HRose/Abalieno’s Reviews > Miss MacIntosh, My Darling > Status Update

"that all the people who were more than three miles tall should be put out of the house, as she would say, for fear they should bump their heads into Mr. Chandelier with his candle lights like dim stars in some dim, glassy heaven."

"whether he would stare at that wild, precipitous abyss which would stare at him."

"for in this mortal chaos where we now were caught, this constant fluctuation of distorted mirror images and principle of nothing but error repeating error like a mad, sad dream, no man knew where or who he was, and no man knew what he might become"

Now it feels like reading The Elephant Man.

Sometimes I think it's a joke on me, personally. An impossible object. That all existence is one giant prank.

There has been a plot twist through the last few chapters. It's very simple. So simple that I don't know anymore what I'm reading.

"That this was the garden of the blind could surely in no way have influenced my own clarity of vision in that amorphous, wet, clammy night of clouds and whirling fogs—even though, I have wondered ever since, what is the influence of place?"

A good chunk of the book done.

"The P’s were crowding upon her—Pandora’s bottomless box, pyramids, peninsulas, pebbles, prologues, pterodactyls. The P’s were crowding upon her—planets, Pythian games, polygons, Prussians, petunias, pseudopsias which are the delusions of sight, pseudosmias which are the delusions of smell, and there was no other guest expected through all that empty house."

Chapter 10 (next)

"She sat upright, the stuffed bird bobbing on her flower-laden hat, mechanical as consciousness, always in agreement with the dual-minded wearer of the hat"

This is now an exercise in concentration. I read 8 pages a day, but some days I have to skip. It seems doable. The book is like inside-out, everything that goes inside characters is exploded outwardly. A dreamlike reality, loosely connected with elsewhere.

"taking all the roads that went nowhere"

102 pages and chapter 5 done.

"sitting all day at my mother’s shadowed bedside, talking to a mad, sick lady who supposed her head was the only world, that nothing existed outside of her and her inflated imagination"

I think I found at least two common typos.

"We should be grateful for every new day we had gotten through, for every sunset, for that was our only success in this world of failure, the fact that we had lived through another day."

"all the apples fell downward in all the orchards of this earth"

Done with chapter 3, onward.

"yet though she was herself only the deceived, enchanted head to whom had been transferred as through a glass tube the conspiratorial illusion of this unreal reality, the idea of a world"

There's a moment where some plot surfaces and then...

"that it was not simply illusion facing illusion?"

"whether the world had not always been this vast, supernatural joke played upon her or someone, poor, euchred humanity"