Ms Eclectic > Recent Status Updates

“Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”

“What’s to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murder’s been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, then there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier”

“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? ... Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?”

“The years flowed smoothly by, seaming the faces of the young and adding gray to their temples”

“I believed that this want to be older meant that age would answer all my questions, that my desires would be fulfilled at a later date, but as the years pass and I wish for youth once more, the habit of waiting has already been instilled...I wonder if, when I’m old and frail and can see the shape of my end in front of me, I will still be waiting for the future to roll in. “

I’m not sure this one is for me. There is a really awful visual of a puppy that has been injured which I can’t get out of my head earlier in the novel. It is reality in India, I remember the dogs, but the description was particularly disturbing for me. The story itself is ok, a bit too clinical and distanced for me to take pleasure in it.

This novel is so unexpected, unique and poignant. The blurb seriously undersells it as a romantic comedy.

“I opted instead for a coffee... Naturally, I had been about to pour it all over myself but, just in time, had read the warning printed on the paper cup” 😂

“At the same time it seemed to me that she already knew all about life. Or maybe that she knew something frightening about life.”

"I joined him in his laughter, then settled back to my window, pleased that the whole danged all-fired state was as ignorant of the time of day as I was"

“You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast. “

“It’s a strange, inexplicable law that the most innocent people among us are the ones predisposed to the greatest sense of guilt”

“They liberated us from everything, the dears - first they freed us from the land, then from my husband, then from my children, from my cow, my chickens... They’ll liberate us from vodka, and our freedom will be complete”

Enjoying it more now, although sometimes it feels like reading short stories instead of a novel.

Bit slow going but enjoying the atmosphere and character building

« ... the truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant »

Enjoying so far... the most unrealistic bit has just come up though. In what world does anyone (especially a brother!) notice when a woman has changed her hair!