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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
In Heidi Julavits' The Folded Clock, I found joy in reading thoughts that were candid and fiercely relatable. I questioned how easily I would be able to explore her experiences and feelings, as this is a diary, but in the end I'm left wishing that I could meet her.
I read [b:Her|15794110|Her|Christa Parravani|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1366215570s/15794110.jpg|21586563] at the same time, and found the two books complemented each other somehow. I feel like Lidia Yuknavitch's [b:The Chronology of Water|9214995|The Chronology of Water|Lidia Yuknavitch|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1336629501s/9214995.jpg|14094773] is a natural sibling, which I also read recently. All three have evoked similar discomforts and wonder and I can't help but recommend them all in this brief review.
I read [b:Her|15794110|Her|Christa Parravani|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1366215570s/15794110.jpg|21586563] at the same time, and found the two books complemented each other somehow. I feel like Lidia Yuknavitch's [b:The Chronology of Water|9214995|The Chronology of Water|Lidia Yuknavitch|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1336629501s/9214995.jpg|14094773] is a natural sibling, which I also read recently. All three have evoked similar discomforts and wonder and I can't help but recommend them all in this brief review.
The Folded Clock has been a companion of sorts of late. The kind of book you carry around and dip in and out of when moments allow. Each time I pulled it of my bag it felt like resuming a conversation with a friend. I'd find something that made me laugh, or I'd be compelled to underline lines here and there with excitement, "yes, I feel this!" & often paused to reread a line simply because it surprised me. Heidi Julavits writes about the daily mundane things that no one thinks are important, but it's those boring mundane things that make up the very fabric of who we are. She's honest about the thoughts we all (or at least many or some??) have but don't always voice/share. The less socially acceptable person underneath the face we show.
Probably because of the pretty cover (which attracted me to it, too), a lot of people asked me about this book while I was reading it over the past few days. They wanted to know if it was an old book because of the textile-like pattern. I explained that it was someone's diary, over two years, polished, chopped, and scrambled. I explained that the author, because she is a writer, lives in a lot of different places for big chunks of the year; in this case, mostly Maine, New York, and the suburbs of Berlin. This still didn't explain the diary part, so at one point I said "But still, it's a modern diary, and there are multiple entries about buying stuff on eBay." Which did get something across.
Ben Marcus is the author's husband, and they do have something in their style in common, though instead of the creepy anxiousness I remember from his books, there is instead a GOOP-style advocacy for various consumer products, and for the "hard" life of a writer, and for Maine where the author grew up, longed to escape, and now returns to every summer. She does at one point mention Gwyneth Paltrow, but in contrast to herself, in talking about going to college and encountering rich WASPs, who she had not encountered before, but who now also inhabit the Maine of her adulthood as well (who were maybe always there? I think that is what she means when she talks about heritage families but that joke is still a bit out of my reach).
Diary entries I got the most out of: September 5, April 19, October 10, October 15, August 14.
Ben Marcus is the author's husband, and they do have something in their style in common, though instead of the creepy anxiousness I remember from his books, there is instead a GOOP-style advocacy for various consumer products, and for the "hard" life of a writer, and for Maine where the author grew up, longed to escape, and now returns to every summer. She does at one point mention Gwyneth Paltrow, but in contrast to herself, in talking about going to college and encountering rich WASPs, who she had not encountered before, but who now also inhabit the Maine of her adulthood as well (who were maybe always there? I think that is what she means when she talks about heritage families but that joke is still a bit out of my reach).
Diary entries I got the most out of: September 5, April 19, October 10, October 15, August 14.
Really, 4.5 stars--This is sharp, witty, sometimes hilarious, other times it brought me to tears. Excellent writing, lots to sink my teeth into. So it's a diary, but it moves back and forth through time, keeping the reader on her toes. I didn't want to finish--wanted to go on with her,into more of her insights and essays into life. I felt so grateful to Ms Julavits for making this book.
1) "This fancy town is also a famed warfare site, and not only of the domestic variety. I've been told the history of this town. A Revolutionary War—era something happened there. The battle of something. During the war, people floated their houses here on boats from (or maybe to) Quebec. Or from (or maybe to) Massachusetts. They were either too sentimental to leave their houses where they'd built them, or they were too cheap to build new ones. When I think of this town, the image that comes to mind is a harbor clogged by floating houses, and people in tri-corner hats yelling at each other, 'Watch your front porch, asshole!'"
