robyn reads books

chasing resonance

the reading room

“My interior is one of the strangest and most beautiful things in the world.” -Lispector

  • Limits of containment

    Ever build something then it starts making demands of you?

    The ‘Author’ begins with an intention to create ‘Angela’, but Angela becomes increasingly full, weird, independent, contradictory. The more alive she becomes, the less he can contain or explain her.

    I finished Breath of Life in two days and I am, once again, affected by Clarice Lispector in ways I don’t quite know what to do with.

    I understand her. I just don’t know how to talk about what happens to me when I read her, think with her.

    I started underlining and tabbing passages immediately. Thought. Language. Writing. Being alive. The moment before a thought becomes a thought. The space before language catches up with whatever is happening inside us.

    That pre-instant of thought.

    God.

    That’s everywhere in Lispector.

    It’s this reaching toward what exists before being organized into something coherent. Like an idea or sentence or formed thought. She makes the act of writing part of the whole thing too, in some urgent manner that just gets me… charged.

    And her Author is thinking about thinking, writing about writing, trying to catch something that can’t be caught because it changes when he tries to put words to it.

    It all feels dangerous and unstable.

    I gravitate to that kind of thing.

    It also feels like recording something that already exists isn’t quite enough for the Author. Because the actual act of writing changes the ‘thing’. It moves the shapeless toward shape. It makes something more real, more visible, more alive. And that’s too far… too resolved. Maybe. Do you understand? It’s okay. I don’t. Yet.

    And then there is Angela.

    Oh gosh.

    She comes to life.

    She becomes full and whole and complicated and contradictory and increasingly impossible for the Author to hold. I immediately felt she had become too whole to fit his container. His limitations.

    That arc completely got me. Because?

    Limits. Invisible tripwires in my experience.

    Because isn’t that one of the possibilities of creating anything? You begin with an idea that belongs to you. You think you are going to build something. And then, if it becomes alive enough, it starts exceeding the boundaries you gave it. Maybe even the boundaries you retroactively give it.

    And this is where Lispector gets me personally. She keeps pressing against the limits of what can be said, what can be known, what can be contained, what can be acted upon.

    I don’t think I want things neatly contained.

    Well… I don’t want me neatly contained. Drives me bonkers.

    And perhaps that’s a reason why she gives me so much fucking voltage.

    There is nothing conventionally erotic about Breath of Life. Nothing particularly spicy about it. And yet I experience her writing physically. It has charge. It gets underneath things.

    It peels back my own layers. I get to peel them back.

    She be like, let’s dig into the psyche.

    I say, let’s fucking go!

    And then instead of putting everything back or not facing what is there, I let some of those hidden things breathe. Give life to it. Not always. But as much as I can.

    That feels important to me.

    I have spent a lot of time thinking about what is underneath things. My obsession with excavation has yet to let up.

    What are our wants? What do we feel? What don’t we say? What exists before we have language for it? What is truth? What’s the lie?

    There’s nothing really sensible about it, but it gets to the honesty of stuff. And boy, do I love honesty. Lispector gives me permission to stay with it for a while. Love that too.

    Do you write something you already know? She doesn’t. She writes until she knows something.

    So this is all leading to me trying to understand consciousness. Learn it. Not in some grand way, definitely not ‘an authority on it’ (because half the time I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about), but because I know what it feels like to have something exist inside me before even I know what it is. From Agua Viva, it’s the idea of existing in and before the ‘is’.

    What a beautiful thing. I want to write the ‘is’.

    Sometimes I feel something and try moving toward it with words, and somewhere in there I figure out what I actually think. I want to become a better, more intelligent writer, and I think this is part of what I’m chasing. Lispector seems to do this at a level I can barely comprehend. She gets so close to the thing before it has become a finished thought, and somehow the writing itself discovers it.

    I want that. I hope all that made sense?

    That feeling of not quite manufacturing the sentence, but letting it come. Flow, I suppose. Surrender, maybe. Again, that’s an Agua Viva throwback.

    And then there is:

    “I am free to feel.”

    It’s burned in my brain now. Forever.

    Freedom to feel before understanding. Freedom to contradict yourself. Freedom to be me before the edit.

    Now back to our vibrant Angela. She gets to be open too.

    Too large. Too contradictory. Too alive to be completely possessed by the person who created her. The person who is threatened by her agency.

    So Breath of Life gave me the feeling of watching consciousness become. A becoming that can’t be contained.

    Obviously there is no stopping me thinking with Lispector. I’d rather do that than try to explain her.

    God, I love this woman.

  • I want this. Me too.

    Unfucking real.

    I started and finished Story of the Eye tonight and I fucking loved it.

    French. Erotica. Bataille. Orgasms, urine, semen, blood, eggs, eyes, bullfighting, churches, murder, Simone. A lot of peeing. Maybe too much peeing. 

    And yet.

    What got me wasn’t simply how extreme it is. It was the specificity of the desire. The complete lack of interest in making these wants respectable or explaining them away. Bataille takes sexuality and fetish into places that are strange, grotesque, frightening and sometimes ridiculous, but he doesn’t flinch. And I wasn’t embarrassed by any of it.

    There is an urge here. An edge. A willingness to follow desire past the point where it is supposed to stop. It’s aggressive too. 

    And I admired the hell out of that.

    Oh and Simone and the narrator’s match. THIS. THEM. (And dear Marcelle.) Their sexuality isn’t something one of them has to translate into acceptable language for the other. They understand the same strange impulses. Right from the start. They want what they want together. Things that might otherwise remain hidden because of shame… are met.

    That hit. I loved it. Beautiful. Artful.

    Frick, my whole life I’ve wanted that kind of match. Someone who understands my needs and my sexuality and the things I have never said out loud. Not necessarily someone who wants every single thing I want, but someone who can hear it without recoiling from it. Feeling weird about it. Someone who understands that desire can be strange and specific and difficult (and terrifying) to explain.

    (Did I mention I’m a Scorpio?)

    It’s easy to read Story of the Eye as transgressive erotica, cuz it absolutely is. But underneath all the fucking madness is another familiar thing I noticed: the desire to find another person with whom you don’t have to hide. Ugh. Felt.

    Bataille gives the characters a bit of terrifying freedom to follow the thing they want.

    He doesn’t sanitize it. Clearly.

    No pretending it isn’t there. It’s full on exposure of himself, his characters. 

    No shame-induced retreat back into normality.

    Just: I want this. 

    And then the other person says, essentially:

    Me too.

    God.

    What a fucking Monday night read.

    This one goes on the shelf.

  • Horror and hunting and heartbreak

    I finished Crone by Keith Rosson tonight.

    The last thirty percent was read in a hunting blind with my son, and honestly, I can’t think of a better way I could have finished it.

    It’s been a tough week. I was tired. But I was invigorated by this. Sitting beside him, watching and waiting, Kindle in my hands.

    Kindle e-reader with book cover titles Crone by Keith Rosson. Autumn forest in the background.

    Keith Rosson is ridiculously delightful to read. Like Coffin Moon, his writing grabs me immediately and just moves. It’s earthy and wild and fucked up; and completely unburdened by any ‘trying too hard’ vibes. This story has grit, and the prose has that same vibration to it. It pulled me along with ease. Somehow, he can describe a completely “…batshit supernatural thing…” happening and make you see exactly what he means.

    And of course, underneath the dirt and insanity is a story about what people will do for the ones they love, and how badly we sometimes need answers. Daughter. Father. Parenthood. Life. Rosson keeps the story tethered to things that actually hurt: family, addiction, loss and love. We all know these matter so much, and they increase the emotional stakes of the story, especially in a world that has gone completely off the rails.

    So there I was, sitting in the woods with my son, smelling moss and the damp rot of the forest floor, reading electrifying horror about people hunting for clues, answers, justice, peace.

    There was something about that combination that made the whole experience feel… big. Maybe it was the woodsy atmosphere of the whole thing, witchy story included. Nothing particularly dramatic happened. I suppose it was a rather small thing. We were just hanging out there. He was hunting. I was reading. We were together.

    But I loved it.

    And yes, I’m grieving it.

    Oh, the things we have to hold at once as a parent.

    Maybe that’s what I want to remember about this particular reading experience. That Crone was fucking awesome. That it spoke, in its strange and terrifying way, to raising a child from infancy to however long we get to have them. That Rosson continues to be an author whose books leave me craving the next one.

    But no. It’s not that at all. Not even close.

    I simply want to hold tightly to this moment. To the few hours spent listening to heavy drops of rain while watching deer pass by with my son. That’s it.

    Horror in my hands.

    A kid beside me.

    The woods growing dark and cool, the slow decaying earth around us.

    A really great Friday night.

    “Everything matters.”

