Eric Maas > Recent Status Updates

4 boating

I don’t care much for the’ Neighbor’, who seems to be mainly occupied with making an impression. Meanwhile I am puzzled about the Narrator’s motivations to meet up with him, let alone go out on a boat drive with the man. Cusk writes beautifully but it isn’t until we get to see a glimpse of the Narrator’s mind and state that I experience some engagement, some connection to the story.

After mentioning Wuthering Heights: …likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.

…a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. (p73/74)

3. Clelia’s place, or how to write a self-image through an apartment (and how to read this to one‘s own liking)

There seems to be a deliberacy in the way Clerks had left her place for writer guests to form an idea of the owner. On the other hand, how this is described, may tell more about the visiting narrator. But what exactly?

2. Ryan, the Irish writer. Bit of dick, if you ask me. Again, much narrative there and opinion. Telling all about him, and hardly anything about his wife or life in general, for that matter. Also some recognition too, which possibly explained the dislike.

1. The Greek divorcee on the plain
Tough first chapter to get through. Familiar story about the first and second wife. The point seems to be about the narrative we tell ourselves and anyone who’ll listen to make us look best. One point: like it’s not wrong to be jealous of a child or to be beautiful, it is not evil to construct such narratives, just don’t confuse them with the truth

As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition - I had no desire to prove that one book was better than the other: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly inclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others.

…the very action of naming something that subsequently happens — if wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass — this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it. The fact that the young me who cursed and the old me who witnessed the curse’s outcome had quite different feelings — that was monstrously irrelevant.

A terrible letter, which I can’t imagine one would forget, no matter how drunk or otherwise confused when written. Or at least, I assume Tony speaks the truth now, that he doesn’t remember.

Still, the story remains a mystery and makes me hope for a big reveal.

…memory is what we thought we’d forgotten.

We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young.

…the reward of merit is not life’s business.
[…]
What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point.

One

So, what happened here? What is it that rounds this first part. The Story of How Three Boys Befriend The Most-Intelligent And Mysterious Adrian Finn, Who Has Unknown Secrets Both In Life And Death. The set-up for the real story…

A pleasant read with but a scarce suggestion of depth, coming from a handful words spoken and more or less ignored. High expectations of Part Two in that respect though...

Surprised to find Adrian dating Veronica. He seemed to me to have clear objections to (at least) her brother Jack (I know the sort of people they are (p. 31)) and I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it (p. 33), which means nothing to anyone (yet), except Adrian himself…

22. Step

…I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and treat it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.

I feel for Hella, brave Hella, but I relate to David, who fails to find any answers. To her, or to himself…

All the words I wanted to say closed my throat, like weeds, and stopped my mouth. (p. 144)

Much has been written about love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say. (p. 139)

2.04 - The break-up after Hella’s return. Giovanni dramatic but believable and sincere in a terrible rant. Very personal and incomparably unique, yet so very much like going through my own break-ups, being the hurt Giovanni and the betraying David, both heart-broken, but the latter drawing the shortest straw, for the guilt of deliberate insincerity, to lie to both may be worse than the raw grief of the other…

…something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me. (p. 128)

2.03. Giovanni out of a job. David confused and severely mixed up, not ever able to let go of his escape scheme back to the acceptable life, but at the same time unable to cut off Giovanni. Such a convincing ambiguity, present on every page…

And then something shakes me, I feel shaken hard and dry, like some dead thing in the desert, and I know that I am hoping that Giovanni is being sheltered in someone’s arms tonight (p. 101)

I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Saviour had met in me.

To lie in all sincerity, surprising yourself while acting so, to get through the awkwardness of the moment seems to me more human and more true than all the plans and resolutions we read about in books and movies and the stories we tell each other…

2.02 - Betrayal. Of Giovanni, of Sue, of his self…

She wrote the strangest smile I had ever seen. It was pained and vindictive and humiliated but she inexpertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety — as rigid as the skeleton beneath her flabby body. I’d fate ever allowed Sue to reach me, she would kill me with just that smile.

…what I did with Giovanni could not possibly be more immoral than what I was about to do with Sue>/i>. (p. 88)