2) "It was fortunate, I guess, that the one normal-sized finger I possess is the finger on which wedding rings are meant to go. When I was first married, I was much more interested in wedding-type wedding rings, and those rings tend to be small, especially if you're broke, because you have to buy them used, and so they tend to date back to an age when people and fingers were tinier. My first husband and I bought my wedding ring at a pawnshop. People marveled at our brazenness. 'Isn't it bad luck to buy a secondhand wedding ring?' These people assumed the ring had been sold to the pawnshop following a divorce. My first husband preferred to think the woman who'd once owned the ring had died in a sky-diving accident. Years after our divorce, I still own the ring. I keep it in a small box with old business cards and postage stamps of outdated denominations. The box moves around my Maine home, sometimes in this room, sometimes in that. As with many things I don't keep track of or care much about, I never lose it."
3) "Maybe I was at an impasse with all gurus. Maybe I was looking to the wrong people for answers and clarity. I turned instead to a guidebook for guidance. A real guidebook. Someone had left it in the common bookshelf of our hotel's dining room. It was called Getting Along in Italian. According to Getting Along in Italian, one can ably survive a vacation and probably a whole life knowing how to ask and answer a few pages' worth of questions. I narrowed the options down to these essentials:
Are you alone?
Where is my key?
This is a violation.
I have pain in my chest.
There is a mistake in the bill.
Where are the lifeboats?
Did anyone call me?
Did anyone come for me?
I want a felt hat.
I want a novel.
I want a priest."
4) "I skied across the Brooklyn Bridge because I was losing the thread. I felt disconnected from the person who once trekked alone through blizzards, the person who was from Maine and didn't give a shit about parties and fame. The stone used to make the bridge's arches was quarried in Maine, and taken from a hole in the ground that had since filled up with water and in which I'd once gone swimming. Both of these stories are about my first few years of what would become two decades in a city that didn't immediately feel like home and still sometimes doesn't. It so didn't feel like home that I married a man I knew I should not because his mother lived in a house that, because of its windows and its molding and its old plaster smell, reminded me of Maine; New York so didn't feel like home that I would often walk across the bridge to lean my forehead against the stone arches and touch the ground from which I'd come. If they could persist here, these stones, and retain their shape, then so could I."
5) "Maybe this was also true of the Italian ghost. She meant me no harm. Possibly she didn't even exist. I'd mistaken my exhaustion for a long-dead woman who'd lost her children. To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you."
6) "Speaking of lost. I seem to have lost 'today.' Now it is six months earlier than it was when I started this entry. I am in Maine, and it is a year since I began this book, and I am trying to finish it. I have just spent the weekend with my parents. I am convinced that it is impossible to temporarily visit people with whom you used to permanently live. We cannot tap back into the old ease of cohabitation. We try and we try, and I don't want to call these attempts futile, because for every million misses there exists a single success. I had a success five days ago. I rowed to an island with my father and my son. My son ignored us—he set mussel shells afloat and then sunk them with a raining hell-fire of pebbles. My father and I, meanwhile, admired the rocks balanced atop other rocks. In Maine, on islands, rock manipulation is a form of tagging. We were here. The rock manipulation feats of our predecessors were daunting, almost spooky. They were supernatural acts of object levitation. A tall, thin rock balanced on its narrowest point, like a saltshaker on a pile of salt. I thought we could never practice this variety of beach sorcery, but we tried and we did. We were either extremely skilled or what we were attempting was not, despite appearances, very hard. Regardless, the activity consumed us. My father and I, we walked along the shoreline and searched for rocks. We tried to find the right combination of hollow here and jag there. Though we'd never before performed such precarious and optically illusory balancing acts, the activity felt familiar to us both. I had spent many summer days as a kid trying to lose myself to fun on islands. My father had spent many summer days—and winter days, and fall and spring days—trying to lose himself to fun with me. We were at the mall. We were spinning tops. We were drilling downward. The disappearance of the invisible but present object-time—is how we fall back into love with people we never, according to language at least, stopped loving."
2) "It was fortunate, I guess, that the one normal-sized finger I possess is the finger on which wedding rings are meant to go. When I was first married, I was much more interested in wedding-type wedding rings, and those rings tend to be small, especially if you're broke, because you have to buy them used, and so they tend to date back to an age when people and fingers were tinier. My first husband and I bought my wedding ring at a pawnshop. People marveled at our brazenness. 'Isn't it bad luck to buy a secondhand wedding ring?' These people assumed the ring had been sold to the pawnshop following a divorce. My first husband preferred to think the woman who'd once owned the ring had died in a sky-diving accident. Years after our divorce, I still own the ring. I keep it in a small box with old business cards and postage stamps of outdated denominations. The box moves around my Maine home, sometimes in this room, sometimes in that. As with many things I don't keep track of or care much about, I never lose it."
