Emily
“Writing as jealousy of the real.”
I found comfort in a recognition of like; of writing as the only tool for escape from the wrack
Burned through it in a single sitting. While The Accused's voice came through occasionally as trite, the shifts in perspective across the two female voices made up for any missing nuance.
unexpectedly ends as an oddly moving treatise on motherhood - “accept the turmoil of reproduction inside my body, and, in turn, to let the coming generations pass through me”
“Expensive transient bursts of well-being” as an explanation for: drugs, travel, alcoholism, LA.
Eve says more in the spaces between words than most writers manage to cram into a trilogy.
Ernaux sees her past selves as Matryoshka dolls; defined more by their passage through time than places
So good it took me two years to finish because I'd never again be able to read it for the first time.
I gleaned three “truths” from this essay:
1. Anger is an emotion that warps creativity
2. Poverty is a state that generates fear and bitterness (“intellectual freedom depends on material things”)
3. (and this is the one I find to be more truthy than true) Only a truly androgynous mind can be unfettered by rage and produce works of “genius”. As Woolf posits, “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.” To a certain extent, I agree. To this day, men's writing often finds itself acrid in the “shadow of the ‘I'” from which no truth can grow - there is no question that ego dominance in a narrative chokes all possible oxygen sources. However, writing as a woman does not necessarily need to result in “sacrifice to the man with the measuring rod” - righteous anger at the status quo does not inherently equate to deference.
Briefly, her obsession with purity in the form of creation rings a bit hypocritical next to her criticisms of chastity as a virtue.
4. (cheating) I really ought to read Jane Eyre one day.
Men ask “why do I write?”; women ask “how?”
Men are afforded the luxury of being able to start from a place of anger; women are at war with their lot
Too disjointed to really be Great, but at least one star comes from just being of Eve.
“The griefs we cause ourselves cut deepest of all.” Or, we have only ourselves to blame for our exile from Idyll - that initial shame of our eternally recurring reality.
Memories of memories form a tangled ball of yarn that encapsulates an obsession with the reality that every moment in its present state is nothing more than a possible future loss.
Each rereading results in focusing a different lens - in this case, the motifs diminished in favor of the misalignments. Of the characters, it seems it is the men who only manage to make it through the first circle of the implied infinite labyrinth - Sabina moves more fluidly in a linear fashion of betrayals; while Tereza remains relatively unwavering in her attachments.
I only wish that Katherine hadn't been granted a “happy” ending - it resulted in too much talk of spunk when she had enough of that on her own from the start.
“She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way or finding that is to trust them, hoping she'll not be disappointed, but sometimes she is.”
A novel that captures the reticent third light.
