Ah. Ahhhhh.
This book was like someone you want to get close to who doesn’t pull away. After decades.
It stretches the whole length you want it to. And trusts you — believes in you, allows you — to take a completely different ending from the book if you recall one line uttered over 100 pages prior. Which I did.
Which changes everything.
God damn. I love that I am now a person who will swear out loud, into an empty room, when reading a book that does that to me. I love that I haven’t become someone who tamps that down. Because this book. You have to feel it fully. Or rather — you don’t have to. She gives you that way out. You could forget. You could not have been paying attention. You are completely allowed to do that, and walk off thinking one thing happened. But it didn’t. If you remember what you were told pages and pages and pages ago, it didn’t. Oh god, this book.
You should probably read it.
Of course I’m being deliberately vague. Because there is so much value in not knowing. And the final page of the book, the blank one at the end, is tattooed with so many page numbers. But one of them speaks directly to my favorite and memorized passage from Malafrena, so starkly I set my coffee down, left a busy room for somewhere quiet, to read it.
They sat, inclined towards each other, and exchanged some pain for a tragedy not exclusively theirs. Grace got up and went to the piano, as to a haven. Then turned and looked at Caro. “At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations.” What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.
This is definitely one of the books that will stick. I had thought it would just be well-phrased. Then as it went on I appreciated that it didn’t turn away over time, forget to call; leave letters unanswered. But shit.
“They would manage without me,” he said, “if I died.” He did not mean the conference, but the world. “Why not if I live?”
Seriously. Read this book.
metaphlame 