3) "Maybe I was at an impasse with all gurus. Maybe I was looking to the wrong people for answers and clarity. I turned instead to a guidebook for guidance. A real guidebook. Someone had left it in the common bookshelf of our hotel's dining room. It was called Getting Along in Italian. According to Getting Along in Italian, one can ably survive a vacation and probably a whole life knowing how to ask and answer a few pages' worth of questions. I narrowed the options down to these essentials:
Are you alone?
Where is my key?
This is a violation.
I have pain in my chest.
There is a mistake in the bill.
Where are the lifeboats?
Did anyone call me?
Did anyone come for me?
I want a felt hat.
I want a novel.
I want a priest."
4) "I skied across the Brooklyn Bridge because I was losing the thread. I felt disconnected from the person who once trekked alone through blizzards, the person who was from Maine and didn't give a shit about parties and fame. The stone used to make the bridge's arches was quarried in Maine, and taken from a hole in the ground that had since filled up with water and in which I'd once gone swimming. Both of these stories are about my first few years of what would become two decades in a city that didn't immediately feel like home and still sometimes doesn't. It so didn't feel like home that I married a man I knew I should not because his mother lived in a house that, because of its windows and its molding and its old plaster smell, reminded me of Maine; New York so didn't feel like home that I would often walk across the bridge to lean my forehead against the stone arches and touch the ground from which I'd come. If they could persist here, these stones, and retain their shape, then so could I."
5) "Maybe this was also true of the Italian ghost. She meant me no harm. Possibly she didn't even exist. I'd mistaken my exhaustion for a long-dead woman who'd lost her children. To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you."
6) "Speaking of lost. I seem to have lost 'today.' Now it is six months earlier than it was when I started this entry. I am in Maine, and it is a year since I began this book, and I am trying to finish it. I have just spent the weekend with my parents. I am convinced that it is impossible to temporarily visit people with whom you used to permanently live. We cannot tap back into the old ease of cohabitation. We try and we try, and I don't want to call these attempts futile, because for every million misses there exists a single success. I had a success five days ago. I rowed to an island with my father and my son. My son ignored us—he set mussel shells afloat and then sunk them with a raining hell-fire of pebbles. My father and I, meanwhile, admired the rocks balanced atop other rocks. In Maine, on islands, rock manipulation is a form of tagging. We were here. The rock manipulation feats of our predecessors were daunting, almost spooky. They were supernatural acts of object levitation. A tall, thin rock balanced on its narrowest point, like a saltshaker on a pile of salt. I thought we could never practice this variety of beach sorcery, but we tried and we did. We were either extremely skilled or what we were attempting was not, despite appearances, very hard. Regardless, the activity consumed us. My father and I, we walked along the shoreline and searched for rocks. We tried to find the right combination of hollow here and jag there. Though we'd never before performed such precarious and optically illusory balancing acts, the activity felt familiar to us both. I had spent many summer days as a kid trying to lose myself to fun on islands. My father had spent many summer days—and winter days, and fall and spring days—trying to lose himself to fun with me. We were at the mall. We were spinning tops. We were drilling downward. The disappearance of the invisible but present object-time—is how we fall back into love with people we never, according to language at least, stopped loving."
Really enjoyed this book to start, however after a while I found it pretentious and even boring. Beautiful cover and several stories were enjoyable but it was difficult for me to not skim through to the end.
I genuinely can't believe how boring this book was. I reached a point where I just started skimming, in hopes that there would eventually be a plot. There isn't. This is, literally, a collection of diary entries about the disconnected events of the author's extremely boring life: A tree in her yard is destroyed, she watches The Bachelorette, a friend has an affair, she visits a museum. I'm not exaggerating -- my own personal diary is probably more interesting. I have no idea why this book exists. Towards the end, I was gleefully finishing it just so I could officially mark it as the lowest-rated book I have ever read for my book club. A couple of the vignettes are mildly amusing, which is the only reason I gave it a single star, and some of her turns of phrase have a charmingly dry sense of humor.
When this book landed on the top of my holds pile, I was pretty smitten with the cover design. The pattern and cobalt endpapers were beautiful. This is a diary, but not one bound by time as the dated chapters jump around and each entry starts off with something that occurs from the day but travels into the past or into the future. A folded clock indeed. Julavits is funny, clever and droll and her life is full of fancy scarves, trinkets, dinner parties, 2nd houses and travel. Enjoyable.