The Gray House by
Mariam Petrosyan
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
I loved loved loved this book. It is not a perfect novel. It is not a book, it is a whole world. I felt like I was in a beautiful rabbit hole. Such a rich, unique world that is crazy, mystical, and strangely addictive. Written about boys home for disabled kids, there is a perspective I have not seen explored in this way. It is such a deeply imagined world that there are some dead ends that must only be resolved in the author's mind (or maybe literally lost in translation), and some questions that never get answered, but I did not mind. I would spend another 500 pages in this crazy world if I could.
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The marker didn’t hold well, it smeared and faded, and the flowing script made the Fourth’s bathroom a bizarre sight, like a place that was draining away. That was urgently trying to convey a message but couldn’t because it was melting and evaporating. The writing was on the wall, but no one could read it.
If you sat without moving for hours, Nature would include you in its cycle just like another tree.
“There is nothing more horrible than knowing what awaits us tomorrow,” she said and gave me one of her fangs in consolation . . .
It looks like a small black cylinder. It cannot be seen by sunlight, and it definitely cannot be seen in the dark. One can only bump into it by accident. Every night it hums softly as it steals time .
For Grasshopper, the House resembles a gigantic beehive. Each dorm is a cell, and each cell a separate world. There are also empty cells—classrooms and playrooms, the canteen and locker rooms, but they are not shining at night with the honey-amber light from their windows, so they are not real, in a sense.
When a person turns into a patient he relinquishes his identity. The individuality sloughs off, and the only thing that’s left is an animal shell over a compound of fear, hope, pain, and sleep. There is no trace of humanity in there. The human floats somewhere outside of the boundaries of the patient, waiting patiently for the possibility of a resurrection. And there is nothing worse for a spirit than to be reduced to a mere body. That’s why it is Sepulcher. A place where the spirit goes to be buried. The dread permeating these walls cannot be extinguished.
You should have seen it, Smoker. Seen what they had wrought when their time came. If you’d have seen that, then for the rest of your life you would’ve kept your mouth shut about the Outsides, about open and closed doors, about chicks in their shells. If only you could have seen.
The rules of the Game are not the same for everyone. Black is the way he wants himself to be. Noble is the way he feels himself to be.
The longer you spend somewhere, the more there are things around you that need to be thrown out, but when you move to a new place you never take all that trash with you, which means that it belongs more to the place than to the people, because it never moves, and in each new place a person finds scraps of someone else, while transferring the possession of his own scraps to whoever moves into his previous place, and this goes on everywhere and all the time.
“What happened, happened long ago. Only yesterday for me, but long ago for everyone else. We all need miracles, Sphinx. Some of them are possible and some are not, so we choose to pursue the possible. But then, after you’ve chosen, it turns out that you are not strong enough to achieve even that.
When did his hours and days grow diminished with the fears and regrets?
But after lying there for a while I realized that I wasn’t sleepy at all. My tiredness was of the canteen, not of anything that was inside me, and our room cured me of it.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles
