading Challenge		Quote Reply



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I'm trying to think why I like PKD's writing so much. Even though his books were weird and far out, he often wrote about believable people. Not super-heroes that save the world, but schmucks that get by day by day. Here's a passage from The Man in the High Castle about an ex-wife that struct me.


 
Juliana the best-looking woman he had ever married. Soot-black eyebrows and hair; trace amounts of Spanish blood distributed as pure color, even to her lips. Her rubbery, soundless walk; she had worn saddle shoes left over from high school. In fact all her clothes had a dilapidated quality and the definite suggestion of being old and often washed. He and she had been so broke so long that despite her looks she had had to wear a cotton sweater, cloth zippered jacket, brown tweed skirt and bobby socks, and she hated him and it because it made her look, she had said, like a woman who played tennis or (even worse) collected mushrooms in the woods.
But above and beyond everything else, he had originally been drawn by her screwball expression; for no reason, Juliana greeted strangers with a portentous, nudnik, Mona Lisa smile that hung them up between responses, whether to say hello or not. And she was so attractive that more often than not they did say hello, whereupon Juliana glided by. At first he had thought it was just plain bad eyesight, but finally he had decided that it revealed a deep-dyed otherwise concealed stupidity at her core. And so finally her borderline flicker of greeting to strangers had annoyed him, as had her plantlike, silent, Im-on-a-mysterious-errand way of coming and going. But even then, toward the end, when they had been fighting so much, he still never saw her as anything but a direct, literal invention of Gods, dropped into his life for reasons he would never know. And on that account a sort of religious intuition or faith about her he could not get over having lost her.
Dick, Philip K. (2012-01-24). The Man in the High Castle (pp. 14-15). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.


Edited by jwharris28 2015-05-27 6:07 PM

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