Euphemism

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 19:26:00 +0800

i picked this book up during the last sale of fullybooked after eyeing it for almost a month and coming into terms with whether i could read a book that is 600 or so pages without feeling more swamped than what i’m supposed to feel. i miraculously finished it after two exams and a dozen of readings etc, and i didn’t feel burdened or anything for that matter

the premise of this book is this: toru okada’s cat noboru wataya had gone missing. feel like the book progressed without barely mentioning the cat yet i was left with the notion that there is danger coming because of the cat that had gone / when the cat returns. was introduced to toru okada in 2009 when i read kafka on the shore and so during the course of reading, when careful actions were expected of him, vague images of how murakami perceived toru okada in kots pulsated in my head with brief interludes from the same book eg a boy running away from home, a girl having sex with an inexperienced boy etc. i think i did grow an insurmountable amount of affection for okada because he was a cat lover, very lonesome, and have actions / thoughts i could really identify with

the book is a collection of three books namely the thieving magpie june and july 1984, book two bird as prophet july to october 1984, and book three the birdcatcher october 1984 to december 1985. i think, i like the first book best because the build-up / the impending danger was well-written and i feel like i am ‘okay’ because here is a person who is ‘okay’ with being nothing and practically doing nothing though somewhat sensed that he lacked validity from his wife which is actually a social ramification given the circumstances i.e. of being jobless/unemployed. i get the feeling that i would end up just like toru and the world would shun me likewise, wherefore the case of urban alienation that the book also dwelled into. urban alienation, being one of the main themes, was delineated with austere veracity and i think that i like how the setting was incorporated seamlessly with this theme because when asked if the book is graphic, i’d def say yes with posters of the abandoned house where a waterless well was situated, the river of the duck people, the narrow alley demarcating may kasahara’s house and old miyawata house in both hands. also i eventually came to know about lieutenant mamiya, whom i had instant feelings of gratification and affection for his bravery and plight, in the first book so comes the explanation of how i came to regard the first book more highly than the other two

all the stories during the war which involved lieutenant mamiya, i enjoyed with a heart half-broken. i think my bones quivered one night when i read the horrors of the man who killed his prisoners through skinning. i may have laid in bed, mum and inanimate, as the visual imageries took place in my head where i also saw myself quietly taking cover behind a bush as the manskinner feed on each of the prisoners of war. i think what completely unsettles me is the fact that i did proceed on reading even when i sat passively, doing nothing, and even had the audacity to type, ‘i enjoyed with a heart half-broken’. i guess, i completely misused the word ‘enjoyed’ because the gravity of what was done was beyond words and so all i could do was grieve via finishing the book completely. by understanding the notions, the presuppositions, i was able to recognize it for myself that no one wins at war and that we are all victims of war one way or another

somewhere along the book i began to develop a strong grip on reality vs dreams, as i always implicate myself in worrying of what i would do when i lose hold of the here and now. this is frightening, as what was portrayed in the movie inception, because parallel worlds, if to exist, should not hold two truths and therefore should not exist in the first place. madness is something, which i think, is the precedent of a world that holds two truths (the here and the elsewhere), and that is scary, well at least for me. but in this book there are two worlds and the clear demarcation between the two was not vividly set though the landmark of where everything becomes ambivalent was pointed out and that’s the well. i notice that murakami has used this object many times in his stories and i guess that’s because his characters always have to go through some kind of difficulty. toru said that he wanted to think and so he went into the well, which i really liked because i would also want a place where nothing would matter apart from my thoughts

at the last page, when i finally breathed out the last word of the last chapter, i found myself staring at the ceiling, not thinking of what to do afterwards and rather feeling a kind of lightness ironically not in conjunction with the heaviness of the book’s contents. i felt like i have also held toru’s hands in mine and said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t show you the duck people, Mr Wind-up bird” as the winter moon hung frozen in the cloudless sky

started reading: june 23, 2012
ended reading: july 28, 2012

Blue Angel by Francine Prose

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:36:00 +0800

what i like about this book:

1.) the cover
2.) the stories of mr swenson’s class especially the one about the boy who had sex with a chicken
3.) angela argo’s novel—eggs

i think the subject/the premise of this book is banal therefore seems unoriginal. but i do like how prose presents her ideas re ted swenson’s inner rambling thoughts. the fragile self is reflected in swenson’s mind ie i am conscious of my self-image, with what i say, how i act etc. feel like i can relate to that sometimes when i am feeling intimidated

also this book made me remember that it is of great importance to read nabokov’s lolita

started reading: June 12, 2012
ended reading: June 20, 2012

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 22:48:00 +0800

on the night of the first day i read the history of love water spilled onto its back cover. it was a brand new book, which i bought as my mind teetered between hesitation and aspiration, so i felt briefly disappointed but then realized that water spilling onto the back cover of the book was a good symbol for childbirth. water breaking induces labor, childbirth = beginning. and so, i began reading the history of love the same moment that the world birthed it surrounded by water.

i think, i have blogged about how much the book speaks to me in volumes after reading its excerpts / first passages in the new yorker. reminded of how much i liked the first lines in the book, “When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT.” because the style of writing was unequivocal and scintillating. i also feel particular towards contemporary fiction because of its experimentalism presented as successive pages of singular paragraphs (the history of love), or inclusions of pictures overtly laid out like those in jonathan safran foer’s extremely loud and incredibly close.

the history of love is highly comparable to jonathan safran foer’s everything is illuminated. i like to think that it is not because nicole krauss is the wife of jonathan safran foer / his idea of beautiful, and rather because the books are classified under contemporary literature and so elements like blunt, casual style of writing etc. are necessary.

i like the chapter called my mother’s sadness. in here i was introduced to alma singer, the girl who was named after every girl in zvi litvinoff’s the history of love. i really like how nicole krauss used numerical enumeration to narrate the events / present the singers’ lives prior to the communication between alma and leo gursky’s son via letter writing. again, this was done to showcase clinical and straightforward writing, which i really enjoy, but then again it doesn’t mean that the scenes are devoid of feeling because frankly it is the other way around. i specifically like no. 18 aka MY MOTHER NEVER FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH MY FATHER:

She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to dot his, she’s turned her life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.

There is a certain kind of sadness about Leo Gursky that makes me feel like I am this person in some way. I felt for him when it hit him how good it is to be alive only to find out later on that his only son, Isaac Moritz, had already died, felt for him when he pinned an index card saying, “My name is Leo Gursky I have no family Please call Pinelawn Cemetery I have a plot there in the Jewish park Thank you for your consideration” across his chest, and when he started dying on August 18, 1920 and even when he died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. I guess this is the kind of loneliness that would kill me many times and would still leave me alive and pining for death again and again, many times at nights, only to wake up the next day still breathing and unfortunate and still lonely. and so i think that leo gursky is the saddest fictional character i’ve ever met and the one character that i would like to hug tightly until his sadness ebbs away.

this, he said:

Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you’re a person and the next day they tell you you’re a dog. At first it’s hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as a loss. there;s even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, of for the lack of a better word, being human.”

love this book so much

started reading: June 9, 2012
ended reading: June 12, 2012

The Accidental by Ali Smith

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 12:00:00 +0800

i tweeted in twitter that this is by far the best book i’ve read in 2012. the plot of the book didn’t hold enough interest for me; the author did, because she introduced angela carter’s the infernal desire machine of dr hoffman, which i tremendously liked and would want to carry in my hands when the world steers clear away from my grasp. i think, i also like the minimalistic look of the cover, and felt that it riveted my eyes from glancing at other on sale books. took note of: “orange for fantastic fiction” which was penguin’s way of telling hey buy this because it’s penguin published

i like ali smith’s style of writing, which was perfunctorily laid out almost so instantly at the first passages of the book. this, i like:

“From my mother: grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want. From my father: how to disappera, how to not exist.”

the book is divided into three parts: the beginning, the middle, and the end. i like the beginning the most, though feel like it’s ever the same as the end because we are reminded that end=beginning and vice versa. five characters take turns on narrating—astrid, magnus, michael, eve, and amber. astrid and magnus are eve’s children. michael is their stepfather. amber is the girl whose car broke down. accident = car breaking down, accident = amber stepping into the smart’s life on account of another accident (= car breaking down)

it is astrid whom i feel highly favorable of because her opinions reach out what are mine, and that there is no lackluster moment whenever i read her part. I also feel that her choice of words re substandard and preternaturally is sharp-witted and of good quality, and ie id est she is of good quality and sharp-witted. magnus is the subdued case of astrid on the other hand, though the gravity of what he had done was hefty. on the outside, magnus looks like any ordinary kid you pass by on the streets. on the inside, wow, a jigsaw puzzle, a raucuous river. here’s what he’s got to say:

“His mother, broken. Michael, broken. Magnus’s father, his real father, so broken a piece of the shape of things that, say he were walking past Magnus, his son, sitting in the corroded bus shelter of this village right now, Magnus wouldn’t recognize him. He wouldn’t recognize Magnus. Everyone is broken. The man who has the restaurant, he’s a broken man. Magnus remembers his shouting. Those two painters, they’re broken, though you can’t always tell by just looking. They must be, since Magnus knows everybody in the whole world is. The people talking on all the millions of tvs in the world are all broken, though they seem whole enough. The tyrants are as broken as the people they broke. The people being shot or bombed or burned are broken. The people doing the shooting or the bombing or the burning are equally broken. All those girls on the world wide web being endlessly broken in mundane-looking rooms on the internet. All yhose people dialling them up to have a look at them are broken too. Doesn’t matter. All the people who known in the world, all the people who don’t know in the world. It’s all a kind of broken, the knowing, the not-knowing. Amber is broken, a beautiful piece of omething glinting broken off the seabed, miraculously washed up on to the same shore Mahnus happens to be on.”

don’t feel particular towards the parentals, and sort of respond to the possibility that amber = fiction eg not real. all inside magnus’s broken mind are broken things, irreparable, all in pieces, and so, i realize, am i.

started reading: may19, 2012
ended reading: may 29, 2012

Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings by Megan Mccafferty

Sat, 19 May 2012 12:00:00 +0800

the first jessica darling book i bought was second helpings
then had fourth comings, and then sloppy firsts
(still on the lookout for charmed thirds & perfect fifths)
reading this book was a breeze, a piece of cake
because high school is supposed to be like that
it brought back warm memories back in the days
when i had to wear blue-checkered uniforms
and everything came so easy

it starts off when hope, jessica’s bestfriend, moved away from pineville,
after she lost his brother to drugs / bad influences etc
this left jessica defenseless because hope is
her intellectual equal, the only person who understands her
each chapter ends off with a letter from jessica to hope
i like that jessica is funny as she struggles with mild depression
i also like that these 2 books are incorporated
with poems and literary musings

and omg, how can one not fall deeply in love with marcus flutie?

imitating jessica, i’d sign off with:
inconsequentially yours,
finella

started reading: may 6, 2012
ended reading: may 19, 2012

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Sun, 06 May 2012 12:00:00 +0800

started reading: April 25, 2012

ended reading: May 3, 2012

have tried reading the bell jar two times

the first time got me through the middle then felt confused and scared

failed the second time out of preoccupation with acads and other “less depressing” books

a person in the internet who i regard highly for his honest and eloquent writing said that the book was shit depressing

i don’t feel the same way when i finished reading the book

monica said that it wouldn’t plant compounding ideas in my head

so i officially read it in the mrt, in buses, in jeepneys, in the office

to kill time

i like the bell jar so much, therefore feel honest and trustworthy right now

i like plath’s words

felt like reading the bell jar was an excavation of plath’s thoughts

right before she succumbed to suicide

here are some passages that i am interested in:

“People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.”

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadown under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.”

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenceless that i couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somwhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”

“…I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

couldn’t bring myself to distinguish between fascination and obsession

because i am truly fascinated with this book,

with its presentation of a wholly different world i felt like anyone could grasp

to claim his at whatever cost, anytime

laura told me that it’s okay to be fascinated with the mind, with this book

but never outdo your curiosity, she said

told her that i wouldn’t, over bento boxes and cheeseburgers last friday

and i began to wonder what the basis of electroshock treatment was

and how it feels like to be suffused with your own sour air in a glass bell jar

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0800

told myself that i would write after i finish reading the language of flowers

so here i am, willing myself to let the words flow out of my head, feeling unbelievably unaccustomed to writing

when i picked the language of flowers at powerbooks, i was half-blindly taken over by my mild fixation—

to buy on sale books/to acknowledge the frugality in my genes i’ve inherited from my mother

had set in mind that i’d collect murakami books so i zigzagged my way into the ‘m’ shelf

sad to say the wind-up bird chronicles was out of stock

then, felt momentarily dejected as with many things in the here and now

fingered several books, all of them had pretty and interesting covers

but this one struck me with two assertive characteristics i felt clinging to in bitter times:

language and nature typified by the notion, ‘flowers’

i like the book

i like diffenbaugh’s clean way of writing,

clean as in pure, innocent, and simple

honest too

victoria jones is the name of the protagonist

very victorian, the name

as well as the name ‘elizabeth’, the person who taught her the language of flowers

all throughout the book i found myself leafing through the dictionary of the meaning of flowers located at the last pages

what does mistletoe signify? lilac? and basil?

