Nicole’s Reviews > The Passion According to G.H. > Status Update

yes yes yes.. and i think it is the truest response a book can earn from us, truer than admiration, which is easy, and truer than rejection, which is only admiration too cowardly to admit itself.. to love and dislike at once is what happens when a book refuses to let us keep our distance from it.. when it does not console, does not explain, does not arrange itself into the shape our tenderness was hoping for..
i believed that the deepest truths are never the ones that flatter us into agreement.. they are the ones we resist even as we recognize them, the way the body recoils from a light too honest for the eyes..
the passion according to g.h. is that kind of light.. it dismantles the woman methodically, without offering her (or us) the mercy of a shape to hold onto afterward, and something in me despised it for that same precision i could not stop admiring.. we do not forgive a book for showing us the room behind the room, the self behind the performed self, the cockroach behind the tidy apartment of who we thought we were.. and yet we go on reading, because some starved part of us has been waiting its whole life for exactly that indecency..
i think of my own worst hours (the ones without a witness, without a shape, when nothing in me could be gathered into a sentence that made me presentable even to myself).. a book that reaches into that region and does not flinch is a book i cannot simply enjoy.. enjoyment implies a comfort this book was never interested in offering.. and yet i love it precisely for withholding that comfort, the way i have come to love certain silences more than the voices that tried, insufficiently, to fill them.. to dislike it is only to admit that it found me.. to love it is only to admit that nothing untrue could have found me so exactly..

so YES YES YES.. love and disgust, together, are not a contradiction in a reader.. they are what happens when a book stops performing kindness and starts telling the truth, and the truth, as i have had so many years now to learn, is rarely a thing we are grateful for in the moment it arrives..

btw Keep going, Nicole.. the parts that repel you most are usually the ones the book needed you to feel, and by 220 you'll understand why you couldn't look away either..

Thanks, Moe! Very true. I love a challenging read, but what had me questioning is I’m not sure I’m enjoying opening the book at this point. I only have about 60 pages left, but it seems like the narrative has dissolved entirely becoming this cyclical, abstract, existential ranting—bordering on nonsense—punctuated by pockets of, what seems, profound insight, but this insight is wrapped in lines and lines of word soup.

Maybe that’s the point.. it probably is. There’s so much I love about it too, I think I just have to accept there are sections I’ll need to revisit.

that "word soup" is only what a self sounds like once it stops performing coherence for a witness.. i have written nights like that myself, and called them nothing, because no one taught me they could be literature..
finish it not for "enjoyment", which this book was never offering, but the way one stays through a silence that has stopped explaining itself (you sense, rightly, that the staying is the point)..
aaaand never stop looking..

you know?.. it's nearly 3 a.m. here now, nicole.. the hour when books like this stop being read and start being understood, so perhaps that's why i keep thinking of yours..