elfs29's reviews
194 reviews

The prose is nice but this story didn't grip me at all, probably not helped by the fact that I am not a Hardy fan.

It is astonishing to me that this was Morrison’s debut novel, yet not astonishing at all, because her genius has never given me reason to doubt that she would not have it honed from minute one. The way she seeks to understand, in this novel why black girls hate themselves the way they do, why they are treated the way they are, and in her findings she writes with complete certainty. No ifs or buts, this is the way it is and you must listen because it is real and because people are hurt. Beautiful writing, her classic intertwining of characters’ stories, everything that makes her work brilliant is here from her first novel. How absolutely incredible.

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty to virtue, she stripped her mind, bound if, and collected self contempt by the heap. 

Whilst reading the first half of this I was convinced I was going to give this five stars but the last 150 pages took such a fast paced, dramatic turn from the lovely, winding narrative that the rest of it felt almost spoiled. The character work was fascinating, especially in the first three quarters where a huge difference between Theo’s perception of himself as a child and an adult was very tangible. There were just so many other ways I had hoped Theo and Boris would reunite, something in the conclusion felt so wrong that something she had created initially seemed to have been displaced. Still, the writing was beautiful, and her musings on grief, obsession and love and loss is consistently lovely.

Ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness - not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on the powerful current and drifting out there somewhere, a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea. 

These stories seem to be the most personal to Tsushima of all that I’ve read of hers, focusing on her dead father, her troubled relationship with her mother, and her brother who died when he was young. In this essence these stories are very sad, and leave me feeling melancholy as they speak of a difficult life, but one she has been able to accept through her writing, and her understanding of the reasons why these things happen, or the lack of reason at all. Especially in The Watery Realm, her acute anger and sympathy for her mother is so intelligent, and I applaud how long and difficult it must have been to reach this point of self discovery and emotional maturity. She is a beautiful writer.

For a while she had dreamed of the two figures letting themselves into the garden, then returning the way they came. Sometimes the thirteen year old daughter would go through the wicket door and chat with the young master, who would have just stepped out into the garden. As he joined her there for a stroll, they would go on and talk about nothing in particular. These quiet and uneventful dreams continued. Always somewhere in the background lay Toru-chan’s body, gone cold. 

Banana Yoshimoto’s way with words is unlike any other author I’ve ever read. The severe lack of plot in this novel is what so well demonstrates it’s purpose, to soothe the reader through the endless cycle of time passing. I regard this novel as rather philosophical, with many discussions of memory, death, happiness and the sheer meaning of life. The writing is so beautiful, the descriptions so mesmerising, the narrator’s contemplations so serious and lovely and devastating, that reading this novel felt very calming and melancholy.

I want to go on living, understanding more. I want to see the world around me. I’m overjoyed by my differences. I don’t know if this that resembles hope is the source of all my desires. When I wander the streets of the city where I was born, attacked by the flood of old, frightening memories, I get an urge to turn to the fading sunset over the skyline of Tokyo and yell ‘Papa!’. It’s all so familiar. I recognise the scent of my own childhood - the smell of the wool on my father’s sweater, the smell of  water straight from the well on the side of the road. I feel it all. 

This has to be one of my favourite books I have ever read. At it’s core it is about growth and change and love, for others and the self. Every character is so real and loveable and the bond between Celie and Nettie that remains whole across so many decades is utterly beautiful. Celie’s self discovery, with Shug, with Nettie, with Sofia and eventually Albert is so heart warmingly magical in its earnestness, and Walker’s abundant emotional intelligence allowing her to write so meaningfully of painful lives reborn and always evolving is incredible to witness.

Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees to everything to git attention we do, except walk? Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking about him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how did it do that?) not the colour purple (where it come from?). Not the wildflowers. Nothing.
Now that my eyes opening I feel like a fool. Next to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr _’s evil sort of shrink. Like Shug say, you have to git man off your eyeball before you can see anything a’tall. 

Strout explores the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship in the aftermath of a traumatic childhood beautifully and intelligently. Their relationship is so layered, so is her relationship with her daughters, and Lucy’s character so complex that this very melancholy storytelling made me very sad. Yet Lucy’s chronic loneliness and fear does not control her, and Strout writes wonderfully of a woman coping with loss and ambition and an emptiness she struggles to explain.

But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make. I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, the way you can hear, outside in the open air -when the conditions were exactly right - the corn growing in the fields of my youth. You cannot hear my heart breaking and I know that part is true, but to me, they are inseparable, the sound of corn growing and the sound of my heart breaking. 

I loved this book for Elizabeth’s relentless ambition, and her unrealistic but very satisfying refusal to say was it expected of her and do what is wanted. There were definitely some story threads that felt unresolved, some characters I wish were more whole, and some pacing issues, but nonetheless it’s easy to read, both gratifying and saddening, and it sheds light on the life of women and feels, at its core, extremely hopeful.

Beautiful writing of the difficult and inconceivable time when a friend has lost their memory. It made me very scared of that happening to me or to my friends, and having to suffer what the author has, the intangible loss and hideous loneliness.

The ghastly originality of the disease, for me, is becoming a cliché, another mode, predictable now, of communication. I have eased into illness, as well, into its rhetoric; nothing surprises me anymore. This ought to be a consolation, probably, but for reason i find it alarming. Because I’ll no longer have anything to write about?

Baker's writing reminds me a lot of Salinger's, astute, witty and moving writing of family, covering only a matter of days in immense and fascinating detail. Both Cassandra and Judith's characters were complex and interesting, but what was most moving was their bond as twins and the different ways they both perceive it. Cassandra's immense loss because of her sister's imminent marriage says so much about her and her insecurity, her loneliness - this story more than anything else is perhaps one of what happens when things don't happen the way we allow ourselves to expect them to, when plans that were never spoken get overturned and we must figure out how else to live. Brilliant writing and character work, and a fascinating dissection of sisterhood, to me who does not have a sister.

One thing about being alive is that you can swim. Other things, too - you can look at the clouds in the daytime and the stars at night and think of space as something you can't terribly care about conquering. Let it go on being spacious while it can. There's lots of time if you think of it in terms of light years.