Book Report:"The Giant's House: A Romance" by Elizabeth McCracken

From Penn's private book blog:

"The Giant's House: A Romance by Elizabeth McCracken – 201031 – 

Here’s another book I came late to. I guess everyone read this in the 90’s.  Not me. It’s a guy who’s too tall that does magic. You’d think I’d identify, but he’s two feet taller than me. So, I’m normal size in this book. I identify more with the woman who narrates I guess. She’s a very reliable narrator. She seems to see herself in brutally accurate ways. It’s subtitled a romance and I guess it is and that’s really wonderful. It really is a romance. I read so many things that have death as their subject, murders and shit like this. This really has life as it’s subject and it’s so much more intense and sad. It reminds me of seeing “Hamilton” on Broadway and, wow, wasn’t that something with all its big issues, and then I saw “The Flicks,” the Annie Baker play, and I was destroyed. When things go from life and death to life . . . that can change one’s heart. It’s not either or, we can have it all, but I have to remember that all is out there. David Greenberger told me to read this and it’s really beautiful.  And the plot has so many surprises, there is figuring out where it’s going. It’s a great book. And every line is to be savored. She thinks about things.

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Doctors had not yet prescribed glasses, and he squinted at faraway objects in a heroic way, as if they were new countries waiting to be discovered.

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She had the voice of a dancer, I mean like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, someone who has such grace at another art that the grace suffuses their voice, which does not quite match the tune but instead strolls up to a note and stands right next to it, that slight difference so beautiful and heartbreaking that you never want to hear a professional sing again.

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We are fools for who will have us.

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who did not have a sense of humor in the way most people do not have a sense of French.

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“The best things I can believe,” I said, “are the things that happen to be true.”

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“It’s true,” I said. “Socks mate for life. Socks and swans.”

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But you can’t spend your life hoping that people will ask you the right questions. You must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask. Otherwise you’re dreaming of visiting Venice by driving to Boise, Idaho.

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“But that’s the thing of it,” said James. “It wasn’t escaping that was hard. I mean, he made it look harder than it was. He took just long enough to make the audience think he was dead. That was the real trick. Not that he was alive, because he was alive at the start and nobody was so impressed, right? The trick was he made people think he was dead.”

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“I think I’ve never met a nicer man with fewer morals.”