Jun 9, 2009

Such edifices are notoriously fragile


I'm a big fan of Margaret Atwood as well as a girl determined to stop passing over books she owns in favor of library books which have that attraction of only being lent for a fleeting time. So I picked up Alias Grace.

It's a novel based on a true life account of a serving girl suspected of murdering her boss and another maid. There's a lot of ambiguity in this book and the story reveals itself in a deliciously slow manner.

There's a wonderfully chilling paragraph early on:
But underneath that is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. It's like being wakened suddenly in the middle of the night, by a hand over your face, and you sit up with your heart going fast, and no one is there. And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach, and not even torn open, but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord

And inside the peach there's a stone.

How awesome is that? I liked the book but didn't love it. Maybe its because that wonderful, wonderful made a promise to me that the book failed to fulfill.

Another line I really liked - "His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile."

I give this one a 5 out of 10.

Also, as I'm terrified of clutter, I'm offering this up to the internet world. Anyone who wants it should leave a comment on this post. Sunday I shall send it off (and if more than one person wants it, I'll pick a name from a hat.)

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