Three O'Clock in the Morning: A Novel

we need to squander joy, that’s the only way not to waste it. After all, it disappears afterward anyway.

“Fitzgerald was a great writer and an unhappy man. There’s a sentence of his I often think about: ‘In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.’”

“The calanques are geological formations: a whole lot of inlets and cliffs just outside Marseilles. You can take a boat from the Vieux Port and make a three-hour trip.

Notre-Dame de la Garde was a building of impressive dimensions, all in marble, neo-romantic in style, located at the highest point of the city.

This is basically a novel about communication, a story of a father and son who, through extraordinary circumstances, are forced to spend time together and, in doing so, to discover truths about each other they might not otherwise have learned. They do this mainly by talking, really talking to each other, for the first time in their lives.

The calanque of Morgiou, which was bigger than the others, had a marina with boats and a little fishing village.

My father’s letter to me ended with a quotation from the great mathematician John von Neumann: “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”

There are occasions when you need to talk, and you mustn’t take anything for granted. Then there are other occasions when you have to keep silent because there’s something intangible, something precious in the air, and your words might dispel it in an instant. These are two simple concepts. The hard part is to know when to apply one rule and when t

“Balikwas. It’s a word in Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines. It’s not easy to translate. It means something like: jumping suddenly into another situation and being surprised by it, changing your own point of view, and seeing things you thought you knew in a different way.”