elfs29's reviews
194 reviews

I like the content of this book but I think I just prefer fiction over memoirs. The matter of fact tone of this book just did not invite much interest for me, but Gornick is clearly very intelligent and I would like to read some of her fiction.

Mama had assumed her widowhood in the same way. It elevated her in her own eyes, made of her a spiritually significant person, lent richness to her gloom and rhetoric to her speech. Papa's death became a religion that provided ceremony and doctrine. A woman-who-has-lost-the-love-of-her-life was now her orthodoxy: she paid it Talmudic attention.

Banana Yoshimoto writes about loss so beautifully and thoughtfully that I am in awe of her introspection. Themes of death, grief and the unstoppable passing of time seem to be the centre of all her writing and I have not come across another author that touches these topics with so much wisdom, so much peace and reflection, or who so deftly addresses the horror and beauty of life simply moving forward, the one thing we all experience and none of us control. I especially love the way she so massively ties the environment of the characters to the story itself, with such beautiful imagery making for a wonderful and tragic reading experience. 

It was at once a miracle and the most natural thing in the world. I held the feeling in my heart; the urge to discuss it died out. There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream. 

Selvon writes such vivid characters, combined with such perceptive and honest comments on the lives of Caribbean migrants in the 1950s, all centred in London, the amorphous creature of a city that both suppresses and uplifts them. The themes of friendship and community are so heartwarming, the themes of poverty and misery so devastating, that Selvon is able to accurately and compassionately display the varied and complicated lives of the characters, giving power back to them by establishing as the Londoners they are.

Sometimes, listening to them, he look in each face, and he feel a great compassion for every one of them, as if he live each one of their lives, one by one, all the strain and stress come to rest on his own shoulders.
"What are you doing Moses? You still thinking of going back home?"

Fowler had a lot of intentions with this novel and I think every single one was fulfilled deftly and given enough time and space to unfold and conclude. The two different historical backdrops of Brazil in the 1960s and 70s and London in the 2010s brilliantly intertwines so many lives and themes, politically and personally. Fowler's constant changing of the form allows for an all the more expressive and moving reading experience, one that, at its core, aims to unite queer women and help them free themselves.

And Hamlet says No, he will not kill himself, because there is everything to live for because so much more is possible than what they have imagined yet, because there are more things on heaven and earth.

I respect this essay massively, and find a lot of what she puts forward very interesting - I felt that some sentiments were too essentialist and seemed to contradict what she was saying, but for very early feminist writing, it remains extremely valuable and very insightful.

Women also attract agreeable essayists, light fingered novelists, young men who have taken the MA degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

I really enjoy a book where the narrator contemplates what they are writing as they write, and it works perfectly in this novella, especially due to Yozo’s previously established insecurity in No Longer Human. At first I wasn’t sure whether this story really complemented the other, or if it were necessary, but it opens far wider Yozo’s character and the act of being ‘the clown’ that he talks so much of in No Longer Human but that we don’t actually get to see. Dazai discusses writing, performance, and identity with such terrible realism, as all his work does.

A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance. If that's beyond your comprehension, dear reader, then you and I will never understand each other. Life's a farce, so we might as well make it a good one. But real life is a realm that I may never reach. The best that I can hope for is to loiter in the memory of these four days, so steeped with empathy. Four days that count more than five or ten years of my life. Four days that count more than a lifetime.

I adored the first half of this book, when the clinic was being created. It was just a winding narrative exploring memory and the self, very thought provoking and existential. The sudden and quite jarring flip into an EU vote to return completely to the past felt so out of place that I just couldn’t get invested in the second half. I think I just would have preferred the introspective and complex discussions of memory and philosophy to be the main focus, not how specifically entire countries turned themselves back into the past. 

Our bodies turn out to be quite merciful by nature, a little amnesia rather than anaesthesia at the end. Our memory, which is leaving us, let’s us play a bit longer, one last time in the Elysian fields of childhood. A few well-begged-for, please-just-five-more minutes, like in the old days, playing outside in the street. Before we get called home for good.