When I bit a banana in Elba, I realized that it was the Platonic Idea of Banana, that which every banana that I had ever tasted had been trying, unsuccessfully, to imitate.
Rohan presents a list-description worthy of Poul Anderson or SM Stirling. The first person narrator sees, lit by oil lanterns:
rafters-dangling dried herbs and sausages;
sacked hams;
slabs of salt cod;
octopi;
bloated wine-flasks;
less identifiable shapes -
- and smells their fragrance. Then he realizes that they are not plastic and are what every tourist-trap Greek bar had been imitating. He has yet to realize that he has been translated to a different reality. The transition occurs at a leisurely narrative pace but the action will probably accelerate.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And ELBA was where Napoleon was first exiled by the victorious Coalition which finally cast him down in 1814. But, Elba was too temptingly near France, and Napoleon escaped the island for his second usurpation of the throne in 1815.
Ad astra! Sean
Palindrome:
"Able was I ere I saw Elba."
Kaor, Paul!
Ha! I wish I had seen that palindrome! And it's something Napoleon himself might have said as he was going to Elba!
Ad astra! Sean
Ah, the Illyrian Tavern -- one of my favorite fictional hangouts!
The name is evocative too -- Illyria is itself one of the great crossroads of history, a liminal place on the edge of half a dozen empires.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And not so far from Split, where the Emperor Diocletian went to live after he abdicated in AD 305. And the scene of a very evocative story called "The Last God's Dream," by Russell Kirk.
Ad astra! Sean
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