Dakle, inspirisan
ovim, pokrećem topik. Evo opisa igre u romanu:
Doing his British best to redeem what was looking to be adraggy dinner, he taught us a game he claims to have invented, called ' Humiliation'. I assured him I was married to the World Champion, but no, he said,
this was a game you won by humiliating yourself. The essence of the matter is that each person names a book which he hasn't read but assumes the others have read, and scores a point for every person who has read it.Get it? Well, Howard Ringbaum didn't. You know Howard, he has a pathological urge to succeed and a pathological fear of being thought uncultured, and this game set his two obsessions at war with each other, because he could succeed in the game only by exposing a gap in his culture. At first his psyche just couldn't absorb the paradox and he named some eighteenth-century book so obscure I can't even remember the name of it. Of course, he came last in the final score, and sulked. It was a stupid game, he said,and refused to play the next round. ' I pass, I pass,' he said sneeringly, like Mrs Elton on Box Hill (I may not read your books, Zapp, but I remember my Jane Austen pretty good). But I could see he was following the play attentively, knitting his brows and twisting his napkin in his fingers as the point of the game began to dawn on him.
It's quite a groovy game, actually, a kind of intellectual strip poker. For instance, it came out that Luke Hogan has never read Paradise Regained. I mean, I know it isn't his field, but to think you can get to be Chairman of the English Departmentat Euphoric State without ever having read Paradise Re-gained makes you think, right? I could see Howard taking this in, going a bit pale when he realized that Luke was telling the truth. Well, on the third round, Sy was leading the field with Hiawatha, Mr Swallow being the only otherperson who hadn't read it, when suddenly Howard slammed his fist on the table, jutted his jaw about six feet over the table and said: 'Hamlet!' Well, of course, we all laughed, not very much because it didn't seem much of a joke. In fact it wasn't a joke at all. Howard admitted to having seen the Lawrence Olivier movie, but insisted that he had never read the text of Hamlet. Nobody believed him of course, and this made him sore as hell. He said did we think he was lying and Sy more or less implied that we did. Upon which Howard flew into a great rage and insisted on swearing a solemn oath that he had never read the play. Sy apologized through tight lips for having doubted his word. By this time, of course, we were all cold sober with embarrassment. Howard left, and the rest of us stood around for a while trying to pretend nothing had happened.