    I received an advance e-copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

  • A point of origin

    Last night I was playing music I used to associate with Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series, and my mind went… somewhere. 

    I remembered her.

    Me.

    The woman I was then. The reader.

    I was fucking obsessed with this series.

    I made reels about it. I had a music playlist for it. I thought about Hadrian Marlowe constantly. I was completely gone. I loved being inside his voice, his memory, his contradictions, the way he was always telling me a story (his story) while trying to understand the man he had become inside it.

    Hadrian was one of the first narrators who made me realize how much I could love inhabiting another consciousness. I didn’t even have that language then. Don’t know if I’m really using it correctly now. I just knew I was completely gripped by the design of it. 

    So thinking this has to be the beginning, right? Ha. Funny that Sun Eater itself starts with an ending.

    I also think I underestimated how much of that experience was about language. Vocabulary. The arrangement of words on the page. Ruocchio can fucking write. There were phrases and paragraphs I tabbed and tabbed. Philosophical passages I underlined. Sentences that could take such an enormous, sprawling story and make it beautifully intimate. And I was so attached. But not only attached to Hadrian’s consciousness; I was attached to the mind that had built the language through which I encountered him.

    And underneath all of it was Hadrian’s humanity. God, the humanity. That was always the thing I kept coming back to. For all the scale of the series, for all the history, philosophy, violence, horror and cosmic machinery, there was this man trying to save humanity while being forced to confront almost everything that makes humanity difficult to love.

    Then Kingdoms of Death happened.

    Fuuuuck.

    That book cracked something open in me: horror.

    Not “I like scary books.” Not heebie-jeebie stuff. I discovered that I wanted literature that could make me feel deeply uncomfortable. That could trap me inside a psychological and bodily experience and make me stay there. Claustrophobia. Suffering. Pain inflicted on the body. Fear. Suffocating loneliness. The near unraveling of a mind. Someone’s world becoming unbearable and there being nowhere inside themselves to escape to.

    I couldn’t stop reading it. I was sweating. Walking. Walking and talking to myself about what the actual fuck I was reading.

    I didn’t come away from Kingdoms of Death simply thinking, I love horror now. I think I started to understand what horror could do as a way of studying a person. What happens to humanity when almost everything humane is stripped away? What’s even left? Who will Hadrian be after this?

    And then, somehow, I launched into a bizarre and unexpected reading path that doesn’t seem to stop unfolding:

    A lot of horror. Really fucking good horror. 

    Then, the lit happened:

    No Longer Human.

    The Trial.

    Lolita.

    The Collector. 

    The Piano Teacher.

    The Vegetarian.

    The Yellow Wallpaper.

    The Blind Owl.

    Agua Viva.

    Notes on a Scandal.

    The Book of Evidence.

    Good grief I love that list. 

    So I look back at all of these and see something I couldn’t see at the time.

    Hindsight. Ugh. If only. Argh… gotta keep it going forward…

    I am or have been (or both) searching for a particular kind of reading experience for a long time.

    I want to be completely inside another mind. Always. I don’t want to be in mine. It sucks there sometimes.

    I want the consciousness, the language, the contradictions. I want the physical experience of being in someone else’s reality, especially when that reality is difficult or disturbing or completely unlike my own. I want to be made uncomfortable. I want to follow a thought somewhere I would and wouldn’t have gone myself.

    And Sun Eater was already doing some version of this. Just at a massive cosmic scale.

    So maybe Hadrian really was my first encounter with this particular kind of readerly obsession. A man telling his own story, living inside memory, reflection, contradiction, regret and history. A consciousness trying to make sense of itself, of the choices and decision, through the story it is telling. 

    I just loved it so much. I keep saying it but it’s true. 

    Point is, I think I want a little more of that woman back.

    Not all of her. I’ve changed enormously, and I don’t want to go backward. But I miss some of her edge. Her confidence in speaking her mind. Her spirit. Her ability to get completely absorbed in something because she fucking loved it.

    Maybe even some of her capacity for absorbing the tough stuff in life too. The armour. That centre of gravity she had… I admire it all.

    I think Sun Eater belongs on a shelf here for those reasons. It belongs there as an origin story. A little artifact from an earlier version of my reading life that turns out to have been pointing toward the reader I am now and becoming.

    And fuck me, I gotta reread this series.

    ‘The Scientist’ by Coldplay, Valka, and Ashes of Man are forever faves.

  • Mitigative Measures

    What happens to interior freedom when you become conscious of being watched?

