Right from the beginning there is a sense of going back in time, of flipping through the images of the past so as to arrive at some point in time where a certain revelatory experience unfolds from the ordinary narrative of human life, and some distant memory can be uncovered to reveal its treasured meanings.
It is terrifically diaristic. The writing is minimalistic, but flavorful. We see the face of the young girl, the delicate cat-like features presented against the mild weather of the Asian hemisphere, gazing into a world from a private life filled with familial disputes, poverty, and meaninglessness. She is mysterious — she wants to be a writer. The picture of her life unfolds from a variety of different literary elements: dreary rivers, temperate winds, maturity, mismatched clothing, and a despondent mother. Everything is placid, lacklustre, meretricious. Life takes on its usual course without any surprises or sudden fortunes.
The obscure narrational style provides an intriguing quality of surrealism to the style of the text. And as with many novels focusing upon the individual, the heightened focus upon subjective experiences and realizations overpowers descriptions of the surrounding world — it is ultimately the mind, and its infinite emotional digressions, which shape the narrator’s reality and course of life. And this world changes at once when the man steps out of the black limousine; right from that moment the whole of reality, with all of its dreariness and placidity, hones down to a single point of romantic attraction that implicitly takes over her state of being, and compels her to enter another chapter of her life separate from her family, away from those old arrangements of being into a new one where her affections, femininity, and desires are explored.
The combination of his physical vulnerability, and her unemotional straightforwardness, is remarkable, when viewed in context of the ambiguous affection they share for one another.
The man’s name is not known throughout the novel, and this creates a certain degree of anonymity, of distance between the girl and her relationship with him. Their relationship is certainly sexual; the affection that they share, however, sometimes amounts to mutual affection, and at other times appears to be the shadow of an unnamed, secretive, sickening human desire for physical affection, made to be favorable under the thrilling influence of pleasure. But that is not to say that her encounter with this man has instantly alleviated her burdens. In fact, the relationship is portrayed as only one aspect of her life, one distinct memory of a foregone relationship mingled with her memory of countless other places, people, and impressions that overflow the boundaries of her life. As explicitly described starting from page 44, she describes a certain air of sadness that is pervasive in her life, and which has been present within her for as long as she has come to know herself. I don’t think at all that this is a “happy” book. While this particular quality of sadness is derived from familial estrangement and poverty, it has a deeper implication in terms of the meaninglessness of life, isolation, and the futility of human endeavours.
This was very nicely written and put into terms of how depressing and wrong some parts of the book was but also exploring the self-discovery (in a way) of a young girls sexual journey. I like how you said “The obscure narrational style provides an intriguing quality of surrealism to the style of the text.” I think it was a good observation and I agree with you.
“…when viewed in context of the ambiguous affection they share for one another.” I think you’ve accurately described the nature of their relationship. But also, after reading your blog, you’ve made me reflect on the other affects the narrator describes. The conscious act of writing, so to speak, alerts us that, despite her young age, the narrator has very particular ways of perceiving and relating to her own body.