He laughed at the romantic tales I used to read at my convent school - he claimed they had deformed my mind and my imagination.
There was a danger in being honoured with such manufactured laurels, particularly for the tragedy's survivors: for the fantasy to hold, citizens would have to stay in character, never mind that their roles were constrained and deforming, never mind that the command performance prevented them from expressing what they really had witnessed and suffered that day.
Because it sucks to be an alienated narcissist enslaved to yourself and spending that much time crammed alone inside your room deforms your mind.
With a sensibility damaged by history, a political conscience deformed by totalitarianism, a mind deeply affected by his study of philosophy, it would be easy to imagine Zagajewski writing veiled protest poetry (which he did in his youth) or poems entirely private and runic, bitter in tone and indecipherable in content, or even descending into shrill silence.
"I felt my mind had been deformed by science in the UK," he says.
The brain deformed naturally.
It is a sprawling fantasy featuring deformed humans, superheroes who can read minds and fly, and plot lines exploring issues such as bigotry and raw political ambition.
Polio deforms his psyche as well as his body.
While some readers may be dismayed by the novel's lack of logic or coherence, it doesn't take an English-lit wonk to appreciate the antic mind that would name two of the grotesquely deformed prostitutes in Mrs. Puggsley's brothel after virginal victims of Count Dracula — and find a role in these shenanigans for Coleridge.
Of the remaining 10%, most are deformed (called Jokers) and 1% (called Aces) get superpowers, from flight to mind-reading, which they use for both good and evil.
