Teaser Tuesday - 1 February

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Following our recent trip to see Jesica Hausner's Lourdes, I see that the latest Michael Arditti novel - Jubilate is also about Lourdes - this second link describes an Arditti visit to Lourdes a few years ago, and from the first link I nick this quote from the book about the place:

Love. The place may be crass and exploitative, but the pilgrims who come here do so in good faith. Like everywhere else, that’s been invested with a sense of the sacred. It has an aura. It’s that aura that inspires people to keep coming. But it’s also us, or rather they, who’ve given it that aura: their hopes, their faith and above all, their love. It’s not something that’s beamed down from above.

Here's the Guardian review which alerted me to the publication.
But enough about the book I'm not reading, the Arditti review made me want to go and re-read his earlier book about sex, death, lies and the Church of England 'Easter' - written in 2000 - which seems aeons ago now:

The world has changed so much so fast that the modesty of her life no longer seems a virtue but a sign of its insignificance. As she gazes at the battlefield banners and the war heroes plaques, all she can think is how little her life has been and how little difference it has made.

(she's sitting in St George's chapel Westminster Abbey). That's a splendid random quotation but I'll hope to see how well the book stands the test of what's happened over the last 10 years. This is what Stephen Bates wrote about it all those years ago. And I'll keep an eye out in the local library for Jubilate!