Catch 22 (Joseph Heller's 1961 novel) is built around bureaucratic paradoxes and unpleasant situations with no solutions. It is peopled with lunatics and madmen and people who are well along the road to becoming lunatics and madmen. The protagonist of the novel, a bombardier (the story centers around a US bomber squadron during World War II) named Yossarian, decides to "...live forever or die in the attempt..." and is trying to navigate his way out of a predicament with no viable exits.
In the scene I've chosen to illustrate, we find Yossarian in Rome where it is his sad duty to report the death of one of his fellow pilots (a man named Nately) to a woman who cared about him.
"Nately's death, in fact, almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to Nately's whore in Rome she uttered a piercing cry and tried to stab him to death..."
It's a frantic, kinetic scene. She tries to kill him with a potato peeler, a knife, her fingernails... madness brought to life by Heller's matter-of-fact prose.
The woman's physical appearance is described in some detail, but (unless I missed it) Yossarian's physical appearance is only vaguely hinted at in a handful of passages, which I took as license to draw him however I wanted. And I wanted him to have a simian countenance and build; a face and bearing that belie the actual depth and breadth of his intelligence and melancholy. They're dancing, and he doesn't know the steps.
It's a good book. Read it when you find the time and let me know what you think.
Cheers.
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