    You know what sucks?

    The whole books/Instagram thing.

    I hate even saying it like that because it sounds so fucking small. Instagram. Bookstagram. A social media account. Who cares? There are bigger things happening in the world. Real problems. Real life. 

    And yet I am genuinely sad that a place I loved feels contaminated.

    It was a place where I went to be myself. Honest as fuck. Reading experiences. Vulnerable posts. Raw thoughts. Real engagement. Real friendships. Intelligent conversations around books.

    I brought my books, my brain, my humour, my weird little observations. I brought the things I was thinking about while reading and put them somewhere other people could encounter them. Sometimes someone would recognize themselves in what I had written. Sometimes they would disagree. Sometimes they would say, YES, THAT.

    There was a healthy ecosystem there.

    And I don’t mean that metaphorically in the vague social media sense of “community ecosystem.” I mean ecosystem in the environmental sense, which is probably inevitable given that my degree is actually in Environmental Toxicology and I’ve worked for an agency that protects ecological integrity for over twenty years.

    Agency. Integrity. Remember those words as you read this. 

    So, yes. I know something about contaminated ecosystems.

    I know that contaminants can change the conditions of a place without becoming the whole place. I know that exposure matters. Concentration matters. Persistence matters. Pathways matter. I know that some contaminants break down and some persist. I know that remediation can be possible, but that it is rarely as simple as making something disappear.

    And I know that sometimes the most appropriate intervention is not pretending the contamination isn’t there.

    It is reducing exposure.

    That is what changed for me.

    The books are still there. My writing is still there. The people who genuinely connected with what I was doing are still there. (I love you guys so much.)

    But my relationship to the environment changed. Because I am not there.

    There is something uniquely unsettling about knowing that someone is watching you when you did not invite them into your space. Something changes when someone’s surveillance becomes part of the conditions under which you participate.

    You notice who is looking.

    You notice yourself being observed.

    You have to block fake accounts.

    You can’t let blog metrics and certain daily repeat state viewers affect your every move.

    Because suddenly the space that once allowed you to be expansive makes you smaller. You start thinking twice before posting something or sharing a story. I won’t say how many times I thought about publishing this… but goddammit… agency.

    You edit yourself before anyone else has even asked you to. You decide not to share, to post, because of someone else.

    That is the part I hate most.

    Not the drama. Not even the behaviour itself. Because that reveals character. Really immature, unintelligent, toxic character.

    It’s the cause and effect.

    The fact that I started feeling like I can’t move through that space freely.

    Reduce myself.

    Go private.

    Step away.

    It feels like I’m being cornered and that choice is taken away. Like there are now terms and conditions built into it. All because someone is monitoring me. And I feel I can’t stick up for myself.

    Well, maybe this is what they intended. To be that anthropogenic threat to the ecosystem.

    Well, fuck that. Nobody puts baby in a corner, amiright? I don’t want to spend my time thinking about spies and stalkers. And why they are doing it in the first place. I don’t want someone else’s attention to become a condition of my participation.

    And it pisses me off that I have allowed other people’s behaviour to make me question whether I am allowed to breathe in a space I helped build.

    That playground-mean-girl bullshit cuts off the oxygen.

    And yes, the ecosystem is much bigger than the pollutant, the contamination.

    There are good people there. Genuine friendships. Interesting conversations. Plenty of oxygen for everyone. There are still books. There is still that part of me that wants to show up and say, I read this, and this is what it did to me.

    That hasn’t disappeared. But neither has the reaction. I’m writing a blog post about it FFS. 

    On resilience and exposure

    I think what I’m struggling with is the dynamic between resilience and exposure.

    I keep treating my ability to tolerate situations like this as evidence that I am resilient. As though the goal were to absorb it, recover, and carry on as normal.

    But resilience isn’t an unlimited capacity to absorb pollutants without consequence. Exposure changes the system. Enough of it, over enough time, can change what the system is capable of tolerating. There are some things I am still capable of. And some things not.

    So yes, this affects me. I don’t need to pretend otherwise. I’m a sensitive person. I also don’t need to prove that I can tolerate it. Because it destabilizes my own nervous system too.

    Ugh. I don’t know what to do.

    But what about reclaiming the space? Posting anyway. Showing I am not affected? Well, that would be pretending. I’m just too honest for that.

    And really, that’s not reclamation. That’s just the exposure with better branding.

    Ya, I’m rambling. Almost done. 

