TNCOM, #11: Raccoon

Sometimes a stupid child would tie a firecracker to a crayfish or a frog just once, and light the fuse. Or give a piece of sugar to a raccoon, which in its odd fastidiousness would wash that sugar in a brook till there was nothing left. —Renata Adler, Speedboat

The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own. —W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Sotto voce

Via Google: Eliot Fremont-Smith in The Village Voice, October 11, 1976, on Renata Adler's Speedboat.

Bonus: Photo of Adler, and on the next page, a very young looking Margaret Atwood.

Crazy for you

There are some days when everyone I see is a lunatic.
—Renata Adler, Speedboat

It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy.
—Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

I did a bit more wilting. It seemed to me that I was alone in a deserted smoking-room with a homicidal loony. It is a type of loony I particularly bar, and the homicidal loony I like least is one with a forty-four chest and biceps in proportion. —P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit