“The New York Times said that [Margaret] Cooley has given us something valuable and rare." I agree with this completely. I was taken in by her characters, especially the dead, spoken of and accounted for by the living narrator and journal entries. I felt especially compelled by Judith, the wife of narrator, Matthias (Matt), who took her own life after a lengthly war with her own mind--a metaphorical war that spawned from the very real WWII.
Favorite lines and excerpts:
(1) "It's impossible to be a keeper of books and not feel a gratitude that extends to something beyond the intellects that created them--to a greater Mind, beneficent and lively and inconceivably large, which urges reading and writing."
(2) "I doubt she knew then how much I needed to feel safe, or how deeply this need disturbed me."
(3) "[Judith] allowed intimacy only a small entrance; she knew how to bar intrusions."
(4) "... what Eliot called 'The still point of the turning world'; the safe center..."
(5) I like how Cooley made me think of the idea of being either a player or an observer of life and how that relates to myself.
(6) "God was an author who'd imagined me... My task was to imagine God in return..."
(7) "I could never get the distance that work requires. How did I do it all those years at the office--typing all day, answering phones, taking letters... The daily act of being with others but not really being with them, just as they weren't really with me."
(8) "Eliot: 'human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.'"
(9) "You accommodate this illness [manic depression]. You do not recover from it. It's a way of being."
(10) "My will and strength leave me as easily as Lottie and Sam left, as unexpectedly as the embryo: no pain at the instant but then the wordless shock of discovery, after the fact."
(11) "Poetry: where I encounter what is not in memory but arises through a kind of instinct, deep-running, inventive. Recognition of something I don't know I knew; something I know only as I write and a poem begins to deliver itself, to assert a reality, startling but oddly familiar."
(12) "Who is he? I must conjure him, which is different from remembering."
(13) "... in that season when we wandered [New York City]... like lost happy children."
(14) "Within me, truth assumes so many shapes that I find relief in objects, which have certainty. Pearls, books, record players. Newspapers."
(15) There was an ongoing theme of individuals refusing their own histories. This was interesting to me: (a) Roberta's parents finally revealing to her the family's jewish roots, not Christian as she had grown up believing. (b) Judith's doctor tells her that she "refuses her history"--the loss of her parents, the lie she heard from her aunt and uncle--all the while her getting caught up, distracted, immersed, drowned by the history of others, of the world, of the Jews in Europe during the war.
(16) "... has it been silenced yet, your pain, has it stopped interfering?"
(17) "... a person never discovers who he is. Only what he might have been and what he failed to do."
(18) "I could see it playing out on his face: the battle to suppress, to minimize. What's known but ignored takes its revenge."
(19) "... I'll never tell Len how much I haven't wanted a child. ... How much better it seems not to replicate your own confusion."
(20) "... I move between two extremes. I'm either completely swallowed or completely separate."
(21) "What I exist for: my daily walks, reading, a bath each evening. Small oblivions."
(22) "That may be [Len and Carol's] secret: nothing happens to them."
(23) [LeRoi Jones]: "What I thought was love / in me, I find a thousand instances / as fear."
(24) "I didn't bother about denominations, and I didn't listen to the sermons. I went [to church] because I needed to tug on the invisible cord that bound me to the sacred."
(25) "The arms wrapped around the self: that frightened embrace which children give themselves when they are forced to confront, in their silent rooms at night, their perfect aloneness.
(26) "I'd sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and sit up in bed and watch Peter sleeping. I'd think, this is home--ours! And it was a deeply interesting place to me."
(27) "There's always some... precipitating event, isn't there? When something happens and everything suddenly looks different. Or maybe what I mean is, when suddenly everything can be seen differently."
* 28) "I need to go back to where I was when something got interrupted. It's like I've been stuck on some kind of detour since I left."
(29) Throughout the novel, there are instances of attempts to conceal truths, ideas, thoughts... And it's not productive or useful, it's debilitating.
(30) "Trust involves truth, betrayal involves lies--isn't that your formula, Roberta? The problem is, it doesn't apply. Everything's tangled..."
(31) "... we can't just sit around worrying about drowning. We've got to wake up anyway."
(32) "Who can tell another person what to endure--how much, and for how long?"
(33) "Each of us has a weak spot, an organ or system within the body where death gains access."
(34) "We resist ourselves--who we've been, who we've become; and the tension of this resistance enters our bodies and is incorporated within us. No wonder we finally tire."
(35) "It has always seemed miraculous to me that words actually do communicate meanings."”
Jen B wrote this review Saturday, July 30, 2011.
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