Free A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser Page B

for longer’ was utterly irresistible. Doha, the capital of Qatar on the Persian Gulf. It didn’t only sound exotic and unrelated to virtually anything he’d heard of before, most of all it sounded like a hefty salary rise and an extension to his contract by a year at least.
    And so one July evening – it was beautifully warm, she’d put a chair outside the shop, a bottle of wine beside it (and a glass, of course) and had just opened a wonderful little book – Valerie received a text on her mobile: ‘Doha’s happening! Yeah!’
    â€˜Great!’ she texted back. ‘I’m delighted for you.’ Then she deleted the second sentence. She turned ‘Great!’ into ‘Great’, and ‘Great’ into ‘Wow!’, then ‘Wow’ and finally…
    She poured herself another glass of wine, swirled it around and held it up to her nose. As the bouquet of blackberries, lavender, fir, oak and vanilla roamed her senses, she watched a family walking down the streetsome distance away. The wife was wearing a headscarf, the man had a beard, the boy an enormous stick of candy floss, so large that his entire head disappeared behind it. She looked up at the lit window opposite, through which she could see the silhouette of a woman moving back and forth. Maybe she was mixing something in a bowl, maybe she was playing guitar or piano, maybe she was sitting on her boyfriend. Whatever she was doing, it looked as if she was doing it with commitment. The family soon vanished. The glass soon emptied. The light in the window switched off. Valerie turned off her mobile. ‘Have a good flight,’ she muttered, opening her book in the weak light of dusk, which coalesced with the weak light of the streetlamp. And as a soft summer wind took all thoughts of Sven away, so these words took her to another place at another time:
    Â 
    Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,– the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking’d-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen…
    She has more than a thousand pages before her. Her first really thick book. It’s not one of those must-reads her aunt had catalogued without any notes. No, on this one she commented simply, ‘The most beautiful first line in all literature. The entire book one long poem.’
    It may well turn out to be a book that’s impossible to explain, one like James Joyce’s
Ulysses
that is as compelling as it is unreadable, so mysterious and puzzling that after reading it what lingers is the uncertain feeling of having gained a glimpse of an unheard-of world rather than the certainty of having understood its life and workings.
    Aunt Charlotte had also made a note on Joyce’s masterpiece: ‘Liebig’s Extract of Meat. You can’t eat it. But it’ll make many soups (Tucholsky).’
    There were a few similarly gargantuan tomes, which Valerie had put in a separate pile to turn to in moments of hubris. Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain
was there, as were Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, Robert Musil’s
The Man without Qualities
, Jonathan Franzen’s
The Corrections
, David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest
and Susanna Clarke’s
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell
(Aunt Charlotte’s comment: ‘As if from another time. A great storyteller!’) Each one a heavyweight and out of the ordinary.Literary bulk. Valerie was terrified of these works. But as the old truism goes, fear always shows the way. And so, whenever she’d had enough of the monotony of management, she followed the path of fear and leaped into the adventures of these mighty literary tomes.
    And that was what she did that evening, when she’d had enough of managing her relationship with Sven, in