Tilda is not a woman given to subterfuge.  She does not manipulate and she does not really fight with him.  But as he tries to force her into a role he thinks more appropriate – like making her shop for clothes she does not want or care about – he comes to understand that her passivity is not a ploy.  He realizes the woman who fucks with ease is really as disengaged from sex as she is from shopping, though he doesn’t have to threaten to throw her out to make her acquiesce to sex.  One gets the feeling that anything she does not have to leave the house to do she is fine enough just enduring in her disembodied sort of way.

He slowly begins to understand her because her constant nearness forces him to.  She hates being apart from him, even when he takes a daily walk.  Their days took on a near-boring sameness for him, but not for her. She sat at the floor and watched him work, ate the meals he cooked and did little else.

I asked if she would like a television set?  A Walkman radio?  Magazines?  She said, “A properly furnished mind cunt is its own feast cunt and does not need such expensive and foolish extravagances.”

God, I loved Tilda completely after reading that sentence.  The narrator tells us she stops using the word “cunt” so much as their time together went on, but he still had a hard time knowing what was going on in her properly furnished mind.

This book is the literary equivalent of running your soul over a cheese grater. Over and over again. It’s hard to discuss such a book with any skill, though others have. Initially, I thought Paul Auster’s take on this book, printed in the copy I read, was wrong, but later I realized he was correct – he just interrogated the text from a different perspective. He looked at the book from an intellectual perspective and I looked at it from the perspective of someone who has gone insane and felt something akin to pain reading such lunacy."

It was late morning, a Cristobo waiter named Raoul and I were dumping a bucket of indigestibles over the leeward side, when the asinine scion of some spreadsheet fortune, fresh from Namibia, pulled alongside us on his bright red double-engined landing vessel – dispatched from the belly of a larger service vessel, that in turn follows his father’s truly gargantuan luxury liner around the globe – and deposited this poorly-bled, poorly-iced and shotgun-perforated beast onto our decks – one thousand pounds of unrefrigerated baby giraffe dropped from a crane like an immense spotted bony birdshit without so much as an “are you open?” – and instructed us to drop whatever else we were doing to get it ready for a late supper that evening for his friends. How many friends? What time? Not sure, he said, but save the skin, it’s valuable. And he adjusted his ludicrous sailor’s cap and motored away in a spray of salt water and hundred dollar bills.

That’s the kind of millionaire I like to eat.

And I’m okay with that. Baby giraffe indeed."