conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled In a Strange Room about Starred, Review, There's with the genre: Travel, Africa? Start with the sentence 'Starred Review'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Starred Review. There's a lot of travel in Booker Prize finalist the author's (The Good Doctor) new novel, but he's more interested in depicting the randomness, heightened sensitivity, dread, and possibility that come from unfamiliar places than in seeing the sights. A South African man travels in Greece, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, and India, forming the complicated, tenuous relationships that provide the book's three sections titles (Follower; Lover; Guardian). This character, who bears the author's name and seems to share his history, is both "he" and "I." Though these shifts can occur in the space of a sentence, they're surprisingly easy to accept, and attentive readers will get a subtle, frank depiction of some of the problems of writing; "he" seems to be the author, but often experiences himself as divided, uncertain, and blurry as a fictional character evading his creator, "I" often steps in to remind us of the limits of memory and the artificiality of genre distinctions. At its best the author's tale has the feel of arriving in a destination you'd never planned to go. It's not always pleasant, but it's strangely fascinating.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first four paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In a Strange Room
  It happens like this. He sets out in the afternoon on the track that has been shown to him and soon he leaves the little town behind. In an hour or so he is among low hills covered by olive trees and grey stones, from which there is a view out over a plain that gradually descends to the sea. He is intensely happy, which is possible for him when he is walking and alone.
  As the road rises and falls there are moments when he can see far ahead and other moments when he can see nothing at all. He keeps looking out for other people, but the huge landscape seems to be completely deserted. The only sign of human beings is the occasional house, tiny and distant, and the fact of the road itself.
  Then at some point, as he comes to the crest of a hill, he becomes aware of another figure far away. It could be male or female, it could be any age, it could be travelling in either direction, towards him or away. He watches until the road dips out of sight, and when he comes to the top of the next rise the figure is clearer, coming towards him. Now they are watching each other, while pretending they are not.
  When they draw even they stop. The figure is a man about his own age, dressed entirely in black. Black pants and shirt, black boots. Even his rucksack is black. What the first man is wearing I don't know, I forget.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In a Strange Room
  It happens like this. He sets out in the afternoon on the track that has been shown to him and soon he leaves the little town behind. In an hour or so he is among low hills covered by olive trees and grey stones, from which there is a view out over a plain that gradually descends to the sea. He is intensely happy, which is possible for him when he is walking and alone.
  As the road rises and falls there are moments when he can see far ahead and other moments when he can see nothing at all. He keeps looking out for other people, but the huge landscape seems to be completely deserted. The only sign of human beings is the occasional house, tiny and distant, and the fact of the road itself.
  Then at some point, as he comes to the crest of a hill, he becomes aware of another figure far away. It could be male or female, it could be any age, it could be travelling in either direction, towards him or away. He watches until the road dips out of sight, and when he comes to the top of the next rise the figure is clearer, coming towards him. Now they are watching each other, while pretending they are not.
  When they draw even they stop. The figure is a man about his own age, dressed entirely in black. Black pants and shirt, black boots. Even his rucksack is black.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is two more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: So he waits for the next bus to come. It's as if he's arrived at a place outside time, in which only he feels its lack. He paces up and down, he throws pebbles at a tree, he watches a file of ants going into a hole in the ground, all in a bid to summon time again. When the interval is over perhaps an hour and a half has passed. By then a small crowd is swelling next to the road and everybody clambers on board the bus at once. He ends up without a seat and has to hang on to roof racks in the aisle. Outside there is a mountainous green countryside quilted with tea plantations. Banana trees clap their broad leaves in applause.
  It's a full three hours or more before the road begins to descend from this high hilly country and the edges of Mbeya accrete around him. By now the sun is setting and in the dwindling light all he can see are low, sinister buildings, made mostly of mud, crouching close to the ground. He climbs down at the edge of a crowded street swirling with fumes. He asks a woman nearby, do you know where the station is. Somebody else overhears him and repeats it to somebody else, and he finds himself escorted by a stranger to a group of men loitering nearby. He saw them when he got off the bus, an expressionless and hard-looking bunch wearing caps and dark glasses, exuding menace. One of them says that he will take him to the station for five dollars. He hesitates for a few seconds in renewed panic, he's afraid of this man in dark glasses whose car, he sees, has dark windows too, is he really going to drive off into these anonymous streets walled in by so much dark glass. But he's come this far and he doesn't know what else to do.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A couple of years later, when he's travelling in Morocco, he spends a night in Agadir and takes a taxi the next morning to a dusty hillside outside town. He has intended to buy flowers but hasn't managed to find any, so he arrives empty-handed. The day is burning hot, he hasn't slept properly the night before, he has a bad headache. You want me to wait, the taxi driver asks him. No, come back in half an hour. Is it enough time, half an hour. Yes, it should be enough.
