It seemed to her then that the thing she had done was incredible, that it had not been done by her at all, but by some unhappy and debased stranger, and then, on the table, she found the food he had so solicitously left behind for her, the milk, the chocolate, the soup package, coffee, even cigarettes, and she looked at the nakedness of the gifts as though they contained some terrible confirmation of the fact that the woman who had inhabited this room through the night had, after all, not been a stranger.
The shock and shame and tenderness that vie with one another in that passage, as if they were a tangle of drowning men each striving to beat the others to the surface, yet each so well delineated, can stand as well as anything for the what might be called, a tad repetitiously, a passionate, considered dissection of passion. In his introduction, the novelist Paul Bailey says Hayes does for bruised men what Jean Rhys did for bruised women. The devastating equality his lovers find here leaves them equally battered.
The Slaves Of Solitude | By Patrick Hamilton | New York Review Books Classics | 270 pages | $14.95 (Paper)
The Girl On The Via Flaminia | By Alfred Hayes | Europa Editions | 147 pages | $14.95 (Paper)
Related:
Major minor, Twenty years pass, RI stays the same, Fighting words, More 
- Major minor
Hamilton’s newly re-issued 1941 novel Hangover Square makes almost all other hard-boiled writing seem phony.
- Twenty years pass, RI stays the same
Phillipe + Jorge were graciously asked to recall Rhode Island’s Monthly’s first dubious achievement-style Rhode Island Red Awards, as chosen in 1988 by your superior correspondents, during the mag’s 20th anniversary gala last week.
- Fighting words
Imagine that suicide bombers have just blasted three American shopping malls.
- Capital boneheads
The willing support of GOP US representatives for Dubya’s spying on innocent Americans, violating their civil rights on a daily basis for years, makes this all the more detestable, if not laughable.
- Inside fight
By all accounts, Thursday, February 9 was a red-letter day for US Senate candidate Matt Brown.
- Reality bites
The war in Iraq has been on the back burner of the American political scene for some time.
- Trying out an anti-demonstration ‘sonic cannon’
The Maine Marine Patrol is considering purchasing a “sonic cannon” capable of broadcasting earsplitting, “disorienting” sounds, like those that have been used to break up peaceful demonstrations in public spaces in Iraq and the country of Georgia.
- Afghanistan: Just say no!
The idea that the war in Afghanistan has reached a critical junction, a “now-or-never” moment that requires an additional 40,000 troops to win, is rubbish.
- Rent a war
Wonder why the Iraq government changed its mind about expelling Blackwater, the rent-a-soldier company whose employees killed 17 civilians this past month?
- The outsiders
Just a few months ago, the story-line of Maine’s 2008 US Senate race seemed inevitable.
- War all the time
War is hell and all that, but deep down you desperately want to know what it was actually like.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Culture and Lifestyle, Elizabeth Taylor, History, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Elizabeth Taylor, History, World History, World War II, U.S. Armed Forces Activities, U.S. Army Activities, Alberto Moravia, Patrick Hamilton, Cesare Pavese, Less