victoria is a combination of thistle (misanthrophy), peony(anger), and basil(hate)

elizabeth, though not presented in the book, would have been a cactus(ardent love), moss(maternal love), and white monte casino(patience)

grant, on the other hand, is a toss between dogwood(love undiminished by adversity) and baby’s breath(everlasting love)

and if i were to put who i am into words birthed by flowers,

i’d be a mix of heath(solitude), delphinium(levity), cowslip(pensiveness), and queen anne’s lace(fantasy)

when i first started to read the book, i instantly looked up the meaning of zinnia,

i mourn your presence

realized that it was predestined after all

4/5, very recommended

read from april 21 to 25, 2012

Bluebeard by Angela Carter

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0800

this is the book i bought at page one, singapore

this is the first book i’ve read in 2012

this is my first angela carter book

bluebeard is a collection of seven short stories, fairytales, such as puss in boots, sleeping beauty in the wood, cinderella, bluebeard. it ends of with a moral, a shift back to reality

i read it on a bus heading towards Malaysia, on a hotel, on the plane back to home; read it while waiting for the klcc countdown in the middle of a park, while having breakfast; and finally, read it here in the comfort of my room, on my bed with my legs and arms propped against my pillows

with all the moments and travel experiences i’ve shared with it, i consider this book a special read,

and yes, i liked every part of it all the same

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 12:00:00 +0800

hello world. saturday hasn’t been treating me well so far re: failure to pass a subject (yes i have already precluded the impossible notion of getting a three in es 1). mother has told me that i should fight until the end, saying that if this is a war, an amputated soldier must not lose the will to fight until his last breath. she further voiced out her belief in miracles and that there are two kinds of people in the world: the optimist and the pessimist. it is all in the mind, she said.

but today i must say, i decided to be a realist.

after reading her fearful symmetry i felt a great tug within me to give another chance for audrey niffeneger to prove her acclaimed prowess in fiction writing. after all the book isn’t all that bad. the aesthetic value of niffeneger’s words; the colors, or the lack thereof, of the characters especially that of Elspeth; and of course, the grandiosity and grayness of the setting (london still holds a very special place in my heart apart from singapore and manila), have slowly built my diminishing confidence in her. all of these have also instilled in me an imagery that is both haunting and ominous. and of course, i like it most especially.

the time traveler’s wife was an easy read. every time i turn a page of the book there is, in me, a sense of feeling that i could have written this. the scenes and the emotions of the characters are elements in the surroundings of my day-to-day life. some precipitated from the deepest recesses of the subconscious and some are visibly puttering around as i consciously find my way to the finality of the day. also, i’ve realized that i am beginning to accept the consequences and ramifications of proving that i am not time’s slave. because i am, we all are, and there’s no way out for us in here.

what do i like best about the book, that is the question that my mind posed in me after reading the entirety of it (even though i just skimmed the last part). the wateriness of the plot has left me floating halfway, in the midst of avowal and apathy. i read some parts of it again one day, and i saw the clarity of transcendent love. love that conquers the unconquerable, that does wait, and has transgressed its own mortality in the physical world. i said to myself, that is how i like to see the meaning of love.

also, i feel a great attraction to how clare was portrayed: her art, the way she speaks or watches her face in the mirror, her reddish-brown hair accentuating the translucency of her skin. how simple each attribute seems but when magnified, piles up to reveal that these are the sources of her strength, of her capability to wait for an eternity for a person who leaves as easily as the season changes from summer to winter.

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?

in the end, feel like this was a good read but that is what it all was, at least for me. i did enjoy the interdependency of time and love yet this has been a commonplace subject that everyone almost has pried on. this time, niffeneger presented it in such a way that the elements are purely strewn along the roads of a magical realistic world. and we did believe in this world she painted across our realistic minds. in contemplation don’t you think that only love can do such a trick?

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fri, 20 May 2011 12:00:00 +0800

as I write this, the sky is weeping. little-big droplets of water cascade down the shut windowpanes, the odoriferous soil sets my senses in motion, and the monotonous drip-drops of the teasing rain invite the child in me to play, and jump, and sing with them. this moment, this minute, is the perfect time for my thoughts about fahrenheit 451 to coagulate. nature is about balance, isn’t it? with water comes fire.

it really was a pleasure to burn. even more so, to see things burn. houses in blaze. books in blaze. seesawing display of bright red-blackish flames devouring everything on the way. fragments of wood falling off the temporary mound of hell on earth. they all exhibit the idea of fun. but fun, more or less, pertains to playfulness and lack of seriousness, right? with this, I’d like to think about danger. almost every paragraph in the book poses/is verging into danger/something out of the ordinary (to be more subtle). “fahrenheit 451…the temperature at which books burn.”, danger, isn’t it?

“The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt.”

it is also apparent that destruction plays a big role as one of the motifs. I, myself, am undeniably fascinated with destruction. in this book, you are thrown into an on-going war (but not entirely dwelled into by bradbury); censorship dictating ruination of books, family units, search for profound knowledge, lives, and souls; highly-advanced technology in the form of The Mechanical Hound, which almost so instantly tracks wanted people via their scents; and an individual’s own submission to self-annihilation, suicide. a world in gray with streaks of bright-red orange and flaming fuschia, is how I like to visualize the setting.

fahrenheit 451 takes place in a futuristic, hedonistic, anti-intellectual society, where parlors project the immediate information that everyone takes in whether they strictly accept it or not. they are like the televisions in our day and age. the members of the society were fed with loads of contradicting/complementing ideas as they passively swallow them in without any whimper, disgust, nod of agreement —-no reaction at all. bradbury, himself, said that the book touches on the alienation of people by media. a very interesting subject for me all throughout my uni years as it became a constant debatable subject in my social science and art studies classes.

I don’t want to go into the summary. useless since one should read it otherwise. so obviously, I highly recommend this masterpiece of mr. ray bradbury. especially so, if and when you think that we are in a society where the media, the television and such rots the mind instead of daring it to prove its worth beyond what’s expected of it.

I’d like to end this post with the importance of books, which I have enthusiastically affixed to my mind for the bookworm within me,

“Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the grass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

(I wish to have written down every paragraph that I underlined for their beauty and essentiality. I felt my hands dripping and my ass sagging against the cushy mattress. I am inefficient.)

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding

Sat, 14 May 2011 12:00:00 +0800

I finished the edge of reason in just a day. this only attests to how much I am in love with bridget jones. her clumsiness and ability to make the most out of the worst were disarming to the point that I was even considering to be in those dismal and helpless situations in the future. even mark darcy’s infinite, overwhelming love for bridget made me hope for the best for myself too. I don’t even understand how I was completely transformed by this book. It suddenly felt like, for the first time, there really is a ‘true romantic love’.

Helen Fielding’s power over me was just unbelievable.

I both love the first and second books. However, I found myself to be more feeling in bj’s diary’s sequel. it has more content for me, that’s why. I was also strongly fascinated with present relationships. relationships between man and woman that are inclining to break-up. I question how silly little things become full-blown arguments. how one little mistake pushes everything out of track. and then, in the end, everything would turn out rosy and dandy? where’s the reality. I just can’t bring myself to believe in that.

but bridget and mark’s story was believable. I don’t exactly know how that worked out for me. but I’m happy it did because I surely felt the humanity that was lost, for a while, within me.

for humanity, I highly strongly desperately recommend this.

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

Fri, 06 May 2011 12:00:00 +0800

it took me a along time to finish this book. there had been a lot of in-between digressions as i tried to take in winterson’s imaginative ideas. i went back to different times as the book became the medium of my time travel. although the story is set in the middle ages, i still found it to have impacted me in some sort of way. what is past if not present and future interwoven in harmony, and vice versa? and that is one thing i’ve learnt about the linear nature of time.

My experience of time is mostly like my experience with maps. Flat, moving in a more or less straight line from one point to another. Being in time, in a continuous present, is to look at a map and not see the hills, shapes and undulations, but only the flat form. There is no sense of dimension, only a feeling for the surface. Thinking about time is more dizzy and precipitous.

