Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo, is well and truly blowing my freaking mind. Why? Well, look. Here's the opening. Tell me if you're still standing once you read this:
"Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five. What did he do when this happened? He did not take long walks into the scrolling dawn. There was no friend he loved enough to harrow with a call. What was there to say? It was a matter of silences, not words."
If you're still upright, you must be inhuman. Try this, from the scene where Chin is biting his nails:
"He was gnawing, grinding his teeth on the hangnail, then the nail itself, then the base of the nail, the pale arc of quarter moon, the lunula, and there was something awful and atavistic in the scene ... Why is a hangnail called a hangnail? It's an alteration of agnail, which is Middle English, Eric happened to know, from Old English, with roots in torment and pain."
Reminds me of a pair of sisters I know.
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