Status Updates From Falling Slowly (Vintage Con...

I'm definitely going through a personal crisis at the moment and I'm learning tha in a time of utter exhaustion and some desperation it's better for me personally to stick to Elizabeth Taylor novels than to try and mix things up with some late stage Brookner

'You've been reading too much. That was always your trouble.'
' my trouble is that neither of these characters came out of a book. There were no happy endings.'

She joined this group, you are. They met every week to denounce male power. '
'How very old-fashioned of them.'

- a rare market that Brookner was part of the culture of the 90s and au fait with the spice girls and the concept of the ladette 😛

She saw that there two people who had never met, held the keys to her own life, were her completion, her fulfilment...

As a reader I don't think that I agree

In bed she may awake for a long time, sending the loneliness of the flat. But when she slept it was without dreams, so that she woke easily & calmly, to another day.

- dreams =problems for Miriam, !

She could no longer detect Beatrice's presence. What she felt was an immense stillness, as if she were living in the aftermath of some natural disaster, an earhquake, a volcano. There was no fear in this, only a sort of recognition. This was how it would be now, a life without company, without surprises. Even this silence was appropriate. Beatrice"a last gift to her.

Beatrice & Miriam had been grateful for Mrs Oliver's assiduity. She has had the true instinct of friendship, or maybe it was love, she did not recognise stiffness or discouragement, merely attributing them to shyness, which was accurate in a number of cases.

Hastily, she made provision for him. He could stroll, perform small tasks; he could wear his Panama hat . He would be bored of course, but then so would she.

She bought a couple of books, which would take their place on the pile by her bedside, & perhaps at some time in the future, when this enormous upheaval had been out aside, she would have the patience to read.

She had been ardent herself, until she was rather forcibly reminded that she was no longer young, had sought to ally herself with the heroines of novels rather than with the practical business of finding a partner, still preferred stories in which a long ordeal is crowned with a happy outcome. Of her failed expectations only her sister knew, & characteristically blamed her choice of reading.

It occurred to him that what the world expected from him was a fully fledged biography, with details of the illustrious persons he had known, whereas he desired to recall sweet small incidents, family dignity, unassuming love. No publisher would be interested in such a thing; refugees' stories were all too common.

She had never been so aware that they were going to separate times, that the whole width of darkening London was no longer a measure of distance but a symbolic enclave: beyond it she did not know the lie of the land.

- I am aware of geography in this novel, even more than in other Brookner novels, it is doing more than marking class and social circles I feel.

(In)fertility fears:
She had blamed the friends' tactlessness, had been offended by their lack of reciprocal interest in her life, her activities. Now she wondered if they had sensed her condition, had seen in her slight taut body & her discreet & careful clothes a singularity that they had been spared. She has thought she had detected a certain irritation, a certain resentment at her appearance. What she had

She shrugged: people read novels superficially, invariably remembered the wrong parts: why should she not be superficial too?

- cavaet lector

The conversation after sec:
' What have you brought?' He would ask.
'Smoked salmon,' She would answer, &, after an interval, 'pain de campagne. Boursin .don't go to sleep again'.
' I'm not asleep.'
'Apples. The first cox's.'

The food choices seems quite quips, even though the book's atmosphere is somewhere between 1950 and 1978.

She was not in love; she was in thrall, to Simon, to his wife, to Norham Gardens, to Bryanston Square...

-There are more street names in this novel than in the typical game of monopoly.