Thinking about time is like turning the globe round and round, recognizing that all journeys exist simultaneously, that to be in one place is not to deny the existence of another, even though that other place cannot be felt or seen, our usual criteria for belief.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular - an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

Outside of the rules of daily time, not to be is exact as to be. We can’t talk about all that the universe contains because to do so would be to render it finite and we know in some way, that we cannot prove, that it is infinite. So what the universe doesn’t contain is as significant to us as what it does. There will be a moment (though of course it won’t be a moment) when we will know (though knowing will no longer be separate from being) that we are a part of all we have met and that all we have met was already a part of us.

i have dog-eared a lot of pages in stc (mostly on the 12 dancing princesses’ part). winterson’s words are incomparably poetic and lyrical, and her ideas conjunct with them effortlessly. however, i had to read some paragraphs out loud to make out the alliterations and allusions. it wasn’t an easy read i gathered since the setting goes back a long way in time. one of these days, i will try to read it again as i can’t exactly pinpoint what/whom the author’s referring to.

it would be impossible for me to summarize the book because i intentionally lived in the moments of each scenes. it was, for me, a spectral collection of intermingling stories that may have/may have not occurred in the same time frame. and i like it most especially as it gave me the feeling of not being time’s slave.

all in all, it was a so-so read. i didn’t see kundera’s philosophical insights though, like what i was told re: San Francisco’s Chronicle review, but its similarity to the arabian nights was interestingly observed. perhaps i just need to leaf through this highly-acclaimed oeuvre of winterson once more.

Shopgirl by Steve Martin

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:00:00 +0800

i have read shopgirl last february, when i was deeply deluged with estranged and unrewarded emotions. i was buried in school work then, so i also needed to read something that is light and feel-good. the book is only 130 pages, and there are enough chapters for pausing and digesting steve martin’s brilliant thoughts. his words are effortless and straightforward, hence the weightlessness (almost) of the novella. the way he introduces the characters is, when left to stand alone, a beauty already. and for emphasis:

“There is nothing too mysterious about Ray Porter, at least in the usual sense of the word. He is single, he is kind, he tries to do the right thing, and he does not understand himself, or women, or his relationships with women. But there is one truth about him that can be said of a man who asks a woman to dinner before he has exchanged one personal word with her. Mr. Ray Porter is on the prowl.”

i have seen the movie beforehand so i knew how the story would turn out. mirabelle works behind the glove counter at neiman marcus, just a level above the perfume hierarchy of channel no5 and whatnots. along with the monotonousness of her 8-6 job, mirabelle is intermittently suffused with a hollowness inside her that she subdues with serzone in a night-to-night basis. but she can be humorous too, if she wanted to. and that side of her was best exhibited when she tried to impress mr. ray porter on their first date. mr. ray porter, however, made it clear that what he wanted is just an affair. after all, he’s smart, charming, wealthy, and already pushing 60. meanwhile, jeremy, a penniless graphic artist whom mirabelle slept with out of loneliness, had been making a name in the music industry as he bunks with roadies on tour and sells ‘ultimate’ amplifiers. although his job requires a lot of his time, he never failed to keep mirabelle posted of his day-to-day encounters. eventually mirabelle reunited with him after realizing that falling in love with ray porter was “the pain that changed her life”.

plot wise, shopgirl is a coming of age novella resonating with love and its other dimensions. i like how pain is always reminded to be attributed with love, and it is with pain that lives would transmogrify into something better or at times, worse. i can feel the pain that mirabelle endures as her relationship with ray gradually collapses because the pain isn’t exactly about ray, it’s about herself.

i particularly like this quote:

“At breakfast, early because she has to get to work, Mirabelle becomes age seven. She sits waiting to be served. Ray Porter gets the juice, makes the coffee, sets the plates, toasts the bread, and pours the cereal. He gets the paper. Mirabelle is so dependent, she could have used a nanny to open her mouth and spoon-feed her the oat bran. She speaks in one-word sentence, which requires Ray to fill the silences with innocuous queries, like an adult trying to break through to a disinterested teenager. In this snapshot of their morning is hidden the definition of their coming relationship, which Ray Porter will come to understand almost two years later.”

it speaks to me in volumes about the interdependency of love. when in love, we lose ourselves like mounds of clay used to mold a completely different masterpiece born out of passion and desire. and as these mounds of clay lose its nature to individualize, our thoughts, ideals, and principles soon follow in the path. soon enough, we’ll realize that it all materializes to how helpless we become every time our hearts are in full bloom.

i highly recommend this book as it is a story that all walks of life have been living through/lived through/will live through and resuscitating/resuscitated/will resuscitate from.