Lunchtime read part I: For Esme with Love and Squalor...

There really didn’t seem to be a great deal in the papers this weekend about literary matters so today once the kids had gone to bed the focus shifted to doing some reading and both the Salinger and the Grass have been nibbled away at and attacked.

First the Salinger with a rather odd story because you think you have guessed the ending only to discover you were wrong and as a result are left not really knowing what to make of it all.

Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes
The title refers to a line from a poem that a husband used to read to his wife before they drifted apart. The line is quoted by the husband to a friend who answers the phone in the company of a girl who you assume is the missing wife. The drunk and angry husband is talking about divorce and admits to his friend who is obviously a colleague that he has also lost a case with a high profile client.

The friend keeps advising the husband to calm down and go to bed to wait for his wife and all the time you expect the woman he is with will head off home. But after hanging up and a delay the friend phones back to apologise because his wife has come home. That leads to the friend being sharp with the woman he is with and displaying a mixture of temper and disappointment

Maybe he thought the wife would come to him but all the time the reader thought she was already there with him

Some Gunter Grass in a moment…