Alexander McCall Smith is delivering a novel through The Telegraph Online, day by day in twenty weeks. Corduroy Mansions is on chapter 33 today, and you can read it at The Telegraph site or get them in your email or rss feed. It begins “in the bathroom.”
Passing off, thought William. Spanish sparkling wine – filthy stuff, he thought, filthy – passed itself off as champagne. Japanese whisky – Glen Yakomoto! – was served as Scotch. Inferior hard cheese – from Mafia-run factories in Catania – was sold to the unsuspecting as Parmesan. Lots of things were passed off in one way or another, and now, as he stood before the bathroom mirror, he wondered if he could be passed off too.
My goodness, that quote is brilliant.
Explain yourself, Loren. I like it for an opening paragraph, but are you saying more than that?
How I understand it — and I could be wrong since I haven’t read the context — is that the narrator is comparing himself to these cut-rate things, impostor things, and he’s hoping he can rise to their level. For someone to aspire to mediocrity in such a way is incredibly poignant. And McCall-Smith packs all that emotion into four sentences. It drills me through the heart.
Well said. I understand now. I was thinking he wanted to disguise himself for reasons I haven’t read yet–maybe just to be thought of as younger and better than he is.
I didn’t see him aspiring to mediocrity. Rather, I got the impression he was seeking to rise above it, moving up to a higher social class. Kinda like an old geeky nerd like me trying to pass himself off as a Lutheran Pastor. While I grew up in a down to earth working class home, my current situation often requires me to demonstrate a level of manners and social skills that were not part of my upbringing.