  He imagines he will easily find the spot and pay his respects and leave, but it doesn't happen as he imagines. The taxi driver has dropped him in the wrong place, so he has to walk part-way down the hill. When he finds the European cemetery the gate is locked and he has to shout for somebody to let him in, and once inside he's lost. The graves spread chaotically in all directions, with no clear logic, no plan. He stumbles up and down rows of headstones, names swimming past, and more than forty-five minutes have gone by when he arrives by chance at the one he's looking for. It's all exactly as Caroline told him, the cracked slab with its inscription, its final enclosing dates. Next to it, on the left, is a nameless brown hump of earth, the grave of a woman, a friend who was killed in the same accident. Her family didn't have the means to bring her body home or to memorialize her properly.
  Maybe it's only the heat, or his headache, or the tiredness, but he finds himself suddenly, unexpectedly, sobbing. He tries to stop the tears, but they keep on coming. A huge emotion is welling up in him, unattached to the scene, he doesn't know either of these people, after all, and they died a long time ago. But it seems unbearably sad that a life should come to rest here, on a sun-blasted hill above a foreign city, with the sea in the distance.
  Caroline's story from the beach is with him again, memory and words inseparable from each other. But it takes him a while to realize who he's really weeping for. Lives leak into each other, the past lays claim to the present. And he feels it now, maybe for the first time, everything that went wrong, all the mess and anguish and disaster. Forgive me, my friend, I tried to hold on, but you fell, you fell.
  The moment seems to drag out for hours, but it's probably only a minute or two before he pulls himself together. He feels awful, but also relieved somehow, emptied out. By now the taxi driver is hooting impatiently outside. The day is wearing on and he has a bus to catch, a journey to complete. It's time to go. He dries his eyes and picks up a tiny stone from the ground, one like millions of others all around, and slips it into his pocket as he walks towards the gate.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He dries his eyes and picks up a tiny stone from the ground, one like millions of others all around, and slips it into his pocket as he walks towards the gate. He has intended to buy flowers but hasn't managed to find any, so he arrives empty-handed. The day is burning hot, he hasn't slept properly the night before, he has a bad headache. You want me to wait, the taxi driver asks him. No, come back in half an hour. Is it enough time, half an hour. Yes, it should be enough.
  He imagines he will easily find the spot and pay his respects and leave, but it doesn't happen as he imagines. The taxi driver has dropped him in the wrong place, so he has to walk part-way down the hill. When he finds the European cemetery the gate is locked and he has to shout for somebody to let him in, and once inside he's lost. The graves spread chaotically in all directions, with no clear logic, no plan. He stumbles up and down rows of headstones, names swimming past, and more than forty-five minutes have gone by when he arrives by chance at the one he's looking for. It's all exactly as Caroline told him, the cracked slab with its inscription, its final enclosing dates. Next to it, on the left, is a nameless brown hump of earth, the grave of a woman, a friend who was killed in the same accident. Her family didn't have the means to bring her body home or to memorialize her properly.
  Maybe it's only the heat, or his headache, or the tiredness, but he finds himself suddenly, unexpectedly, sobbing. He tries to stop the tears, but they keep on coming. A huge emotion is welling up in him, unattached to the scene, he doesn't know either of these people, after all, and they died a long time ago. But it seems unbearably sad that a life should come to rest here, on a sun-blasted hill above a foreign city, with the sea in the distance.
  Caroline's story from the beach is with him again, memory and words inseparable from each other. But it takes him a while to realize who he's really weeping for. Lives leak into each other, the past lays claim to the present. And he feels it now, maybe for the first time, everything that went wrong, all the mess and anguish and disaster. Forgive me, my friend, I tried to hold on, but you fell, you fell.
  The moment seems to drag out for hours, but it's probably only a minute or two before he pulls himself together. He feels awful, but also relieved somehow, emptied out. By now the taxi driver is hooting impatiently outside. The day is wearing on and he has a bus to catch, a journey to complete. It's time to go.A couple of years later, when he's travelling in Morocco, he spends a night in Agadir and takes a taxi the next morning to a dusty hillside outside town.