Excellent Quotes: The Bourne Supremacy

Okay, I had spaced on the fact that all Robert Ludlum books--including The Bourne Supremacy--are woefully deficient in almost every category I look for in a novel. The movies, however, are so awesome that one tends to forget the defects of the source material. And since I spend a LOT of time on planes these days in desperation at a used book store I snagged Supremacy out of a discount bin and began what I can only refer to as a sort of personal literary Bataan death march. (I have real trouble stopping a book--I need to get over that grad school era commitment.)

In any case, and woefully for you, having read the damn thing and having survived it I am posting an illustrative if execrable quote:

"'This is Bourne. Put my wife on the line.'

'As you wish.'

'David?'

'Are you all right?' shouted Webb on the edge of hysteria.

'Yes, just tired, that's all, my darling. Are you all right--'

'Have they hurt you--have they touched you?'

'No, David, they've been quite kind, actually. But you know how tired I get sometimes. Remember that week in Zurich when you wanted to see the Fraumunster and the museums and go out sailing on the Limmat, and I said I just wasn't up to it?'

There'd been no week in Zurich. Only the nightmare of a single night when both of them nearly lost their lives. He running the gauntlet of his would-be executioners in the Steppdeckstrasse, she nearly raped, sentenced to death on a deserted riverfront in the Guisan Quai. What was she trying to tell him?

'Yes, I remember.'"

-Ludlum, Robert. The Bourne Supremacy. New York (NY): Bantam Dell, 1987. P. 145.

Can you feel the pain? Oh, the horror. The horror. Six hundred and forty-six pages of inappropriate italic emphases in the wrong places and for inner monologues. The monologues! He had forgotten the monologues. The visions of them came back to him in a half-remembered rushing blur. The book. The book, sucked.

PS - I want my $4.50 back. Oh, but while Ludlum is a best-left-behind relic of the '80s, you will still enjoy this thing called rap when you rock out to "The Power" by German uber-group Snap; now playing on iTunes.