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From "The Mother" (1958), a short story newly translated from the Italian by Paul Lewis and published last month in "The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg" (University of Toronto Press):

She would tell them to turn their backs while she got undressed, and they would hear the quick rustle of her clothes, see the shadows dancing on the walk, and then she would slip into the bed next to them, a thin body in a cold silk blouse.

The story is so beautiful, I spent the weekend looking for Isabel Quigley's original English translation, published in the Penguin anthology "Italian Short Stories" (1965). I'm glad I did. Quigley's version unfurls the above sentence only a little further, but the change in meaning is profound.

In Lewis's shorter sentences, the narrator's omniscience darts around the bedroom, never finding a fixed point. But in Quigley's take, the narrator falls into a more intimate voice, the close third person, and shadows the mother. The comical, stark clauses in Lewis's translation give way to something else entirely in Quigley's: a panoramic view of a life mired in regret:

She told them they must turn the other way while she undressed, they heard the quick rustle of her clothes, and shadows danced on the walls; she slipped into bed beside them, her thin body in its cold silk nightdress, and they moved away from her because she always complained that they came too close and kicked while they slept; sometimes she put out the light so that they should go to sleep and smoked in silence in the darkness.

~ ANDREW STOUT

On the eve of a summer holiday ("vacation" to North American readers), I've dusted off an apropos little gift:

"Beginnings are always delightful; the threshold is the place to pause." ~ Goethe

The truth is I'm not sure when or where the German gloom-master wrote this (a line that seems far more applicable to the transience of love than to spontaneous trips to New Hampshire, at any rate). I came across the sentence in "Sleepless Nights", Elizabeth Hardwick's beautiful book about memory, time and loss. Punching well above its weight of 130 pages, it is filled with sentences so thoughtful that each demands close attention, like a candy that must touch every part of your tongue. Reading this book feels like chipping away at a stone, colonising it, learning from it, patiently. It is the kind of book that inspires lesser writers to use two different similes in two sequential sentences, for better or worse.

So here is a passage from her book, published to adoring reviews in 1979. It comes from the first pages, and it captures the strain of melancholy that runs throughout (perhaps an inevitability in any consideration of the past):

Husband-wife: not a new move to be discovered in that strong classical tradition. Arguments are like the grinding of rusty blades, the old motor and its troublesome knockings. The dog growls. He too knows his lines.

~ EMILY BOBROW

Julie Kavanagh's feature about her time with a young Martin Amis inspired me to finally pick up "The Rachel Papers". It is hilarious--ribald and knowing, full of unexpected phrases ("pimply lyricism", "regional yobs with faces like gravy dinners", a man with "unusually big brown ears, like tea-dunked ginger-biscuits", a young woman who "made much of her eyes, her nose made much of itself"), and plenty of jokes at the hero's expense. It is a great book, his first, written when he was 24.

As Amis developed as a writer, he began to sacrifice his characters to his cleverness. His later books reveal an infatuation with his own clear-eyed, wry disdain of everyone's flaws. The poor folks with the misfortune of inhabiting his novels tend to be nasty bitches and putty-faced blokes, rarely worthy of empathy. After wrestling with the wittily vile "London Fields" some years ago, I put it down half-way through and never went back. If he doesn't care for his characters, why should I?

So "The Rachel Papers" has been an education. Perhaps there are other pockets in his oeuvre that glitter not only with self-regard but also heart? Please advise.

In the meantime, there's this sentence, which bristles with youth:  read more »

A line with deceptive punch from John Updike's short story "The Women Who Got Away":

If my wife held herself like a dancer, it was her lover's wife who in fact could dance, with a feathery nestling and lightness of fit that had an embarrassing erotic effect on me.

John Wray is a talented and fearless young author. I'm less convinced by his latest novel, "Lowboy" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March), but it's hard to argue with the following sentence:

The sun was declining and the firepits were glowing and oilcolored nightbirds were warbling down from the trees.

The first sentence of "In the South", a new short story by Salman Rushdie published in the New Yorker, is wonderful:

The day that Junior fell down began like any other day: the explosion of heat rippling the air, the trumpeting sunlight, the traffic’s tidal surges, the prayer chants in the distance, the cheap film music rising from the floor below, the loud pelvic thrusts of an “item number” dancing across a neighbor’s TV, a child’s cry, a mother’s rebuke, unexplained laughter, scarlet expectorations, bicycles, the newly plaited hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong sweet coffee, a green wing flashing in a tree.

So wonderful, in fact, that it has inspired a new series here that we'll call "The Sentence". We will now occasionally highlight extraordinary sentences. Feel free to suggest some.