    On mitigation measures

    Jesus Christ.

    Who would have thought I needed mitigative measures to survive Bookstagram?

    Oh, Robyn. Naïve woman.

    Reduce exposure. Control the severity of adverse impacts. Protect what matters. Give the system time to recover.

    I could add IDGAF and be done with it, but that’s not me either. I give all the fucks. I like that about myself. It is care. It is empathy. It is who I care about and why.

    I can’t simply restore some imaginary pristine version of the ecosystem. I can’t pretend it hasn’t affected me. But I just don’t want one contaminant determining the conditions of the entire system, friendships included. This blog included.

    Because there are still things there (and here) I value: the books, the writing, the conversations, the people who know how to show up, and the part of me that still gets excited enough about a sentence to need somewhere to put it. Above all, there are real people with real feelings involved.

    Those parts are worth protecting.

    And maybe that’s why the books I’ve been reading have been getting tangled up with this too. Ya… making a sad attempt to weave in the books here.

    I’ve read a lot about who gets to look; who gets to tell the story; who gets access to another person’s interiority; who is claiming territory over someone; who is controlling the pen. The Vegetarian, The Piano Teacher, Lolita, My Dark Vanessa, Notes on a Scandal, The Book of Evidence. They have all, in different ways, made me think about the power of observation and what happens when you become aware of the person doing the looking.

    So I don’t want to live inside someone else’s gaze.

    I don’t want to make choices according to who is watching. And the reasons why they are. And I don’t want someone else’s access to me to become the condition under which I think, write, or exist.

    So maybe that’s the thing I’m actually reclaiming. Trying to anyway.

    Not the account. Not the ecosystem.

    My agency.

    I get a say in who gets access to me. I get a say in what I do with the exposure. I get to decide what I can absorb without losing myself. And I get to decide what I do when the conditions change. That’s good environmental management, isn’t it?

    Idk. This all just feels shitty. Crazy how people want to and can make others feel this way in what should only be a beautiful, supportive environment.

    Anyway, I’m going to spend some time breathing the oxygen freely in my own life. Not in someone else’s territory they’ve marked as their own. Where they have staked their claim. And have implemented monitoring controls. That ain’t for me, or my heart.

    I have kids. A job. A plane ticket. Books. Friends. An enormous heart filled with people I love. And a world that is considerably larger than one particular bizarre little ecosystem.

    And its pollutants.

  • Jesus fuck, I’m crossing the pond

    I am going to Scotland.

    I keep saying it because I still don’t quite believe it.

    There is a plane ticket. There is an approved ETA thing in or on my passport, however that works. There is a date on the calendar and a route that, at least for now, includes Edinburgh, the Highlands, trains, side quests and most likely rain.

    But I am going.

    This feels like a surprisingly large thing to say. Rather simple for others, I suspect.

    Travel has never been simple for me. I’ve leveraged some really great work trips across Canada, but it has most definitely not been a fuck it, let’s go thing for me.

    For years I have been very good at postponing myself.

    Very fucking good at it.

    There were trips I almost took. Trips I planned and then talked myself out of. Potential trips with my sisters, my mother, friends. Places I wanted to see that could wait, because there was always something else that seemed more necessary.

    Obligations. Priorities. Practical reasons. Others before me.

    It’s easy to build a whole life out of putting everyone before yourself.

    So I bought the ticket.

    And then, because my nervous system can’t seem to deactivate these days, I panicked about the ticket. Then some travel authorization thing. Then luggage. Checked bag or not checked bag. And now accommodation, and all the other tiny logistical details that suddenly seemed capable of becoming evidence that I had made a mistake.

    But I want to go.

    And so I am.

    And that’s it.

    I don’t think I need a better reason.

    My dad didn’t make it to retirement when all his travel was planned for. It’ll be ten years this November since I last held his hand. That’s also my birthday month. And I guess that’s the little push, not reason, I needed.

    And I do think Clarice Lispector gave me a little boost too. She said to flow, and so I’m trying. Really doing the best I can with that. 

    Because I want that. But keep failing. Hurting myself, others in the trying. 

    Fuck, I’ve always wanted to be like the cool people out there and just… flow.

    So it’s not some trip to heal me or transform me or prove anything. Or find myself.

    I simply want to exist somewhere else.

    Feel alive.

    Breathe.

    Flow.

    And maybe keep building a life inside me. A home that includes a trip to Scotland.

    So I am going.

    I get to cross that massive fucking pond for the first time.

