Death Comes as the End [#books #reviews]

by Agatha Christie

Rating: 9/10

She might be safer unknowing, but no human creature could be content to have it that way. She wanted to know.

(Page 231)

This was my second re-read, and maybe it was just what I needed right now, but I liked it even more than the previous readings! The setting is particular and certainly fascinating, the story really grabbed me also because luckily I didn't remember much, not even the murderer (who I guessed again, which is always very satisfying!) It is also true that perhaps this book is one of those in which the clues actually make sense and are not just absurd details that only Poirot would notice!

In short, a very satisfying read!

Quotes

Renisenb stood looking over the Nile.

[incipit]

Hori said, 'At present a few scribes are all that are needed on a large estate, but the day will come, I fancy, when there will be armies of scribes all over Egypt.'

'That will be a good thing,' said Renisenb.

Hori said slowly: 'I am not so sure.'

'Why are you not sure?'

'Because, Renisenb, it is so easy it is so easy and it costs so little labour to write down ten bushels of barley, or a hundred head of cattle, or ten fields of spelt—and the thing that is written will come to seem like the real thing, and so the writer and the scribe will come to despise the man who ploughs the fields and reaps the barley and raises the cattle—but all the same the fields and the cattle are real—they are not just marks of ink on papyrus. And when all the records and all the papyrus rolls are destroyed and the scribes are scattered, the men who toil and reap will go on, and Egypt will still live.’

(Pages 14-15)

‘No, Hori. I will walk alone.’

‘But why, little Renisenb? Will you not be afraid?’

‘Yes,’ said Renisenb, ‘I think I shall be afraid. But all the same that is what has to be done. [...] If one is to live always in fear it would be better to die—so I will overcome fear.’

(Page 130)

Now that I am old and sit much alone and my sight is dim and I walk with difficulty—then I realize that there is a life within as well as a life without.

Esa

(Page 159)

It is the kind of thing that happens to you when you are stupid. Things go entirely differently from the way you planned them.

Esa

(Page 177)

Your mind is like my mind, it looks over the river, seeing a world of changes, of new ideas—seeing a world where all things are possible to those with courage and vision...

Hori a Renisenb

(Page 260)