Read for Second Monday book group. I loved the Christmas Carol echoes – it starts with “God was dead: to begin with” – but hated the Trumpish end: “You’re going to be saying Merry Christmas again, folks.” And the protagonist Art who writes a column “Art in Nature”… it’s a little on-the-nose. Nonetheless, Smith is always a beautiful writer.
Short quotes
- “That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.”
- “Then his mother stops speaking and starts humming a tune and Art knows the doors of the reminiscence have closed, as surely as if the Reminiscence is a cinema or a theatre and the show is over, the rows of seats empty, the audience gone home.”
Long quotes
Well, imagine it like this, the optician says. Imagine I’m a car mechanic and someone brings me in a car for a service, and it’s a car from the 1940s, and I lift the lid and find the engine still nearly as clean as when it left the factory floor in (the optician checks her form) 1946, just amazing, a triumph.
You’re saying I’m like an old Triumph, Sophia says.
Good as new, the optician (who clearly has no idea that a Triumph has ever been a car) says.
Those green things, white things, polystyrene. You’re wrong, they’re recyclable. They’re free of whatever it is that’s bad for it. It’s not as bad as you’d think. I quite like them. I do! No, it’s interesting, because, because they’re so amazingly light, so that when you pick them up it’s surprising every time. You always expect them to be heavier. Even if you tell yourself, even though you know they’re light, you think you already know, you pick one up and it’s like, wow that’s so light, it’s like holding actual lightness. It’s, like, the weight of your own hand just somehow got lighter. Like a bird’s bones kind of light. If you pick up several, hold several so your hand’s full of them, you look at your hand loaded with things and your eye can’t understand it because although you can see that your hand’s full of something it feels like almost nothing’s in your hand.
None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere.
But they may as well be, Iris says. What does here mean anyway, I’d like to know. Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?
In this book I learned
- Petite fille aux feuilles mortes – One of Smith’s trademarks is referencing artworks, which she does skillfully and not annoyingly.
- Elvis with a puppet!