Christopher G. Moore's dissipated Scheherazade

Trapped between post-vacation exhaustion and the sheer joy of being back in the daily routine I love so well, I haven't been reading much.

But this passage, from the first page of Christopher G. Moore's 2003 novel Waiting for the Lady, caught my attention for some reason:

"In the ten years I had known Hart, I felt that each year he lost a bit more faith in himself and lost even more faith in the motives and desires of others. That was another way saying that Hart had lost his youth like a bloated giant star that had lost its nuclear fusion just before collapsing in on itself."

The lady of the title is Aung San Suu Kyi, and the book tells the story of the protagonists' quest to meet her. Here's a review of the novel by Kevin Burton Smith (like Moore and me an expatriate Canadian) that calls the book's narrator "a dissipated Scheherazade, prone to self-pity [with] an over-inflated view of his own worth." I hope you find the phrase "dissipated Scheherazade" as beguiling as I do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012