Дослушала вчера Рэнкина, что сказать, написано умело и хорошо, но сюжету веришь с трудом, а оптика, таксть, вполне кринжовая. Нуар нуаром, но "а не завести ли мне женщину, заодно и ванную отмоет" attitude did not age well.
С другой стороны, Эдинбра у него — не меньший персонаж, чем инспектор Рибус, что конечно подкупает.
It was typical of Edinburgh to have a crumb of culture sited amidst the fast-food shops. A requiem mass and a bag of chips.
Edinburgh’s an easy beat, his colleagues from the west coast would say. Try Partick for a night and tell me that it’s not. But Rebus knew different. He knew that Edinburgh was all appearances, which made the crime less easy to spot, but no less evident. Edinburgh was a schizophrenic city, the place of Jekyll & Hyde sure enough, the city of Deacon Brodie, of fur coats and no knickers (as they said in the west). But it was a small city, too, and that would be to Rebus’s advantage.
Edinburgh slept on, as it had slept on for hundreds of years. There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were Enlightenment ghosts, articulate and deferential. They were not about to leap from the darkness with a length of twine ready in their hands.
Haymarket was the last station into Edinburgh before the much grander Waverley. Rebus remembered that the premature withdrawal of the penis during intercourse for contraceptive reasons was often referred to as ‘getting off at Haymarket.’ Who said the people in Edinburgh were dour? A smile, a song, and a strangulation.
Edinburgh rain was like a judgement. It soaked into the bones, into the structures of the buildings, into the memories of the tourists. It lingered for days, splashing up from puddles by the roadside, breaking up marriages, chilling, killing, omnipresent. The typical postcard home from an Edinburgh boarding-house: ‘Edinburgh is lovely. The people rather reserved. Saw the Castle yesterday, and the Scott Monument. It’s a very small city, almost a town really. You could fit it inside New York and never notice it. Weather could be better.’
Dissent, rationalism, enlightenment: Edinburgh had specialized in all three.
#readingnotes #quotes #edinburgh
С другой стороны, Эдинбра у него — не меньший персонаж, чем инспектор Рибус, что конечно подкупает.
It was typical of Edinburgh to have a crumb of culture sited amidst the fast-food shops. A requiem mass and a bag of chips.
Edinburgh’s an easy beat, his colleagues from the west coast would say. Try Partick for a night and tell me that it’s not. But Rebus knew different. He knew that Edinburgh was all appearances, which made the crime less easy to spot, but no less evident. Edinburgh was a schizophrenic city, the place of Jekyll & Hyde sure enough, the city of Deacon Brodie, of fur coats and no knickers (as they said in the west). But it was a small city, too, and that would be to Rebus’s advantage.
Edinburgh slept on, as it had slept on for hundreds of years. There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were Enlightenment ghosts, articulate and deferential. They were not about to leap from the darkness with a length of twine ready in their hands.
Haymarket was the last station into Edinburgh before the much grander Waverley. Rebus remembered that the premature withdrawal of the penis during intercourse for contraceptive reasons was often referred to as ‘getting off at Haymarket.’ Who said the people in Edinburgh were dour? A smile, a song, and a strangulation.
Edinburgh rain was like a judgement. It soaked into the bones, into the structures of the buildings, into the memories of the tourists. It lingered for days, splashing up from puddles by the roadside, breaking up marriages, chilling, killing, omnipresent. The typical postcard home from an Edinburgh boarding-house: ‘Edinburgh is lovely. The people rather reserved. Saw the Castle yesterday, and the Scott Monument. It’s a very small city, almost a town really. You could fit it inside New York and never notice it. Weather could be better.’
Dissent, rationalism, enlightenment: Edinburgh had specialized in all three.
#readingnotes #quotes #edinburgh