Eleanor > Recent Status Updates

I’m enjoying this, well written, modern, fresh imagery and character, only a few clunky moments so far. Cyrus’s experience of alcohol hits close: ‘In active addiction it had taken dread and doom bringing him to his knees, or euphoric physical ecstasy elevating him half-literally out of his body—to break through his dense numb fugue. In sobriety, he still sometimes erroneously expected this of the universe

It’s a hard book to write about, I am enjoying it, but it’s a bit too ‘life of the mind’ for me, I think I would have loved it a few years ago, but something about the total absorption of her self-introspection is incredibly off-putting, probably because close to home. It’s full of incredible images however, and these make it worth fighting through the continual abstract breakdown of thought/being

I’m racing through it, love how he sets up Alec as the second love from the start - Maurice’s infatuation with the young garden boy as a child, his desire as an adolescent and adult to disappear into the ‘greenwood’, the obscured face of the ‘friend’ in his dreams, his childhood fear of the dark and Alec emerging from it. It’s not perfect, but feel I’ve been misled by ppl saying it’s badly plotted

I don’t see how this is described as unfinished/ badly-plotted, or how Forster himself could have wished M and C ended together. C is more sympathetic than Grant, his self-hating delusion after Greece is so complete it convinces us. The way he becomes another ‘leader’ of M, teacher-like, even as M convinces himself they are equals, is imp. M and C are touching, but Forster isn’t writing them as soulmates.

I like the progression, the symmetry of every one of Grenouille’s mentors or ‘helpers’ reaching a grisly end, as if he’s a bad luck charm. And the play of readerly repulsion and fascination with his ‘genius’ is well managed. Still hoping it ends in the final symmetry of the gallows.
There’s maybe something strange about the politics - animalism of abject poverty

Really enjoying it so far - the description of the world through scent, the recurring tick metaphor for Grenouille (slightly absurd name) the tinges of magical realism (Grenouille’s supernatural abilities, the unlucky fates of everyone he interacts with) contrasting with the liberal take on historical narrative.
Will he end up executed like his mother?

Main theory is now that the Abbott is behind the deaths, setting up William to be tried as a heretic

will William be framed for heresy?
Cellarer and Jorge feel like red herrings, but the herbalist Serverinus seems too obvious also
Was Adelmo’s death really a suicide or is William mistaken?

‘He had time to feel the strangeness of before and after; an hour ago there had been no poems, and now they came like rain and were real.’

Correction - this chapter where Roland returns to his apartment, and finally feels that life can inhere in writing, after so many years of analyzing, of focusing on absences and gaps, and is rewarded by a sudden influx of poetry, is now my favorite

The passages of Christabel and RHA in Yorkshire, and their quiet parallels to Maud and Roland’s growing relationship are probably my favorite two parts, apart from the book’s opening. Roland’s insecurity at the meeting of Val/Maud/Euan was well-rendered, but Byng being there feels serendipitous. Reader having access to C’s letter E burns is interesting, but sort of undermines past focus on material remains