“nothing to bog me down, a style inspired by emptiness, the only one for me” (29).<\/p>\n
This was the easiest novel for me to read in this course – I usually take several hours over multiple sessions but this one I did all in a couple hours. The prose is very matter of fact, short sentences or phrases neatly broken up by commas and easily parseable. A very welcome change of pace after the grandness of the prose and the deep dives into the psychology of the teenagers in this course’s books.<\/p>\n
But at the same time, it also inspires a feeling of emptiness. Maybe because the prose lulled me into a trance for how it just laconically goes on, describing her life outside of the hetero marriage structure and now replaced with all the women she sleeps with. The progression of the custody battle is slow, and just flatly building up, if likening it to a Freytag’s pyramid-like story structure. And so the ending leaves the greatest impression in how it just ends.<\/p>\n
The whole novel she has been trying to restore her connection with Paul. It was a harrowing depiction of the unfairness of the legal system, when her lesbian identity is used against her, with Laurent weaponizing the idea of her as a pedophile and abuser (the associating of queer people with deviancy) to deny her from seeing her son. And that part felt so real and painful to read, how the bureaucracy and Laurent reject her, annd how it seems that Paul has been corrupted against her.<\/p>\n
But after the long fought court hearing, and her victory, and Paul now\u00a0 meeting with her again as her son, it just doesn’t matter to her anymore. “And then it stopped working altogether. I stopped going over to Laurent\u2019. I stopped going to the cops.” (164). Everything stops. It’s different from time earlier in the book, when it was like eternity, her waiting for the next court hearing, in her depiction of two years: “Two years might as well be a thousand years. Two years might as well be never” (20). Now, time is empty once more, but the only thing that matters for her is her new relationship with S (165).<\/p>\n
And after that “revelation” (which seems too grand of a word), pure emptiness. The effect is more pronounced from reading the PDF, but the book ends with 11 straight blank pages. And I first thought it might’ve been an error, that there was another chapter or epilogue. Or it was like Time of the Doves<\/em> when it was some file corruption and we knew that there was some hidden message, some text and new information waiting to be highlighted like invisible ink, but nothing.<\/p>\n In this, I feel like it is where the book breaks from the expectations of marriage drama fiction, or specific queer drama fiction against the homophobic state, and into that territory of autofiction. There is no triumphant ending or lesson to be learned or proper denoument and explanation of the rest of their lives, but just nothingn.The book is written just to explain her life, and to try to paradoxically communicate that emptiness and nothingness with something<\/em> , the words.\u00a0The book ends there not because it’s a satisfying ending, but because there’s no more story to tell about her and Paul and Laurent. In the end, that’s how I interpreted what lecture was getting at when I read it, the betrayal of literature – that is trying to explain the unexplainable empty feeling with the blunt and bared prose.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “nothing to bog me down, a style inspired by emptiness, the only one for me” (29). This was the easiest novel for me to read in this course – I usually take several hours over multiple sessions but this one I did all in a couple hours. The prose is very matter of fact, short […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107411,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[43,48,21],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debre","tag-fiction","tag-realism","tag-sexuality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107411"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/xlromance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}