Cerisaye > Recent Status Updates

My Kindle copy titled Guilt but aka Purity of Vengeance (Mørk #4)

Re-read of my favourite book

Walter looked at his children and wondered if they remembered that it was he, and not Jean, who read bedtime stories. He recited them like an incantation. He thought a story could soothe away pain, and sometimes he would carry on reading long after they had fallen asleep in the twin beds.

Geminus 'a planet trapped on opposite sides of a terrible meridian'. 'Intelligence arose twice. Each kind solved its own impossible climate. But the minds of day failed to find the night intelligible, while the night's minds couldn't comprehend the day. They shared only one bit of common knowledge: life could never exist "over the edge".' p98

A very difficult read, heartbreakingly sad, a bit wonderful, a lot over my head (science), ominous (Flowers for Algernon).

Probably not a good idea to read this like a novel, continuously over a short period of time. Good idea but after a while seems repetitive and samey. Trite and overly literal. Some stories made me cringe, a few I laughed at, fewer touched me.

I am seven years younger than Roland Baines so his lifetime roughly mirrors my own. I well remember Chernoby, four months pregnant in May 1986, and worried.

A hard read. 50 pages in I realised it's memoir not fiction. Details of abusive family relationships, emotional and physical neglect. At times barely credible. Very conflicted in my reactions to reading. I hate her father and her brother though the latter only perpetuates a cycle of abuse. She fails to blame the Mormon church, I do. Frightening insight into extremism, indoctrination and bullying. Challenging.

Second attempt at reading this novella...fingers crossed.

Finding this hard to read...makes me uncomfortable...upset...but I want to finish. I've read We Need to Talk About Kevin but it didn't make me this unsettled. Don't like how everything is telegraphed, eg The Push, which both lessens and increases tension- its purpose?

The Good Mother, again...our conditioning and society's expectations of motherhood, fathers getting a free pass in traditional gender based child-rearing with Mum at home while Dad provides and does fun stuff for quality time. Cycles of maternal abuse, emotional neglect, mental health issues. Nature vs nurture. Being a mother is hard and we have unrealistic expectations, more so than ever with social media.

Rereading

In the tradition of Schindler's List?! The novel has no resemblance other than its wartime setting and that it's a story about one man's resistance. Why do publisher blurbs make these ridiculous marketing connections? This book is about one ordinary German, who was never fooled by the Nazis, taking a stand against the regime in the only way he can, a cog in von Ribbentrop's office, to spy for the Americans.

Everything ends. This will...There's no such thing as forever, at least in the sense of there being more and more time like this. Time is running out...He can feel that the spinning golden carousel of lights that turns here...the spinning carousel of light that's held his whole life, will sometime soon tilt away from him, or he from it. Either way it will angle away from him into the great dark, and turn on...

We are so many, thinks Alec. Every single one of these people homeward bound, like him, to different homes which are to each the one and only home, or else outward bound, to different destinations at which each will find themselves, as ever, the protagonist of the story. Every single one the centre of the world, around whom others revolve and events assemble. So many whole worlds, therefore packed in together...

...she noticed how inevitable the tune is already sounding: how meant, how deliberate, this thing that she has been pulling together from who knows what vapour, who knows how. It's necessary this hardening of the separate parts of a song. Without it, as you turned to a new task, the rest would melt back into the mush of possibility again. And if you need to alter what has already hardened, there is scope to return

So now after 800+ pages of malign, spiteful baddies defeating every attempt by the nice characters to do good, finally, suddenly, it switches to favour the decent, everything goes right for them and wrong for the nasties . Eye roll.

Picked as a Book Group selection I was keen to read it as I enjoyed the earlier books. Not in the same league as Dorothy Dunnett or Hilary Mantel but escapist reading with an historical setting. Sadly it's something of a retread of those other novels with different names but same tropes. Nice decent people trampled all over by mean horrible but successful baddies...hey, is this a commentary on our current leaders?

-You are a river. I am a river. Your consciousness flows to me. Mine to you. The ether is a tributary. We can travel through it. Back and forth. From where I am now to you- where you are, but more so, you can take all the tributaries that make up who you are and go back through them.

-Consciousness is s river. All of us are linked.
-And they say there is no magic in the world.

I'm struggling a bit with the style of narration. Simple, matter of fact to the point of nondescript, occasionally clunky. Characters painted with broad brush. Not uninteresting but too obviously representative of an issue, social, political or economic. Seems to me it would fit better in the 80s or 90s not 2021? It would make a good TV mini series. Carrying on...

Published in the UK as The Illustrated Child. Reading as a Book Group pick.