Wisdom from the 42nd Page

Le Petit Prince

Raiding the bookshelves of The Great Harvest Bread Co. in Everett, Washington we found the forty-second page of “Le Petit Prince” where author Antoi Saint Exupery wrote—in French (emphasis added):

si le général n'obéissait pas, ce ne serait pas la faute du général. Ce serait ma faute.»

«Puis-je m'asseoir? s'enquit timidement le petit prince.

— Je t'ordonne de t'asseoir», lui répondidt le roi,

More information about “Le Petit Prince” (and the book itself) is available from:

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• Powell's Books

(Distribooks Inc, January 1999. Paperback, 99 pages. ISBN: 2070408507; EAN: 9782070408504.)

Interface

On the forty-second page of their political thriller, “Interface,” authors Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George wrote (emphasis added):

their broken-backed sofa in the trailer in Commerce City, his beer in his hand, meditating over this doorjamb, planning to come and take it away. Had it been eating at him ever since they had moved out?

Clarice's birthday was next week. Maybe he intended to give this to her as a birthday present. It had great sentimental value, and it was free.

"Harmon?" she said, again, and heard it echo again off the bare walls of the house. She went to check the bedrooms, but he wasn't in any of them.

The sound of music finally drew her to the garage. Faint tinny music was coming out of the Volvo's stereo. It was barely audible through the mudroom door. She went into the garage.

Harmon was sitting in the driver's seat of the Volvo, reclined all the way back. Once she got the door open, she recognized the music: Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Harmon's favorite. Years ago, on their first trip to Colorado, they had parked on the summit of Pike's Peak and listened to this tape, loud.

She walked quietly up the flank of the Volvo and looked in the drivers window. Harmon had leaned the seat all the way back and folded up his jacket to make a little pillow on the headrest. His eyes were closed and he wasn't moving.

The keys were in the ignition, in the ON position. The tank was empty. The engine was dead. The volume on the stereo was turned all the way up. The tape had been running for hours, possibly even days, auto-reversing itself back and forth, playing the symphony over and over again, running the battery down until hardly anything came out of the speakers.

Harmon was dead. He had been dead for quite some time.

Before she did anything else she reached inside the car and pounded the garage door opener clipped to the sun visor. The big door creaked open, letting in a rush of resh clean air and opening up a clear glittering view of the suburbanized foothills.

It was a very sensible thing to do. Eleanor Richmond did it because she was not crazy, would not allow herself to be crazy, would not allow herself to succumb to the poison gas that her husband had used to kill himself. Her kids and her

More information about “Interface” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
• Amazon.com
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(Spectra Books, May 2005. Paperback, 640 pages. ISBN: 0553383434; EAN: 9780553383430.)

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Another submission from reader Matt Smith, this time the forty-second page of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” where author Roald Dahl wrote (emphasis added):

They looked at each other, and both started giggling nervously.

"Mind you, " said Grandpa Joe, "there is just that tiny chance that it might be the one, don't you agree?"

"Yes," Charlie said. "Of course. Why don't you open it Grandpa?"

"All in good time, my boy, all in good time. Which end do you think I ought to open first?"

"That corner. The one furthest from you. Just tear off a tiny bit, but not quite enough for us to see anything."

"Like that?" said the old man.

"Yes. Now a little bit more."

"You finish it," said Grandpa Joe. " I'm too nervous."

"No, Grandpa. You must do it yourself."

"Very well, then. Here goes." He tore off the wrapper.They both stared at what lay underneath. It was a bar of candy- nothing more. All at once, they both say the funny side of the whole thing, and they burst into peals of laughter.

More information about “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
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• Amazon.com

(Puffin Books, August 2007. Paperback, 155 pages. ISBN: 0142410314; EAN: 9780142410318.)

Holes

Loyal 42nd Page reader Matt Smith writes to tell us that on the forty-second page of “Holes” author Louis Sachar wrote (emphasis Matt's):

The yellow-spotted lizards like to live in holes, which offer shade from the sun and protection from predatory birds.  Up to twenty lizards may live in one hole. They have strong, powerful legs, and can leap out of very deep holes to attack their prey. They eat small animals, insects, certain cactus thorns, and the shells of sunflower seeds.