    And I like the idea of arriving in Edinburgh one morning, carrying the exhaustion of an overnight flight and knowing that for a little while, no one needs anything from me.

    I will have nowhere I absolutely have to be.

    I will walk outside and hear voices that aren’t familiar to me. I will look at buildings that have been standing there long before I arrived and will continue standing there after I leave.

    Gosh, I want to see old things.

    I’ve never really seen old.

    Not like this.

    It’s exciting to think I’ll get to see old stone darkened by weather. Castles. Ruins. Ancient places. A landscape that has held people for thousands of years.

    I need to see the evidence of that.

    And I want lochs.

    Forests turning colour.

    Cold air.

    Rain.

    Maybe the sea.

    Maybe mountains, although I am not sure I need them. Seen them lots. And I have those earmarked for the future.

    I want to find a pub and be warm.

    I want to read somewhere I didn’t expect to read.

    Performatively, of course.

    I want to walk and walk and walk.

    I want to have a day or two that isn’t particularly productive.

    I want to stand in front of something ancient and say, Jesus fuck.

    I predict I’ll say that a few times.

    I might even get a tattoo while I’m there.

    Ha.

    My first tattoo, in my forties, in Scotland. My one boy would love it, the other hate it. So it seems appropriate.

    There is something about travelling alone that I find both frightening and intoxicating.

    I can walk into a bookshop.

    God, the bookshops.

    I can stay.

    Leave.

    I don’t want to disappear from my life.

    Maybe this is a way to step more fully into it.

    Because there has been a lot of looking backward lately. A lot of trying to understand. A lot of trying to hold things I can’t. A lot of examining what happened and what it meant and what I should have known and what I could have done differently.

    Mistakes.

    Regrets.

    We all have them.

    Perhaps… what even is that word? I say it a lot. I need to think about that sometime.

    Perhaps I will sit in a café and read for an hour while rain taps against the window.

    Okay, I recognize that sounds a little romantic.

    Perhaps I will feel scared.

    Perhaps I will feel free.

    Perhaps these things will be the same feeling.

    I am trying not to make Scotland carry too much meaning.

    But alas, I am a meaning maker, so it naturally will.

    Maybe I’ll meet someone who wants to hear my rambles. Like this one. And the many others I have stuck in my head with no one to tell them to.

    And it’s okay if I don’t.

    Because maybe that’s part of what I am going to find out.

    That I can take myself somewhere.

    That I can want something and simply go after it.

    That I can be frightened and still get on the plane.

    That I can walk through unfamiliar countries, alone, with no one waiting for me to make myself useful.

    That I can stand somewhere ancient and feel very, very small.

    And very, very alive.

    There is something ahead of me.

    For once, I am not postponing it.

    I am going to Scotland.

  • Building a home inside myself

    I finished The Dog Stars by Peter Heller yesterday and my heart hurts.

    Nothing beautiful or literary about it. I don’t need to understand why, as I already know.

    It just hurts.

    Funny how some books seem to find a place inside you that was already tender and press on it.

    This one found me there.

    Peter Heller’s prose is stripped almost to the bone. There is no cushioning. Some of it is even unfinished thought, simply because the next thought comes so soon. The sentences move like someone who has learned there is no reason to waste breath. I was propelled forward through observation, action and memory, often before I had really finished absorbing the thing I had just read. There is so little excess in this consciousness and somehow that made everything heavier.

    Hig, with his big beautiful heart, thinks like someone who has lived through too much loss to narrate everything anymore. What matters gets noticed and said. What doesn’t gets left behind. His world has become very physical: weather, distance, food, shelter, a plane in the sky, movement outside, life underneath the stars. And underneath all of it is this enormous capacity to love, which I think is what got me most. I recognize that capacity in myself, and in other people too. Some stubborn human tendency to attach ourselves to things even after we have learned how easily we can lose them.

    Hig has lost almost everything and somehow isn’t detached from those things that matter. Or the things that cause him pain. He still attaches. To his dog. To a plane. To a place. To a friend. Even to possibility, I think. So even though he is deeply shaped by loss, he hasn’t disappeared inside it. Not yet anyway.

    He’s aware he needs to keep making choices, and so he does. Sometimes terrible ones. Sometimes brave ones. Sometimes ones made entirely out of fear. All of them have consequences.

    I understood that, perhaps more than I wanted to.

