Franny and Zooey Read Online Free PDF

withered arm. And that his wife is dead. It's all in the eighteen-hundreds."
     
        Lane had just shifted his attention from the frogs' legs to the salad. "Any good?" he said. "What's it about?"
     
        "I don't know. It's peculiar. I mean it's primarily a religious book. In a way, I suppose you could say it's terribly fanatical, but in a way it isn't. I mean it starts out with this peasant--the pilgrim--wanting to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly. You know. Without stopping. In Thessa-lonians or someplace. So he starts out walking all over Russia, looking for somebody who can tell him how to pray incessantly. And what you should say if you do." Franny seemed intensely interested in the way Lane was dismembering his frogs' legs. Her eyes remained fixed on his plate as she spoke. "All he carries with him is this knapsack filled with bread and salt. Then he meets this person called a starets--some sort of terribly advanced religious person--and the starets tells him about a book called the Thilokalia.' "Which apparently was written by a group of terribly advanced monks who sort of advocated this really incredible method of praying."
     
        "Hold still," Lane said to a pair of frogs' legs.
     
        "Anyway, so the pilgrim learns how to pray the way these very mystical persons say you should--I mean he keeps at it till he's perfected it and everything. Then he goes on walking all over Russia, meeting all kinds of absolutely marvellous people and telling them how to pray by this incredible method. I mean that's really the whole book."
     
        "I hate to mention it, but I'm going to reek of garlic," Lane said.
     
        "He meets this one married couple, on one of his journeys, that I love more than anybody I ever read about in my entire life," Franny said. "He's walking down a road somewhere in the country, with his knapsack on his back, when these two tiny little children run after him, shouting, 'Dear little beggar! Dear little beggar! You must come home to Mummy. She likes beggars.' So he goes home with the children, and this really lovely person, the children's mother, comes out of the house all in a bustle and insists on helping him take off his dirty old boots and giving him a cup of tea. Then the father comes home, and apparently he loves beggars and pilgrims, too, and they all sit down to dinner. And while they're at dinner, the pilgrim wants to know who all the ladies are that are sitting around the table, and the husband tells him that they're all servants but that they always sit down to eat with him and his wife because they're sisters in Christ." Franny suddenly sat up a trifle straighter in her seat, self-consciously. "I mean I loved the pilgrim wanting to know who all the ladies were." She watched Lane butter a piece of bread. "Anyway, after that, the pilgrim stays overnight, and he and the husband sit up till late talking about this method of praying without ceasing. The pilgrim tells him how to do it. Then he leaves in the morning and starts out on some more adventures. He meets all kinds of people--I mean that's the whole book, really--and he tells all of them how to pray by this special way."
     
        Lane nodded. He cut into his salad with his fork. "I hope to God we get time over the weekend so that you can take a quick look at this goddam paper I told you about," he said. "I don't know. I may not do a damn thing with it --I mean try to publish it or what have you-- but I'd like you to sort of glance through it while you're here."
     
        "I'd love to," Franny said. She watched him butter another piece of bread. "You might like this book," she said suddenly. "It's so simple, I mean."
     
        "Sounds interesting. You don't want your butter, do you?"
     
        "No, take it. I can't lend it to you, because it's way overdue already, but you could probably get it at the library here. I'm positive you could."
     
        "You