More information about “Holes” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Amazon.com
• Powell's Books

(Bloomsbury Children, October 2000. 233 pages. ISBN: 0439244196; EAN: 9780439244190.)

The Secret Life of Bees

On the forty-second page of “The Secret Life of Bees: A Novel” (a New York Times bestseller) author Sue Monk Kidd wrote (some emphasis added):

growth, shampoo, brush, toothpaste, toothbrush, rubber bands for my hair, all the time watching the window. What else? catching sight of the map tacked on the wall, I snatched it down, not bothering to pry out the tacks.

I reached under the mattress and pulled out my mother's picture, the gloves, and the wooden picture of black Mary, and tucked them down in the bag, too.

Tearing a sheet of paper from last year's English notebook, I wrote a note, short and to the point: "Dear T. Ray, Don't bother looking for me. Lily. P.S. People who tell lies like you should rot in hell."

When I checked the window, T. Ray was coming out of the orchard toward the house, fists balled, head plowed forward like a bull wanting to gore something.

I propped the note on my dresser and stood a moment in the center of the room, wondering if I'd ever see it again. "Goodbye," I said, and there was a tiny sprig of sadness pushing up from my heart.

Outside, I spied the broken space in the latticework that wrapped around the foundation of the house. Squeezing through, I disappeared into violet light and cobwebbed air.

T. Ray's boots stomped across the porch.

"Lily! Li-leeeee!" I heard his voice sailing along the floor boards of the house.

All of a sudden I caught sight of Snout sniffing at the spot where I'd crawled through. I backed deeper into the darkness, but she'd caught my scent and started barking her mangy head off.

T. Ray emerged with my note crumpled in his hand, yelled at Snout to shut the hell up, and tore out in his truck, leaving plumes of exhaust all along the driveway.

More information about “The Secret Life of Bees: A Novel” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
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(Penguin Books, January 2003. Paperback, 336 pages. ISBN: 0142001740; EAN: 9780142001745.)

The Stone Diaries

Ever loyal 42nd Page reader RCH sends us the forty-second page of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Stone Diaries,” where author Carol Shields wrote (emphasis added by RCH):

His voice is beautiful. Its texture is fine-woven wool. If it had a color it would be a warm chestnut. In tone, in fluidity, in resonance, it is all that a man's voice should be, with just that hint of Scottish bur, thinner than the skin of varnish on his oak lectern, giving necessary hardness. He rides straight up the walls of his sentences. His little pauses are sensuous gateways, without which his listeners would fall into a trance.

As it is, they keep their eyes fixed on him, focusing especially on his handsome, sorrowing, scholarly mouth, bending their heads only when it becomes necessary to write down the lists of words he unspools for them: the parts of a particular flower: pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle. Often he uses the blackboard, but today, having forgotten to bring his chalks along, he sketches these shapes in the air. His long fingers open and close around the airy forms. What a pity his shirt cuffs are in such a state, and it looks as though—yes, definitely—there is a button missing from his left sleeve; but he is oblivious to its absence—which is precisely what his female students find so compelling in Professor Barker T. Flett, his fine manly gift for self-forgetfulness.

The time is autumn, 1916, and twelve out of the fourteen students enrolled in Introductory Botany are young women. The men of Wesley College, all except for Edward Wood, an epileptic, and tiny misshapen Clarence Redfield—forty-eight inches high with one foot bent out sideways—have put on the uniform of the Dominion and gone to war. Why is it that Professor Flett is not himself away fighting at the front?

More information about “The Stone Diaries” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
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Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

169 years ago today the great 19th-century Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Marchado de Assis was born.

In honor of his birthday we are pleased to present the forty-second page of Gregory Rabassa's English translation of Machado de Assis's 1881 novel, “Memórias Pósthumas de Brás Cubas.”

(Machado de Assis dedicated this novel "to the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrances these Posthumous Memoirs.")

