Yan’s Reviews > The Hour of the Star > Status Update

“Today, she thought, today is the first day of my life: I was born.”

“She felt inside her a hope more violent than any despair she had ever felt. If she was no longer herself that meant a loss that counted as a gain. Just as you can be sentenced to death, the fortune-teller had sentenced her to life. Everything suddenly was a lot and a lot and so wide that she felt like crying. But she didn’t: her eyes glistened like the dying sun.”

“I am alone in the world, and I don’t believe in anyone, everyone lies, sometimes even when making love, I don’t think one being speaks to another, the truth only comes to me when I’m alone.”

“And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn’t have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.”

“I’ll miss myself so bad when I die.”

“It’s the only face I’ve got. But I’m only sad on my face because inside I’m actually happy. It’s so good to be alive, don’t you think?”

“She wasn’t crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she’d accepted that with her that was just the way things were, but I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might’ve guessed there were other ways of feeling, there were more delicate existences, and even a certain luxury of soul.“

“The encounter with herself was a good she had not yet known. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my entire life, she thought. She owed nothing to anyone and no one owed her a thing.”

“But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on nothing. Except she needed others in order to believe in herself, otherwise she’d get lost in the successive and round emptinesses inside her.”

“And when she woke up? When she woke up, she no longer knew who she was. Only later did she think with satisfaction: I’m a typist and a virgin, and I like Coca-Cola. Only then did she dress herself in herself, she spent the rest of her day obediently playing the role of being.”