I read Justine a few years ago as well. But if we do a group read of the Quartet, I'd need to read it again. Okay, I WANT to read it again. Something about that book, like reading Swann's Way, it doesn't get old just gets better every time.
People living in the moment know that is the most real. Only the people who live outside the moment, analyzing and assessing, wonder... and maybe they only wonder which is more real because they are judged by those who don't wonder but know.
"Those people were living in their moment, and though I could set it I could no more return to that moment than I would walk across the water that separated us. And those two ways of living--living in the moment and living outside of it--which was the more real?" p75 +1 #rachelcusktogether
A shift from people to place... with the same attention to detail. Still, she was looking for the person in the place and seemed to find nothing more than that first impression.
to a total stranger (like people are want to do) while on a plane (or whatever) and then finding your story in someone's book. Would there be horror? Would there be pleasure? Perhaps there would be enough difference (truth is often sacrificed for the sake of a story) to deny the whole of it.
The voice is hypnotizing. The detailed description is entrancing.And the precise word choice is stellar. Yet I cannot help but think about the people she's captured and drawn on these pages. The book is described as both fiction and nonfiction. So imagine telling intimate secrets #rachelcusktogether
I think this true each time you write something--except perhaps when in the midst of a piece. Most of those in that fever pitch of writing who go to bed in a fog of their characters' lives, who dream of their characters' next steps, and who wake to write more know this relearning process is coming.
I keep thinking about the flight attendant with her props: "we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality with doom." "Special hardness" absolutely encapsulates that feeling. #RachelCuskTogether
People don't talk to each other at all--in the line at supermarkets, waiting for coffee orders, etc. And those who do speak? They are to be avoided. Pretty strange behavior for social animals.
