godsgayearth's reviews
1625 reviews

Here, one was forced back into one's context, given a kind of depth, no longer an atomised individual but part of a structure of feeling that was centuries old. How capacious it was in comparison! How inevitable! How beautiful to be conscious of the inexorable process of eternal recurrence. I felt held...

With a man's brutality he had just spoiled their love. And she remembered the days when he had been in love with her without being cruel enough to tell her so, those times spent at the bottom of the garden in the serenity of the coming spring.

I haven’t read any prior novels from the Rougon-Macquart series and I only started the series because it was available in my library. As a shot in the dark novel, I enjoyed it with an assumption that the enjoyment comes from the language of the novel itself. Helen Constantine’s translation makes the novel vibrant and keeps me from abandoning it midway on account of my low tolerance towards cheating plot lines. But I can’t help but understand the novel in its didactic message; that adultery is a bourgeois occupation and has the capacity to damage relationships beyond repair.

Now that I've mined you, are you mine? from “Secondhand (Smoke)”.

I don't particularly have strong feelings about this connection. The violence present in the poems–some self-inflicted and some not–gives the impression of hating yourself just so and leads to a form of careening towards an oblivion. But the physicality of the poems ties it to firmament. The title's complexity makes me think, too. Is 'bruise' a noun or a verb? Or both. Or neither?

I may be misunderstanding the narrator's purpose of self defense but her attitude towards her gay panic is too contrived and the stream of consciousness is too disjointed that it does not feel like a stream. More like a choppy waterfall which has merits, but not for my overall mood while reading this.