I continue to enjoy reading. I've said it to people but I'm not sure if I've said it here: I wish that reading could be my exercise. I would be fit. F-I-T, fit! Right now I'm readint A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Here is a passage I just read that I liked (it's written in the first person, from the perspective of a Chinese woman who has come to England in order to learn English in order to help her parents excel in their shoe factory business..and has become the lover of a man 20 years her senior who, usually, is gay): "Home is everything. Home is not sex but also about it. Home is not a delicious meal but it is also about it. Home is not a lighted bedroom but it is also about it." I have long thought about what home is. Recently I found photographs I took to explore that idea. The photographs themselves are not interesting but the memory of my thought process is quite possibly interesting.
Late last week I finished Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, the man has a way of getting inside his characters' heads. This book is simple, perhaps even a 'novella'. It unfolds over the course of a couple's first night together after their wedding in 1961 and has a few flashbacks to their courtship and one fast forward to the man's latter life. I was struck again by how we like, narratively, to think about what could have been different if we only said one additional thing. One syllable and a completely different life would unfold. Good book.
This book, Just Breathe, is a stupid book. It's long and it's dumb and they get together in the end. And the picture on the cover? Has nothing to do with it. The woman get preggers at the opening of the book and stays that way nearly the end, she does not, at any point, stand in front of a beach with a perfect little bikini body. The problem with this whole genre of books, of women with marriages that destruct who then go home again, or to some new place, in order to get their lives together, the problem is that it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous that within days, or even a few weeks, of being in this new environment suddenly the guy they crushed on in high school (but never noticed them) falls for them, or some handsome stranger approaches them in a cafe. And they've always left this materialistically sound life that offered them no emotional solace. But so what? I think a book is far more interesting when the marriage that dissolves didn't start out crappy, or that the husband wanted the wife to wear matching sweater sets all the time. And, in this book, the woman is a cartoonist and the author continuously refers to her strip as 'edgy'....there are examples in front of different chapters and, frankly, it's the opposite of edgy...it's dumb. This book is dumb, don't read it unless you're dumb or, well, me and unable to stop yourself.
Late last week I finished Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, the man has a way of getting inside his characters' heads. This book is simple, perhaps even a 'novella'. It unfolds over the course of a couple's first night together after their wedding in 1961 and has a few flashbacks to their courtship and one fast forward to the man's latter life. I was struck again by how we like, narratively, to think about what could have been different if we only said one additional thing. One syllable and a completely different life would unfold. Good book.
This book, Just Breathe, is a stupid book. It's long and it's dumb and they get together in the end. And the picture on the cover? Has nothing to do with it. The woman get preggers at the opening of the book and stays that way nearly the end, she does not, at any point, stand in front of a beach with a perfect little bikini body. The problem with this whole genre of books, of women with marriages that destruct who then go home again, or to some new place, in order to get their lives together, the problem is that it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous that within days, or even a few weeks, of being in this new environment suddenly the guy they crushed on in high school (but never noticed them) falls for them, or some handsome stranger approaches them in a cafe. And they've always left this materialistically sound life that offered them no emotional solace. But so what? I think a book is far more interesting when the marriage that dissolves didn't start out crappy, or that the husband wanted the wife to wear matching sweater sets all the time. And, in this book, the woman is a cartoonist and the author continuously refers to her strip as 'edgy'....there are examples in front of different chapters and, frankly, it's the opposite of edgy...it's dumb. This book is dumb, don't read it unless you're dumb or, well, me and unable to stop yourself.
1 comment:
I loved Chesil Beach, too. Have you read The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard? A School of Letters friend recommended it, so I got it and finally started it today. Beard's writing is just plain terrific.
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