Mimiettecoco

“Another school of opinion followed Mr. Fearenside, and either accepted the piebald view or some modification of it; as, for instance, Silas Durgan, who was heard to assert that “if he chooses to show enself at fairs he’d make his fortune in no time,” and being a bit of a theologian, compared the stranger to the man with the one talent. Yet another view explained the entire matter by regarding the stranger as a harmless lunatic. That had the advantage of accounting for everything straight away. Between”
― H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man

“Adrienne Rich once wrote that Virginia Woolf’s style — that detachment and banked rage, that light, calculated charm — revealed a woman who never forgot she was being overheard, and evaluated, by men. Reading the flood of public writing about #MeToo in recent years — the op-eds and testimonies — I’d occasionally experience a prickly feeling of recognition. Here again, I’d think, was writing that stemmed from outrage, and often shame, but remained impeccably well-mannered and sure of itself, almost legalistic in structure and presentation. Necessarily, perhaps — women must constantly perform credibility. “The whole long arc of justice now crashing down that we call #MeToo has been about whether women may be in possession of facts, and whether anyone will bother to hear out those facts or believe them or, having believed them, allow those facts to have consequences,” Rebecca Solnit has written. These pieces often felt preoccupied with their imagined reception — straining to appease, convince, console — conscious of being overheard, in Rich’s phrase, but this time by women as well as men.

Not these novels. They occupy the backwaters where the writer need not pander or persuade, and can instead seek to understand, or merely complicate, something for herself. They are stories about inconsistencies and incoherence, stories that thicken the mysteries of memory and volition.”
― Parul Sehgal

“At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world around me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.”
― H.G. Wells

“It does not feel reductive to read fiction through this prism, nor will you find the numbing sameness Nunez’s narrator deplores — in fact, these books deliver us from numbing sameness. They are remarkably various, and they trouble debates that traffic in certainties. They come laden with confusion, doubt, subtlety — is it excessively earnest to call it truth?”
― Parul Sehgal