elfs29's reviews
191 reviews

After reading Good Morning, Midnight, this feels like almost like a fitting prequel — the same darkness, the same loss, experienced instead by a girl much younger. Rhys writes beautifully of longing with no place to put it, of fear for nothing except everything, of hopelessness without, somehow, it being too entirely bleak. I find especially astute the way she writes about relationships with men, the lifelessness and dependency of them for Anna. 

And i saw that all my life I had known this was going to happen, and that I’d been afraid for a long time, I’d been afraid for a long time. There’s fear, of course, with everybody. But now it has grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.

Woolf employs narrative and perspective alterations to explore the transience of perception and character — the reader hardly knows who Jacob is, nor does he himself, but instead see the impressions he leaves on others, varying and contradictory. Are these the truth, or a reflection of the viewers themselves?

"Urbane' on the lips of Jacob had mysteriously all the shapeliness of a character which Bonamy thought daily more sublime, devastating, terrific than ever, though he was still, and perhaps would be for ever, barbaric, obscure.

This collection is really special, as is everything Yoshimoto writes. Her explorations of grief and loss are so poignant, but I was struck in these stories as I was especially in N.P too by the way she writes women and the way her queerness manifests in very gorgeous female characters and relationships. Asleep produces such complex female characters, born through the connections between them and the shared melancholy of their experiences.

Whenever we got together I would listen to him talk, and then I’d nod, and that was it. The rhythm of my nods and the rhythm of his talking would become so exquisitely well synchronised that it almost became sort of an art. And that’s when I started getting the feeling that what I was doing was a lot like Shiori’s job, like lying next to people as they slept. 

Whilst incredibly dense and at times hard to follow, this novel is a magnificent feat of literature. Márquez' writing is illusive and imbued with magic, words flowing together and over each other as though Melquíades wrote the novel itself. I can hardly express my amazement at this novel, at the deftness of the storytelling and the truly gorgeous and melancholy tales of these characters who, despite following so many, are all simultaneously real and surreal, sympathetic and ridiculous. Within the many strands of this story, Márquez asks about the human condition, about conflict and love and isolation, philosophising over the fates of this family that seem to exist outside of their control yet shaped by their repetitive misjudgements and immorality. I will forever wish I could read this again for the first time.

A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

Absolutely gorgeous. Lispector’s writing is completely profound, and even in this stream-of-consciousness, free style, she is able to deftly capture to existential essence of living, its fears and supreme joys, with a clarity that is simultaneously groundbreaking and comforting. I could highlight a special line on every page, and certainly will read this countless times. 

Once again I'm full of joyful happy love. Whatever you are I quickly breathe in lapping up your halo of wonder before it vanishes in the evaporation of the air. Is my fresh desire to live me and to live you the very tessitura of life? The nature of beings and of things —is God? So maybe if I demand a lot of nature, I would stop dying? Can I violate death and clear within it an opening for life?

Winterson offers a rather devastating portrayal of the life of a young girl discovering her queerness in a rigidly and destructively religious household. The nuances of Jeanette's relationship with her mother, with Melanie, with Elsie, with God, are astute, and offer a tender image of the way growing up in such a religious household affects one's understanding of themselves and of love and what it means.

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of something utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss the God who was my friend.

Yoshimoto is a gorgeous writer. Her prose is something to swim through, almost, flowing over and around some of the most profound descriptions of feelings and scenes that I have ever encountered. Tsugumi’s story is told by Maria, and reveals, through her poignant and nostalgic narration, an unending bond and unparalleled understanding. Soaked in the grief and beauty of getting older, this story feels like a hand on my head, telling me that life is not over just because a part of it is, that lovely times are just as lovely when they aren’t happening anymore. 

This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next —and I didn’t want to forget a single one. 

This book was just really lovely. Stevie is such a charismatic character and a great one to follow through the trials of coming of age as a black woman in 1960s Chicago. The intersections between personal and political relationships and the development of all the characters are both astute and interesting, but it’s really the fun, bright prose and attitudes that make this just such a heartwarming discovery of oneself.

I knew I was losing my boyfriend, but I felt relieved. I realized that I had never been in love with Sean, just impressed with him. And that was a different feeling. It hadn’t made me want to run outside and taste a snowflake. 

I can completely see how this book has become a revelatory sensation — to have one’s entire experience as a woman told as fact, with sympathy and without speculation is necessary and infuriating, inspiring for its awful reality. This book demands change in the mere motions of following the life of a woman, whose material conditions and consciousness have been irrevocably damaged and dictated by her being a woman. There is nothing else left to wait for but an imperative movement, one long overdue. 

Am I stealing from you? I suffered deathly pain having our child. My routine, my career, my dreams, my entire life, my self — I gave it all up to raise our child. And I’ve become vermin. What do I do now?

Miriam and Laila’s stories and tragic and wonderful, and Hosseini is an extremely talented writer to have been able to make them so real and full of life across so much time in such a dense and devastating story. This novel is very beautiful. 

Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.