Baljit > Recent Status Updates

‘What are secrets but things we want to forget? Why then would we keep the acquaintance of others who remember them?’

‘Of course she did not leave him. What woman leaves a man for something she is likely to suffer at the hands of any other?’

‘The beach stinks of stewing moss, sargassum seaweed and the putrefying guts of beached fishes, rotting in the warming air. It is one of the mornings when the water remains hungover after a night of reckless abandon and has vomited on the sand before seeking to sleep it off.’

‘Murder is one of those things you can listen to, thinks Lala, should you ever be so unfortunate as to be on the guilt-free side of a confession, or a statement of murderous intent, but it was not a thing to be repeated. Murder is a thing best forgotten, a thing best left a mystery.’

‘Did Euridice want to marry? Perhaps. She considered marriage something rather endemic, something that men and women caught between the age of eighteen and twenty-five. Like the flu, except not quite so bad.’

‘Euridice had learned one of the oldest techniques in feminine guerrilla warfare: to repeat the request until the man gives his consent.’

‘For all its millions of people, Koreans the size of a fishbowl and someone was always looking down on someone else. That’s just the way it is in this country, and the reason why people ask a series of rapid- fire questions the minute they meet you.’

3.5 stars

‘I’d seen my mother in that moment as not my mother; I saw her as a tacky-looking woman, as the Cuban lady the girls on my floor would’ve seen, alone in an airport. And I did not like that I suddenly had this ability to see her that way, isolated from our shared history. I didn’t know I’d she’s changed or if she’d always looked that way but now I could see through my feelings somehow.’