    Ugh. The strange violence of choice when every available option means losing something. I think we’ve all felt this in different ways: with life decisions, people we love, family, work, home. Sometimes there is no choice that leaves everything intact, and the decision becomes less about finding the right answer than deciding what you are willing to lose.

    Especially home.

    Because what is home when everything that made it home is gone?

    This is where Hig got to me too.

    He isn’t searching for some lost version of home. He is making one. Slowly and practically, through the things that need doing and the things he continues to care about. The routines, the work, the dog, the plane, the land. The daily business of keeping something alive.

    I felt this deeply here, and throughout The Odyssey. I keep coming back to this question of home in the books I read, although I think I used to imagine it very differently. I used to think of home as somewhere you eventually find, or return to, or recognize. Something outside yourself that provides the feeling of belonging.

    The Wall brought me into something similar through a completely different kind of solitude. There, too, so much of life became the necessary things that needed doing. Food. Animals. Work. The next day. The intimate, almost unremarkable business of continuing to live.

    And maybe that is part of what I am so interested in now.

    What does it mean to build a life rather than simply find one?

    I have spent more than enough time imagining what home really is or could be, and I think I’ve settled on it being something I construct inside myself. That feels very different to me from the idea of “finding yourself,” which has never really connected with me. I’m not sure I ever had a particularly solid sense of a self to find. This is me. These are my passions. This is my personality. This is who I am.

    I think I’m building it now.

    That sounds obvious when I write it down, but it doesn’t feel obvious to me. It feels like something I have only recently begun to understand.

    And that is what I see in Hig. He is not untouched by what happened to him. He isn’t pretending the past didn’t exist, and he certainly hasn’t somehow transcended it. He carries it everywhere, along with his grief. But he also keeps making a world around himself. Participating in it, not just surviving it. Choosing what matters… attaching… caring. Taking risks. Becoming someone in the middle of all that has already happened to him.

    I don’t really want to become the person I was before everything happened. I’m not particularly interested in “getting back to myself.” There may not even be a self back there that I want to return to.

    I think I want to become whoever I am now. Home is definitely part of that becoming, something I’ll keep constructing as I go. Might make it easier to survive change because it isn’t dependent on everything around me remaining the same.

    Maybe that is what I loved about Hig. He keeps choosing, knows that he must. He keeps loving and appreciating what is still here. He keeps moving through the world that remains, even though it isn’t the world he started with.

    And the stars are still there. Jasper too. 

    Even after everything.

    And then there is Cima.

    I connected with her too, in a way I’ll keep to myself. Her grief feels different from Hig’s, but it has shaped her just as completely.

    The loss of her twin brother, her partner, the complicated tenderness and damage of her relationship with her father, the years of not being touched or loved in the ways a body remembers wanting to be touched and loved. There is so much grief in her that has nowhere obvious to go, and yet she is still there, still capable of wanting, still capable of choosing and wanting, still capable of routines and carrying on, wherever that may lead her. 

    And how, because of that, the capacity for connection can remain.

  • I was looking too

    Would you rather: sit inside ethical discomfort or stand above the book and judge everyone else? 

    I finished The Vegetarian tonight. 

    And now I have a completely different problem.

    I spent the second part of this book absolutely fucking charged by the way the brother-in-law looked at Yeong-hye.

    Then I got to the end without ever really getting Yeong-hye herself. I never got to look through her eyes. I got everyone else’s Yeong-hye.

    But that wasn’t my realization.

    Did I want Yeong-hye’s consciousness?

    I think it’s Han Kang’s refusal to let me inside Yeong-hye’s consciousness is precisely what made this experience so strange. Everyone is looking at her. Everyone is trying to make something of her. And I’m right there with them, the reader, looking too. I’m given their lenses, their desire, their fear, their confusion. I’m allowed to get close to her body, her behaviour, the effects she has on everyone around her but never quite get to encounter her. She remains somewhere behind the glass.

    Was that frustrating? Or was that the point?

    I genuinely think I actually value being locked out.

    I don’t want Yeong-hye to explain herself to me.

    I don’t want another first-person psychological excavation. I don’t need to know what every thought feels like from the inside. I’ve read enough of those.

    I think I like what Han Kang did instead.

    She gave me the disturbance and let me watch it move through other people.

    Yeong-hye changes, and then everyone around her has to reckon with the fact that they can no longer make her fit inside the version of her they already knew.

    That’s what clicked. That’s what I’m interested in.

    Not Yeong-hye’s consciousness.

