Maeve > Recent Status Updates

The more completely he concentrated on chess, the more he was able to push the pain aside. He never forgot it, but during the game he did not live exactly in the center of it.

Living not exactly in the center of your pain is interesting

Cesar began to sing the Rossini while he finished up his work. He had the kitchen to himself for a. moment and wanted to make use of this rare time alone. The sun came through the windows and shone brightly off his clean rifle and oh, how he loved to hear the words in his mouth.
Still, he wished he could open himself up th ay she did, bellow

The absurdity of this boundary breaking: I love it. Makes you remember how absurd your own self imposed boundaries are too

Such interesting stuff too about the role of the translator. She landed on such an interesting node for a book being the translator. It all feels just quite masterful

With a great exhalation that could have signified the end of everything, the big man tilted his head down toward the floor

Simone Thibault, who sat there with his cookbooks wearing his wife’s blue wrap like a flag

How do you know Russian too? How do you know so many languages?
It’s my job.
No, no. It’s because you understand something and I want to know it, too.

She plays with gender and sexuality in such an interesting and surprising way here, actually. Nothing explicit at all but everything’s a little more fluid than you’d expect. It’s very curious and reflects the environment they’re in where boundaries break down I think. It’s kind of masterful. Reminds me a bit of jane eyre the beginning 90 pages or so

The few men, the servants, the infirm, came out behind them, looking helpless in the face of so much sadness for which they were not responsible.

The warm and taking even breaths was actually page 57 oops

Mess we glanced around at the bodies at his feet, all of them warm and taking even breaths. Really, he had seen worse.

i lke all of them warm and taking breaths

Aw man Ann patchett gets to go on the list of people who Get It. This whole page was so great. The absurdity of it all, how the boundaries blur and everyone is curious about one another

He got up from the nest he had made by the empty fireplace with his wife and three children, two bright eyed girls and one small boy, whose face was sweaty and red from the work of such deep sleep.

Really good culmination — this bit with what everybody is voting for and why. Idk maybe would otherwise feel a little cheesy but we are attached at this point to the characters, all of them, the sweeping stories of their lives

I need to aspire to WAY more

I wonder what my diary will be like when (if) I’m 65– I wonder if I’ll be wonderfully soft

Stocktaking time. I like that.

Oddly attached to these characters by this point. They smooth out and soften a little in age and as we get to know them

Valuable perspective as I’m thinking about my own parents as people before and during and after they are parents

Well at least she’s softening a little. Finally—

Ok fine — this is interesting if you let yourself chew on it like you’re in a trance in a hot car. These are hot car thoughts.

It’s smart stuff but not presented well is my issue

The unacknowledged weirdly lesbian-coded storyline in what I can only describe as a nauseatingly heterosexual novel is so strange here

This book is a drag. It better get really great in the final hundred pages…

I love the bit about the blue milk bottles and the light filtering through them and the milk


Also milk.. babygirl scene as well
There’s something about it

The women fighting brutally over ajax is almost a subversion of traditional gender roles? He’s the one who has agency and has multiple women but the women themselves are also possessive over him. In that way they’re almost both assertive?
Something subversive here though…

Feel like 120-121 section about Sula is very in line with the braking of boundaries that A Life of Ones Own explores and rests on and in that way Sula is like Lila

And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the baked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.