Thursday, August 23, 2012

Some sense of endings

Warning, spoilers ahead:

Here are the last lines of eleven of my favourite books. (Mostly the final sentence, unless I felt that really, really would be too difficult, in which case you get a couple of extra sentences for free.)

Can you identify the titles and authors? (There are at least two Booker winners in here, and possibly some novels that have been nominated for the prize but haven't won.)

If you really want, you can try and psychoanalyse me on the basis of the novels I most enjoy. To try to protect my fragile egos from any armchair Freuds, I really dislike one of these eleven:

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
'Well,' he said. 'Let's start with Mr McCrindle.'
The gun, Bill Roach had finally convinced himself, was, after all, a dream.
Tears, in teams, abseiled down his face.
And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.
A judgment that can in the nature of things almost certainly never be delivered.
"Everybody's gone, Mrs Porter. Everything's back to normal..."
Gave himself up to the snarl of the engine, the spreading numbness of the drugs in his system, and the onrushing emptiness of the road ahead.
He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.
'Mischief, my dear,' she said to Charles. 'You don't know the half of it.'
Fuck it, he thought. You have to learn how to swim sometime. He opened the door and walked into the sea of the dead.

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