Read for the Great Books group. The opening is famous: “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask,” but I don’t really understand it. I flagged a bunch of passages, but in looking back at them it wasn’t so much for the language or thought as for referring to in our discussion. I felt sorry for poor Maria and her gambling parents, separated from her daughter Kate, having had an awful abortion, and aging in Hollywood.
Carter: “Maria has difficulty talking to people with whom she is not sleeping.”
Maria fantasizes about a house by the sea where she would live with Kate doing her lessons at a pine table, and later “they would eat the mussels and drink a bottle of cold white wine and after a while it would be time to lie down again, on the clean white sheets.” But then (this is a 2-page chapter, Didion is nothing if not concise) “[they] understood as she did that the still center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea but the corner of Sunset and La Brea. In that empty sunlight Kate could do no lessons, and the mussels on any shore Maria knew were toxic.”
Chapter 52 in its entirety:
Maria made a list of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.
I wondered what a “cheese glass” could be – a book group member suggested a glass container that cottage cheese came in.
“five-to-one were the best odds Benny would lay on the sun rising”
Great ending too:
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.