MY MISTRESS'S SPARROW IS DEAD - JEFFREY EUGENIDES

This is what I've been reading during my spare time.

Last year (a couple of months back) I talked - briefly - about this book on my tumblr, way before I started this blog. This is the post. Now that I have an actual blog owing to what seems like an endless passage of time till I start school + the escape from schoolwork albatross for the next 8 months, tumblr will remain my photoblog of... mostly reblogs. And of quotes, of course. 

I shall share some of my favourites quotes and paragraphs from this book. (So far, because it is reading-in-progress) Like what I wrote in my tumblr post, anthologies are for me. As much as I enjoy novels, I don't think every subject matter written in lengthy novel form is appealing at all. I haven't come across a novel written purely about love and love only that engages me. 

This book really does not consist of those sappy, ardent love stories with predictable endings, which is why I like this book and it is possibly on my "favourites" list. Eugenides takes a unique, perspicacious perception on love. 

In "First Love and Other Sorrows" by Harold Brodkey, setting is in St Louis, narrated by a 16-year-old high school boy, revolving around his school experience, his sister, and his mother. Favourite paragraph is the one right the end: 

"There's some soup," my mother said. "Why don't I heat it up." And suddenly her eyes filled with tears, and all at once we fell to kissing one another - to embracing and smiling and making cheerful predictions about one another - there in the white, brightly lighted kitchen. We had known each other for so long, and there were so many things that we all three remembered. . . Our smiles, our approving glances, wandered from face to face. There was a feeling of politeness in the air. We were behaving the way we would in railway stations, at my sister's wedding, at the birth of her first child, at my graduation from college. This was the first of our reunions. 

I found this story average. It was alright, and that's about it. I liked how the Brodkey included the element of high school jealousy, which makes it completely realistic.

Among my other problems was that I was reduced nearly to a state of tears over my own looks whenever I looked at a boy named Joel Bush. Joel was so incredibly good-looking that none of the boys could quite bear the fact of his existence; his looks weren’t particuarly masculine or clean-cut, and he wasn’t a fine figure of a boy - he was merely beautiful.

However, personally, I found it a little too draggy overall. Superfluous details on the sister and the mother and their conversations on the sister's good looks and men chasing her. The mother's incessant talk on the sister settling down. It was a tad too much for me. I felt annoyed at how naggy she was.


And in "The Lady with the Little Dog":

She laughed. Then they went on eating in silence, like strangers; but after dinner they walked off together - and a light, bantering conversation began, of free, contented people, who do not care where they go or what they talk about. They strolled and talked of how strange the light was on the sea; the water was of a lilac colour, so soft and warm, and over it the moon cast a golden strip. They talked of how sultry it was after the hot day. 

Since I still have a long way more to go before I complete this book, I think I will be posting more on this in the near future. I am really tempted to start on David Levithan's "The Lover's Dictionary" and Angela Carter's "Bluebeard". Actually, I think I am going to, over CNY.