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Guy Clinch 35

Guy stepped off the porch and walked past the car (the car avoided his gaze) on to the tattered croisette. A motorbike, an anguished donkey shackled to its cart – nothing else. The sky was also empty, blown clean, an unblinking Africa of blue. Down on the beach the wind went for his calves like an industrial cleanser; Guy gained the hardened rump of damp sand and contemplated the wrinkly sea. It opened inhospitably to him. Feeling neither vigour nor its opposite, feeling no closer to life than to death, feeling thirty-five, Guy pressed on, hardly blinking as he crossed the scrotum barrier; and it was the water that seemed to cringe and start back, repelled by this human touch, as he barged his way down the incline, breathed deep, and pitched himself forward in the swimmer’s embrace of the sea…

Martin Amis · London Fields

35

Trader Faulkner

Night Train

Martin Amis

"I’m thirty-five. You begin to want to see a fresh face..."

35

Edward Rochester

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

Charlotte Brontë

"...he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five..."

35

Jay

'Baby Blue'

Edna O'Brien

"It was the night of his thirty-fifth birthday, and they had parted but a week..."

35

Rollo Martins

The Third Man

Graham Greene

"Rollo Martins walked quickly away as though his long gangly legs wanted to break into a run, and the tears of a boy ran down his thirty-five-year-old cheeks..."

35

John Claggart

Billy Budd, Sailor

Herman Melville

"Claggart was a man about five and thirty, somewhat spare and tall, yet of ill figure upon the whole..."

35

Randle Patrick McMurphy

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey

"McMurry, Randle Patrick. Committed by the state from the Pendleton Farm for Correction. For diagnosis and possible treatment. Thirty-five years old. Never married..."

35

Harry Goldweiser

Manhattan Transfer

John Dos Passos

"That’s the trouble with me. I’m thirtyfive an I dont care any more..."

35

Hermann Karlovich

Despair (Otchayanie)

Vladimir Nabokov

"I was, in fact, only in my thirty-sixth year, and the generous remainder of my life might be devoted to something better than a vile will-o’-the-wisp..."

35

Daniel Quinn

City of Glass

Paul Auster

"We know, for example, that he was thirty-five years old. We know that he had once been married, had once been a father, and that both his wife and son were now dead..."

35

John Self

Money: A Suicide Note

Martin Amis

"I am thirty-five years old. According to the last good book I read, this means that I am half way through my time travel, my travel through time..."