Ruth MacLure > Recent Status Updates

So much for me in this book. I understand it to be about limerence and that being so, my loves have been limerence too. Does that make them lesser?
I have rarely read a description of the feelings and behaviour patterns that my relationships have followed. This is how it was.

Coercive control

This is perfect

Oh god this book is just so pleasing, so much language and odd thoughts. Not endearing, exactly, but disarming.

The mother summarises the novel : son takes her on a bizarre melodramatic journey through their past while she gets increasingly intoxicated and "he blames everything on Switzerland, the Nazis and the second world war"

Sancho panza and Don Quixote

Scheherezade, the stories told to distract his mother to somehow ward off death or disaster, yet the stories are all lurid tales of death and disaster

P112 "it is the dubious privilege of the petite bourgeoisie to have an interest in fruit and cheese and fresh cauliflower, she refused to do so, she would eat only ready-made meals, everything else was pedestrian"

P 69 "and then they came for the vegans"
Meat and milk as politics, power

References to the film Soylent Green

Sleazy, uncomfortable.
There's a word that means dirty ugly money. I have forgotten it. LUCRE. This is that.
Realising that Swiss neutrality actually implied complicity.

Can't believe I am making so many notes as I read. It's a library book. Think I need to buy a copy.
"She'd spent her entire childhood waiting to grow up so she could be here, ringing all the bells of adulthood"

Charlie's description of what makes him: "Your smile, the night sky. The flowering dog wood in front of Mrs Ceccione's house."
He recommends Whitman to William.
He is paper plant worker who lives poetry.

"Rose had tried to build a solid life, but Charlie had wandered away with, or kicked over, every stone she laid down."

Detailed and beautiful writing. Only on p 18 but delighting in the description of Julia's mother in her garden refuge wearing clothes from other people's bins: baseball leg guards and a sombrero.

Academia is Hell.
The End

Is the author really clever, writing with this immature voice? Or is this just how they are? Very much aware of the vulnerability of the first person narrator

This reminds me so much of Anais Nin's writing.

Bloody drama students! Is this how annoying we all seemed to everyone else? At least we didn't constantly "speak Shakespeare" to each other all the time. And nobody died. But yes, the intensity of feelings, the blurred edges between acting and real life...? Exhausting.

This will be a long slow read as I am having to translate word by word and my grammatical understanding sucks