The Balloonist: A Novel
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 159020980X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
As in the best of Jules Verne or Albert Sanchez Pinol, The Balloonist is a gripping and surreal yarn, chilling and comic by turn, that brilliantly reinvents the Arctic adventure.
It is July 1897, at the northernmost reach of the inhabited world. A Swedish scientist, an American journalist, and a young, French-speaking adventurer climb into a wicker gondola suspended beneath a huge, red-and-white balloon. The ropes are cut, the balloon rises, and the three begin their voyage: an attempt to become the first people to set foot on the North Pole, and return, borne on the wind. Philip Pullman says in his foreword: "Once I open any of MacDonald Harris’s novels I find it almost impossible not to turn and read on, so delightful is the sensation of a sharp intelligence at work. In The Balloonist , we see all of his qualities at their best."
vibrations exactly similar to the cracklings and sparkings that result when sealing wax and fur, or silk and a lump of amber, are rapidly frictionated. Further, that these emanations are directional in nature. Should there be, for example, a rarefied air to the westward, the prevailing wind will be from the south. It is to the area of low pressure that the lumps of air rush most vigorously and begin circling in cyclonic pattern, causing the most collisions and therefore the most cracklings in the
and not unkindly, “que vous z-êtes un vr-rai é-rudit.” I forgot to record that one of her breasts had been removed in an operation and she wore a padded appliance in its place. In addition to the aunt there was an uncle in Pondicherry, another aunt in Palma de Mallorca, and a female cousin in Poland with whom Luisa exchanged violet-scented letters. The house on Quai d’Orléans remained something of a mystery to me for a long time. There it was in the middle of the Seine, neither on the Left Bank
You explained how to pull the cord, and I did exactly as you told me.” “I said half the bag.” “You said nothing of the sort. I took particular care to pay attention to exactly what you were saying, so I would not make a mistake.” “Nevertheless you made one.” I was angry, she was angry, she faced me across the wicker car proudly and whitely, totally without expression, the pink blush appearing at the base of her throat and spreading slowly up the neck. It was our first quarrel. “If you are
drove it slightly up when it should have gone down, slightly down when it should have held level, was the demon of her emotions, a phenomenon I knew well from other incidents quite different in circumstances. It was the nature of her voice to rise when she was excited, to lower when she wished to convey a tone of threat. Now she was in the grip of both these forces. The flute could not have followed her even if it had been Mozart’s magic one, neither could any system of notation. The more the
that the small nickel revolver was lying on the floor by the window. There were two possible explanations of this. One was that I was mistaken and it had not gone out the window after all. I was sure I had caught a glimpse of it curving through the open rectangle and downward into the darkness, but perhaps I had only been deluded by my boy’s vanity about throwing things. The other was even less plausible: that the concièrge had been annoyed by my throwing things down into her courtyard, which was