On page 42 of Rabassa's translation we read (some emphasis added):

the vizier's wife, she beckoning to you with possession and you running, running, up to the long tree-lined drive from where you came out onto the street where all the harness-makers jeered at you and thrashed you. Then it seemed to me that Marcela's hallway was the drive and the street was in Baghdad. As a matter of fact, looking toward the door I saw three harness-makers on the sidewalk, once in a cassock, another in livery, another in civilian clothes, as all three entered the hallway, took me by the arms, put me into a carriage, my father on the right, my canon uncle on the left, the one in the livery on the driver's seat, and from there they took me to the house of a police official, from where I was transported to a ship that was to leave for Lisbon. You can imagine my resistance, but all resistance was useless.

Three days later I left the harbor behind, downcast and silent. I wasn't even weeping. I had an id&eeacute;e fixe... Damned id&eeacute;es fixes! The one on that occasion was to dive into the ocean repeating Marcela's name.

XIX

On Board

We were eleven passangers: a crazy man accompanied by his wife, two youths going on an excursion, four businessmen, and two servants. My father entrusted me to all of them, starting with the ship's captain, who had much of his own to look after as well because, on top of everything else, he was carrying his wife, who was in the last stages of tuberculosis.

I don't know whether the captain suspected anything of my lugubrious project or whether my father had put him on the alert, but I do know that he never took his eyes off me, called to me everywhere. When he couldn't be with me he brought me to his wife. The woman was almost always on a low couch, coughing a lot, and promising to show me the sights in Lisbon. She wasn't thin, she was transparent. It was impossible to know why she didn't die from one moment to the

More information about “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
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• Amazon.com

The Violent Land

On the forty-second page of “The Violent Land” (originally published as Terras do Sem Fim in Portuguese in 1943) author Jorge Amado wrote—as translated into English by Samuel Putnam (emphasis added):

making of it, of the cacao groves, and of the wood one single entity bound by the dusk that was equal to night itself. The trees would assume gigantic shapes, growing in stature with the mysterious spreading of the shadows. Dolorous sounds would be heard, the cry of unknown birds and of animals, coming from—where? She did not know. And the hissing of the reptiles, the rustling of dried leaves where they crawled. Ester always had the feeling that one day the snakes would end by coming up on the veranda and making their way into the house, some stormy night, until they reached her own and her child's throat, which they would encircle like a necklace. She herself could never have told the horror of those moments, which lasted from the fall oftwilight until the storm broke. And then, when at last it descended in all its fury and Nature appeared bent upon destroying everything, she would seek out those places where the light of the kerosene lamps was brightest. Even then the shadows cast by the light made her afraid and set her imagination to work, leading her to believe the most superstitious of the stories that the Negroes told.

There was one thing that she always remembered on these nights, and that was the cradle lullabies her grandmother had sung to her to calm her fears when she was a child, so many years before. And so now, beside her own child's cradle, she tearfully sang them over again, one after another, in a low voice, once more convinced of their magic efficacy. She sang them to her son as he looked up at her with his hard brown eyes. Horacio's eyes; but she sang them for herself as well, for she too was a frightened child. She sang in a low voice, lulling herself iwth the melody as the tears streamed down her face. She forgot the darkness of the veranda, those terrible shadows outside, the ominous hoot of the owls in the trees, the melancholy of the night, and the forest and its mystery. She sang the songs of long ago, simple melodies, efficacious against spells. It was as though her grandmother's protecting shade were hovering over her, lovingly and understandingly.

And then of a sudden the cry of a frog in the pool, killed by a snake, would come through the forest, through the cacao groves, and would enter the house; it was louder than the owls' hoot or the rustling of leaves, louder than the whistling wind itself, as it came to die away in the lamp-lit room where Ester sat, her body all a-tremble. She sang no more. Closing her eyes, she could see—in every slightest detail—the slimy, repulsive reptile slithering along over the ground and among the fallen leaves,

This book is available for purchase from:

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• Amazon.com
• Powell's Books