I remember the art chats as typomaniacal.
All right, I'll give a paragraph or so from the start of another book by this author:
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.
It was dark outside and cold and no wind. In the distance a calf bawled. He stood with his hat in his hand. You never combed your hair that way in your life, he said.
Bingo! I do know that one, osso. It's All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy; the only one of his books I've read. I was grazing my local library the other day and came across his No Country for Old Men. But I passed it up, figgering it might not be a book for an old man neither.
I still don't know the first book you quoted, but perhaps I've jogged another's memory.
Nope, it's not. I only gave the author and a different book title. I still don't know which of his books the original quote is from. He's trotted out a whole string of 'em since All the Pretty Horses.
I'm not too keen on McCarthy's writing, to be perfectly generous.
