After reading this novel, I’m now thinking about the subject of names. When the girl (who, as far as I can tell, was never named) talks about her lover and her family, they are not named (unless I missed the mentions of their names) – except when she names her younger brother, “our little Paulo” (79) over halfway through the book – but when she talks about her female friends, they are named fully, with both first and last names (Marie-Claude Carpenter, Betty Fernandez, Hélène Lagonelle). This made the sections about her friends stand out to me, drawing the story wider as she talked about events and relationships that took place outside of her relationship with her lover and her family, and made me think about the desire/feelings she felt particularly for Hélène. The omission of names perhaps points to painful memories and experiences, or even provides some separation between the reader and the story, making the characters feel almost more mysterious in a way, and the naming of the women points to another quote where she says: “My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women” (66), making me think about the narrator’s relationships with women and how those may be different than those with men, so much so that they effect or show up differently in her memory.

Also as I write this I’m finding I wrote a lot of quotes because a lot of them stuck out to me and even if I didn’t quite know how to feel at the end of this book I did finish it basically in one sitting. So yeah, apparently I have things to say that may be rambles, as per usual.

I thought the imagery (some moments/words that stuck out to me were the references to the family of the hunter, and the moment where she talks about the sky) and the way this novel was structured definitely made it feel like it was a reflection on a life from an older perspective because of the way the narrator jumped from different times and different subjects, following up memories of her lover with her family, or vice versa, and giving us glimpses into how her brothers and their fates end up as the story went along.

I didn’t expect so much about the family because I went into the book expecting it to be mostly about the relationship between the girl and her lover, which was obviously also a huge focus of the book. I thought it was interesting how it ended with the declaration of love because it made me think about love and memory and how things that happened even when people are younger or the relationships they have can still be remembered and thought about as they grow older. After learning about the way the author rewrote the story and came back to it, I wondered which parts she decided to change or keep, and how much of it was auto-biographical. It also made me wonder whether the narrator really loved this person they had a relationship with (at the start, she writes “I’ve never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved” (25) and later at the end, writes, “suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen” (114)) because there are obviously different agencies and power relationships at play between them.

My question for the class would probably be: do you think that the girl loved the elegant man? What were your opinions on their relationship and the age gap/hierarchies that existed within it?

Memorable quote: “Our first confidants, though the word seems excessive, are our lovers” (60).

That’s all for now, so here are some more emojis to spice things up:

Peace,

Maia