The Bouquet of Dumb Arguments
The narrator describes a scene in which a man from Sarajevo presents a rather long-winded riddle for a man from Serbia to figure out. The Serbian’s responses tick off the Sarajevan to the point that the two men almost come to blows twice. The narrator goes to sleep with the men still arguing the next day he awakes to a particularly effective bit of imagery delineating the aforementioned scene:
“When I woke up, they were gone, leaving the stench of sweaty mindlessness behind.”
Imagery for the Sake of Imagery
The story “Stairway to Heaven” prominently features the playing of Zeppelin’s rock anthem which perfectly sets the mood for using imagery simply for the sake of imagery. As the chapter moves forward, the atmosphere of the text begins to replicate the trippy non-contextual language of the song’s lyrics, leading to an epic sentence of imagery existing solely for the sake of being imagery:
“Outside, a tremulous lightwake stretched itself toward the cataractous moon.”
Ballad of the Sad Hotels
The first half of the book almost verges on an obsessive description of hotels. And then, suddenly, hotels disappear completely off the map. It is almost as if the ability to tolerate writing about them is flushed right out the narrator’s capacity. One particular passage offers imagery which could very explain the sudden end to the hotel obsession:
“I truly confronted the ineluctable sadness of hotel rooms: a psyche with a notepad nobody had ever used to write; the bed cover with infernally purple flowers; a black-and-white picture of a soulless seaside resort; a garbage basket lined with crumpled paper tissues suggesting a messy quickie…There was no way I was going to spend a night alone in this cave of sorrow.”
The Recitation
In “The Conductor” the narrator describes meeting a famous Bosnian poet and hearing him recite poetry for a writer’s club at a café. The description of the recitation is imprinted in the imagery of the biological processes of the act and the response by those listening:
“He began his recitation in a susurrous voice, riding a tide of iambic throttles and weighted caesuras up to thunderous orgasmic heights, from where he returned to a whisper and then ceased altogether, his head bowed, his eyes closed. He seemed to have fallen asleep. The Table was silent, the muses entranced.”
