Stripping Down the Language
Below are a number of sentences taken from the first four
chapters of
1) The old men glowered at him. (p20)
___________________________________________________________________
2) The bare cement floor was a cracked and pitted lunar landscape. (p4)
____________________________________________________________________
3) He jammed the wooden shutter open with an old radio battery, against the wind. (p3)
_____________________________________________________________________
4) They hung like grotesque ornaments on a Christmas tree. (p21)
_____________________________________________________________________
5) An elderly couple stood looking out to the horizon, hands cupped against the glare of sun on water as though looking for their lost youth. (p 11)
_____________________________________________________________________
6) It was as if people conspired with the city to weave a web of silence around its unsavory parts. (p7)
_____________________________________________________________________
7) Sitting on the counter in his grass skirt, drinking his Fanta and watching Godfrey and Innocent tease the girl behind the counter, Elvis felt like a man. (p 22)
_____________________________________________________________________
8) Turning to Innocent and Godfrey, he told them to watch over their cousin, and then he left with Joseph. (p21)
9) Redemption was not there, Elvis noted, but his father’s friend Benji was. (p 26)
_____________________________________________________________________
10) But for one brilliant moment they dazzled: the women in flashy clothes, makeup and handbags that matched their shoes, daring to smoke in public and drink beer straight from the bottle; and the men, sharp dressers who did not rat on you to your parents if they caught you smoking. (p7)
11) The other socket, empty, gaped red and watery as his gnarled claws slosed over Elvis’s hands and his mouth opened in a toothless grin. (p 30)
____________________________________________________________________
12) Before he read the book on film theory he had found in the secondhand store, movies were as much magic to him as the strange wizards who used to appear in the markets of his childhood. (p 29)
_____________________________________________________________________
13) Other than the war story, Innocent and Godfrey, who was thirteen, were virtually strangers to Elvis. (p 20)
_____________________________________________________________________
14) Raised on stilts like some giant millipede, the walkways’ many legs were sunk below the surface. (p 14)
____________________________________________________________________
15) The road outside their tenement was waterlogged and the dirt had been whipped into a muddy brown froth that looked like chocolate frosting.
_____________________________________________________________________