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peytonaaa's Reviews (927)
informative
Mixed feelings. Very interesting topic but the book itself is a pretty basic recounting of the facts with little accompanying analysis. It was published by a mainstream nonacademic publisher so presumably it has to be accessible but I wish the author dug deeper.
emotional
reflective
tense
"She sprang away from Finn and it was no longer a pretence – she stumbled over the knotted fringe of the rug. Overbalancing, she clutched at Finn to save herself but pulled him over with her. Clinging to each other, Melanie laughing, they toppled in slow motion to the floor.
But Finn did not laugh. And Melanie’s laughter trickled to nothing when she saw his pale, bony face half-hidden by hair and could see nothing there, no hint of a smile or inflection of tenderness which might mean she would be spared. He lay as close as a sheet to a blanket; and he smelt of decay, but that no longer mattered. Shuddering, she realised that this no longer mattered. She waited tensely for it to happen."
But Finn did not laugh. And Melanie’s laughter trickled to nothing when she saw his pale, bony face half-hidden by hair and could see nothing there, no hint of a smile or inflection of tenderness which might mean she would be spared. He lay as close as a sheet to a blanket; and he smelt of decay, but that no longer mattered. Shuddering, she realised that this no longer mattered. She waited tensely for it to happen."
reflective
"There are moments in your destiny when years are compressed into days, and days into hours, by the intensity with which events transform your life, events almost able to erase a past, and if not to erase it, then at least to shut it off from yourself, erecting a wall that separates the days of your childhood from the days of your adolescence, as if those days had been lived by two separate people, not by one person at two different ages. To build a bridge between the two, to pass from the adolescent to the traumatized child, to know that they are one and the same, to find that only one who was and who is; that has, to a large extent, been the purpose of this narrative."
emotional
mysterious
reflective
"No time belongs to you, no place is your own. What you are looking for is not looking for you, that which you are dreaming about is not dreaming about you. You know that something was yours in a different place and in a different time, that's why youre always crisscrossing past rooms and days. But if you are in the right place, the time is different. And if you are in the right time, the place is different."
emotional
reflective
"...writing may exit the cage but the cage remains and grows, or am I speaking of the life of a footnoter; I always hold back from writing in the margins of the clearest sentences: those that lost their status as feeling once they were excised by skillful hands wielding sharp instruments, a manufacture of refraction..."
This was sooooo inconsistent, quite underwhelming for such an intriguing subject. So many sweeping generalizations, especially when discussing things prior to the 19th century. Last chapter was vague and insubstantial and also suddenly got extremely transphobic (sad!), which hurts the whole project because surely you should be able to powerfully convey why the subject of your book is so relevant today.
reflective
9/10
"To which Boori Ma would reply, shaking the free end of her sari so that the skeleton keys rattled, 'Why demand specifics? Why scrape lime from a betel leaf? Believe me, don't believe me. My life is composed of such griefs you cannot even dream them.'
So she garbled facts. She contradicted herself. She embellished almost everything. But her rants were so persuasive, her fretting so vivid, that it was not so easy to dismiss her."
"To which Boori Ma would reply, shaking the free end of her sari so that the skeleton keys rattled, 'Why demand specifics? Why scrape lime from a betel leaf? Believe me, don't believe me. My life is composed of such griefs you cannot even dream them.'
So she garbled facts. She contradicted herself. She embellished almost everything. But her rants were so persuasive, her fretting so vivid, that it was not so easy to dismiss her."
emotional
reflective
"It was one thing to research something, another thing_ entirely to have lived it. To have felt it. How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that tretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it- -not apart from it, but inside of it."
reflective
"She had seen nothing, but she had been seen."
Some of these stories had interesting premises but I think a lot of them were too short and not fully realized :(
Some of these stories had interesting premises but I think a lot of them were too short and not fully realized :(
emotional
mysterious
reflective
"I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must realise that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself."