Notes & Thoughts

Interesting first person voice. Quite a rambling thought process. The sort of person who includes too much detail not pertinent to the central point they are trying to make. Somewhat repetitive. Somewhat like a stream of consciousness but not quite. Perhaps a touch of autism. Good vocabulary and very clear and precise. A satisfying rhythm to the prose that makes it feel a little poetic.

I’m on the second chapter now and I’m wondering if the style is just that of a fairly rapidly written journal. Sometimes, because you’re mostly just describing the events of the day, the writing in a journal can seem a bit stilted. I’ve noticed this about my own journaling when I just chronologically recount events. It takes quite an effort and a lot of practice not to write that way when journaling. And just to reiterate, this is not a criticism. I’m just catching the thoughts that bubble up as I read and noting them down. I actually really like the style and so far am enjoying the book.

What this stream of consciousness / journaling style brings, is a high sense of realism. That is, you can easily forget that you’re reading a novel. It’s a bit strange this need for a work of fiction to seem realistic when we know full well we are reading a work of fiction. I’ve thought about this many times in the past but never really enough to come to any conclusions. It's perplexing that an extremely surreal book can have a strong sense of realism. Like a Murakami for example. Or a Paul Auster. The last Ian McEwan on the other hand, which is essentially sci-fi, but not at all surreal or otherwise unrealistic, always just felt like a novel. It’s hard to pin down why some books have this quality of feeling more realistic and others don’t. I think, if I had to guess, it has something to do with the writing following more natural rhythms and structures.

There’s a long episode in the book about buying flowers. It prompted the thought that I don’t really approve of the whole business of cut flowers. I mean, a vase of flowers looks really nice, but at the same time I’m aware that the flowers are slowly dying. I’d rather people left flowers alone to grow wherever they want to grow. Whenever I receive cut flowers as a gift from my daughter I keep them until they dry out. Then I collect all the dried petals and some of the leaves and keep them in bowls or glass jars. This way the flowers last longer and I get to appreciate the gift from my daughter for longer too. Once when she came to visit she remarked, oh you still have the flowers I got you for your birthday. Yes, I said, dried flowers last a lot longer than you’d think. Another thought that followed this one, was that the cut flowers business should be scaled back, if not outright shut down anyway, in response to the climate and ecological crises. We need to be more judicious in our use of nature and energy. Think of the water, land use and the transportation. Some might think that’s a miserable prospect. But the flip-side is that we would give more space to nature and wild flowers. And perhaps if you did want some flowers in a vase, or you wanted to give someone some flowers, then you could occasionally go outside and pick some.

Well, I’ve just read a bit more of chapter three, which has quite a long section about the cut flowers, and ends, more or less, with this: “That’s probably why I kept the dozen dead roses. They weren’t an original choice, not at all, but that’s precisely what made them so touching. I took off all the heads when they went over, and when the petals were completely dried up I put them in a crystal bowl, and so for years there was a crystal bowl full of dried rose heads on my drinks tray.”

At page 85, I think we can conclude that we are indeed reading a journal. "When I'd finished reading the letter - which my friend had enjoyed listening to as she drove us up the hill and down the other side, 'What a lovely letter,“she'd said - I looked out the window and recalled the mean attitude I’d had towards it and had sought to rationalise by way of various formulations in this very journal or perhaps the one before.”

The part about the florist is revisited again in a later chapter. The same events and her thoughts about them are more or less repeated at some length. I’m not really sure why? I don’t think we learnt anything new. That would be a strange thing to do in a journal. But then, maybe if you’re a writer (and the main character is), it’s not so strange. Perhaps it’s good practice to write about the same events multiple times. You might expect it to reveal something new either about the events, or your thoughts about the events, or about your writing. But, she does not explain why she is going over the same events again. We are left wondering. It creates a sense of oddness. Again I wonder if the narrator is meant to be neurodiverse. Or maybe, it is just reflective of how we tend to think; we do indeed tend to think over the same events again and again, trying to make sense of things, perhaps wondering if we could have done or said something different.

Towards the end of the book, she (the main character) gives a talk on violence in films, and chooses to talk about violence to self. She refers to the film The Piano Teacher by director Michael Hanake, and the analysis is interesting. I may rewatch the film as a result.

What is this book about? I sometimes find it hard to know with books like this where you have someone rambling on about quotidian events in their life. But what I think it’s about is how a person with whom you’ve been in a relationship with, which is now over, can resonate, can continue to fill your thoughts, and continue to pull on you. Maybe this isn’t how it goes for everyone, but it certainly does for me. It’s possible that I am projecting this on the book. That said, flicking back through the book, I see at the start there is a quote: 'No, you cannot hear the thousand conversations with which my soul pesters yours.' So, maybe I am on to something.

I've decided to use the following for one of my postcards: "The truth is I couldn't take my eyes off him. He barely looked at me. I told him that one day because he said he couldn't take his eyes off me. He watched my every little move, he said, and I was always changing. 'Quite remarkable; he said, and I said, 'You never look at me, and he said, I do when you're not looking, and I said, I'm always looking,' and he laughed and said, 'Perhaps not as much as you believe.' What kind of a conversation was that to be having on a midweek afternoon?” Page 134.

Perhaps this is not a nice thing to say. But something else I’ve noticed about the writing style - in places. It’s a bit like Gollum’s stream of consciousness monologues. Try reading the following with the Andy Serkis Gollum voice:

“Is that him? Is that him? That’s him. Up through the hedge. Out of the bushes. Appearing on the path through the gravestones. Yes, that’s him. We weren’t going to tell him off were we? No, that wasn’t the idea. We didn’t even feel like telling him off, did we? No, not really. Sometimes we felt like we should feel like telling him off. More than that. Yes, more than just telling him off actually. Because he had been quite bad.”

This book has not at all felt an effort to read, as some books can. That said, while I was initially very drawn in, over halfway through I felt slightly less drawn, and I have to admit to feeling now - on the last chapter - quite keen to move on to my next book. I think this has to do with the lack of narrative. I mean, chapter IX begins, “Deer were flying very high up in the sky. I could see their antlers disappearing and reappearing in the clouds.” On the other hand, perhaps it is just a general fact about reading books, that you are more likely to start out with excitement and anticipation, and that this will naturally wear off as you progress. In fact the same is true of many things. If you think about it, this is quite a sad aspect of human life, that we can tire of the familiar, and chase novelty. Of course, it’s not that simple, we also sometimes crave the familiar and are fearful of change.

I like this book because of the uniquely mysterious narrative voice, but as I become more accustomed to it, the novelty fades, and I begin to feel a slight desire for a more traditional narrative arc to pull me toward the end and provide a satisfying conclusion. But thankfully it does not do this, otherwise, I would for sure feel disappointed.