Book Impressions

The formality of the book review is a great thing but I must confess that I'm obsessed with copying down passages that resonate with me. I feel pretty anxious if I don't preserve a fragment or paragraph somewhere because it is a way of cataloguing the book in my brain. I hope to contruct an uneven and long trail of found words--fictional accounts that reflect some of my realities and the equal and opposing truths that make our world both bleak and wonderful. I recently read two very good books--The Gathering by Anne Enright and The Sorrows of An American by Siri Hustvedt. 

The Gathering is a book of immense power. Both were gifts from my permanent housemate -- the first he found while he was away in Delhi and the second, here in Singapore. He has my eternal gratitude for introducing me to Enright's wonderful writing. Here is a paragraph I felt compelled to copy. I haven't put it in a notebook yet like I usually do, but recording it on this blog seems to assuage the anxiety of losing track of it. 

"There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."

Siri Hustvedt's 'What I Loved' is a stunning book so I had great expectations for her newest book,  'The Sorrows of An American'. She explores psychotherapy and neurological machinations as well as the compulsion to document, exhibit and reveal. My only quarrels with this book were a couple of almost made-for-Hollywood type climactic scenarios. That said, it is a great read and this bit stayed with me. It is so, so brilliant:

"I've often thought none of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalises the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions."