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Window Glass

What's going on?
The gang is about to meet at Margot’s place for a meal. Margot and Dan are in the kitchen sharing past experiences. Dan and Margot talked quite a bit abour Bou, who was having a “tough week”.

Here we can read about Dan’s perceptions of his three friends. We also find out little details about each of their past and present lives: Margot is a lesbian, Beck is not as wonderful as he wants to seem to people and Bou is simply Bou.

The last bit of the excerpt describes Bou and Dan’s promenade searchin for wine. She talks to him about a humurous situation, half crying because of the laughter. This is when they fall in love.

Language:

As usual with Paul Kafka, he uses descriptive adjectives to invoke in the readers mind the vivid images that wants us to see.
            We zoomed across Avenue de Malakoff
            ...massaged her ass affectionately.... grunting to himself in a boarish way
            he'd been handsomely ripped off
            who looked like a slightly elongated Demi Moore
            her figure gave her the overbuilt, road-hugging grace

The meaning of the title of this excerpt comes from Dan’s thoughts:
The window glass aged and mellowed what occurred inside that apartment, like instant barrel wood.

Metaphors:
Full of details of the gang as it is, comparisons and metaphors are abundant, as well as witty phrases from Dan’s thoughts:
            The last of the previous night's wine tasted like pencil shavings.
            I thought sounded like sax players making fun of folks who buy cassettes full of squealing nonsense
            Margot laughed like a silly little girl with a chest cold
            ...her figure gave her the overbuilt, road-hugging grace of an early '70s Corvette.Especially the '72 Stingray coupe
            My Germaine Lagachian powers were not limited to past alone
            James Blood Ulmer was on guitar now, making a sound like a litter of piglets being tickled
            This was secret agent talk for sleeping the afternoon away
            I loved to hear Margot talk sex and psychology. Her theories were like dirty fairy tales for big kids, with the moral built right into the middle
            ...the bald, eyeless elephant, Phunt, tucked under my chin like a violin

Feelings:
This excerpt is specially full of feelings from Dan towards his 3 friends. The still battles with liking both of the girls, Bou or Margot. “I could never make Beck understand how I kept falling in love with both you and Margot during those weeks”.

He compares both girls, trying to weigh up their similarities and differences. They were so alike but at the same time, completely different: “I talked with whichever of you was there about whichever of you wasn't. You were lovely separately and you fit together perfectly, not in spite of but because you were tall and Margot was short, you were moody and Margot wasn't, you were messy and Margot was a housekeeper, a scientist, and a jazz person all rolled into one”.
Dan here expresses his confusion by having to compare each of them. The fact is that Margot, although being extremely attractive and well-built, was a lesbian.
Margot to him was: “...made me wish I'd had an older sister back then, so that she could have had Margot for a friend. That way I could have fallen in love with her when I was fourteen and she was seventeen, and she could have pretended that it was just a game, while really she would have been mad for me, too.”
Margot seemed to inspire a feeling of familiarity in Dan: “I felt as if I’d been in Hebrew school with her every Saturday of my life”. But at the same time: “I’d never known anyone like her.”

This part of the novel reveals the great complicity between the gang: “...We all gave away each other's secrets.”

While sharing all these details with Margot, Dan expresses what Rue Berlioz made feel: “After a moment the air smelled like summer. I curled deeper into the faded needlework roses”.

Another very descriptive paragraph about feelings is found when Dan, after a long day, is asleep between Margot and Bou. Again the readers encounters the dichotomy that both girls represent in Dan’s life: “I was sleeping between love and love, you and Margot warming me with your bottoms, your backs curled away from me like a pair of wings. I nuzzled your hair and Margot's hair, and before either of you had woken I decided I would stay encamped in that nest forever. I loved the perpetually mild season, and the potential for flight.”

When he comes across Bou, when Beck usurped his chair from Margot’s kitchen, Dan greeted her like his life depended on it: “The cool print of your kiss melted from my cheek in the October breeze”.

While coming back from their promenade, chatting about those " guys on the green motorcycles”, bent over in laughter they landed on the cobbles, side by side, under the linden tree in love.