"Lila Says" by Chimo *****

• French novel, possibly debut, but author used a pseudonym and had a lawyer give the novel to a publisher, handwritten in spiral notebooks.....
• Originally published in 1996
• Erotic coming of age
• Life in a French housing project, filled with immigrants primarily 
• Vocabulary:
• nabes:   a neighborhood movie theater
• Quotes I Like:
• p.23..."..plus there's weeds so tall it's amazing, you wonder where that stuff finds space to grow, it's exactly like us, me and my pals, weeds on a junk heap......"
• p.25..."Once I saw a clown on TV trying to catch a piece of soap squirting out of his hands like a frog, well same with me, my doors are always open my heart's checking out the breeze, I feel things that make me shiver like sunshine in winter, I don't know exactly what it is, all that seems as beautiful as the sky to me but when I write my feelings down right away I get dishwater..."  Chimo about the difficulty of writing
• p.51..."she's an angel with a whore's mouth on her, you'd think the words that cross those lips would hurt her, that her teeth'd fall to the ground from pure shame but nope, it drifts out light as a breath of summer, nothing gets broken and it's even sort of soothing."  Chimo about Lila
• p.54..."...she's still a wild unknown country, you pass by in your boat Chimo and you look at her from far away....".
• p.73..."In school a teacher said concrete is a dead material,, plastic too.  There's no life in it.  We're born to it born in it naturally we've got concrete where our hearts should be."
• p.76..."Our lives are already decided on each morning and each tomorrow's the same again.  It's no state of alert no war just a long wait for nothing, getting older every day and for what."
• p.87..."...we always talk with the same words, because what we see is the same thing, and that too's a way of dumbing down your language and everything else goes with it, it's like shrinking underwear that finally you can't get into anymore....might as well shut up and stop thinking at all, it hurts to think sometimes....".
• p.89..."The others've got cemeteries in their skulls, their brains are full of graves with ghosts sitting silent on the  tombstones, it's always night in there with a cold wet fog.  But I can't switch off the light..."....the light is Lila for Chimo
• p.100..."...it's true you never see babies grow up if you look at them everyday."
• p.108..."He'd say for example:  if I was a snake shoes'd grow on trees, or if I sold coffins nobody'd die..."  "...the blind man puts out his own child's eyes....the forest burns with its own wood..."...Chimo remembering his father
• p.109..."Why I ask myself isn't it ever possible to live in peace on a planet like this, why do some have and others don't and the farmers in the summer junk tons of tomatoes when you're going hungry, why's the world always messed up and complicated, fuck it all."
• p.117..."Imagine a bird in a concrete nest, there's no more twigs on earth, so what's she supposed to do about her eggs?"
• p.117..."...when you're hard up you're poor everywhere, the earth is divided into invisible shelves, me here you there."
• p.117..."People can't mix as well as concrete, the more they're supposed to become the same the more they don't, so they start swinging."
• p.119..."...hope's not for sale can't be bought, not even a superstore has hope on display, you can't steal it from somebody neither, even the word gets forgotten and wiped out of your mind."
• p.128.."Lila was the only thing, Lila and what she said, I don't know if that makes sense, there was nothing else."
• Review:  This is a fascinating, lyrical, erotic, dark, profound novel about life in a French housing project about what brings light into life, and about what snuffs it out. It is about coming of age and trying to make sense of the senselessness of life.  I could not put it down, was disturbed by it, and will be thinking about it for a long time to come.