    Everyone else’s consciousness changing in response to hers. Forcing me to join the crowd of voyeurs looking at her body, her behaviour, her effects on others…

    That’s the fucking experiment.

    Watching each of them construct Yeong-hye according to their own desire, fear, resentment, fascination, sexuality, confusion, etc. has positioned me exactly where I want to be.

    Because suddenly I’m not behind the glass looking for her anymore.

    I’m looking at all of them.

  • The charge of looking

    this book’s strange erotic consciousness + physical reaction

    I just finished the second part of The Vegetarian this morning and I feel absolutely filled with desire.

    Could be simply sexual desire. But see quotes below. It’s different… it’s deep.

    The brother-in-law looking at Yeong-hye. Painting her body. (New fantasy side quest unlocked.) His obsession with the flowers on her skin. The filming. The fantasy of her body moving through the dark room. The fact that she doesn’t resist.

    I don’t know what Han Kang has done here, but I feel it physically.

    She has somehow made looking itself erotic. He is aroused not only by Yeong-hye’s body, but by the fact that she has become so radically herself… renounced, unavailable to ordinary social meaning… almost unbearably compelling.

    It’s like the renunciation makes her body more intensely present.

    More naked and more defended.

    “a body that said so much, and it was no more than itself.”

    “…armoured by the power of her own renunciation.”

    He sees nakedness and somehow perceives armour. Exposure and impenetrability at the same time. That’s an incredibly charged thing for me to read and think about.

    Being more available and completely unreachable.

    He wants to get closer to her, but every attempt to represent her seems to make her stranger. Distant.

    Is it limits or limitless? Boundaries or none? Just the uncomplicated ‘look but can’t touch’?

    Not sure. But I do know that it is not plot twist stuff. Or even the imagined scenes, the fantasy. It’s the prose, the language, these passages. And how, for me, they possess some weird, conductive frequency. It’s not even electric on the page. What he is seeing, what’s being described is done in such a muted, unobtrusive manner. The real voltage is happening in me. Han Kang, you have successfully ran a wire from your mind to mine, and turned the switch on.

    Whatever it is, I am sitting here absolutely fucking charged by it.

    Edit (one hour later): Did Han Kang just pull a Nabokov on me? Yes. I believe she did.

  • Left in the margin

    Lincoln asked:

    “Hey. Wanna sit in this weird liminal afterlife for 7 hours?”

    And I said, “Sure, why the hell not.” 

    Lincoln in the Bardo begins with the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son, Willie, and then promptly abandons anything resembling a conventional narrative structure. I had no idea I would end up in a cemetery with a whole crowd of dead people who haven’t quite moved on yet, and, apparently, have a lot to say.

    I finished it tonight and I’ll keep this short. 

    I loved its experimental form, especially the accumulation of voices. The audiobook made that even more pronounced. An entire ensemble of consciousnesses talking over, interrupting, contradicting, carrying their own histories (some really tough) into the same space.

    Grief is everywhere in the book, but Saunders makes it feel less like a single experience and more like a crowded, communal condition.

    On the volume of consciousness

    There was something happening with the pace here. Or perhaps it was a tightening. No. More like the weight. And the volume. 

    Whatever it was, by the end, I was holding a lot. A lot of attention and grief. It was heavy and loud.

    This was a very different encounter with consciousness for me. This growing collective mind, this shared web of human stories, was new. I haven’t read much that explores the idea of individual lives merging into something like a vast, living stream of memory and thought. Especially not of those existing in some purgatory-like state between life and death.

    It felt like hearing every past and present voice at once.

    More minds. More histories. More grief. More competing accounts of things that happened. 

    And writing this, I’m realizing that I wasn’t really following a plot at all. I was holding an enormous amount of human interiority.

    Did I like it?

    Yes. Absolutely.

    But I’ve been doing quite the heavy lift on consciousness lately, and I need to set this backpack down for a bit. 

    On the discomfort of suspension

    I’ve spent enough time suspended to know that discomfort can become its own kind of environment.

    Personally. Career. Reading life. You name it.

    Like notes scribbled in a margin, I am pushed outside the main narrative in some aspects of my life. Neither here nor there, where movement hasn’t happened yet but remaining in the borders is becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

    Sometimes I want out.

    Then I want to understand it.

    Then, eventually, I wonder whether accepting this suspension is the same or different from giving up. 

    My mind keeps looping:

    Do I want out because I know I’ve lost?

    Accept the defeat, Robyn. