It was something else, terrible and sad, and unspoken. It was not the rage that I have come to be able to pick out instantly because it hums in harmony with my own. There was urgency humming just under the surface of the narrator’s seemingly placid existence, and a sort of anger that fascinated me because I didn’t quite identify with it. Those reflective rhythms became more propulsive, more electric, as the book went on. But I stuck with it, and halfway through the first of its three sections, something happened: I got into it. It’s January, for God’s sake, I thought reading this isn’t really helping with the whole winter blues thing. It’s not exactly plot-driven-slightly surprising for a novel that begins with its nameless protagonist picking up a male hooker in a public toilet-and the thoughtful, reflective rhythms of its prose give it a melancholy air that I wasn’t really in the mood for. When I first picked it up, I read about twenty pages, then put it down to make a cup of tea or something and realized I wasn’t dead keen on picking it up again. I’ve done an almost complete 180 on this book. How easily we are made to feel, I thought, and with what little foundation, with no foundation at all. The Great Reread, #5: I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith.April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs.The Great Reread, #6: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer.
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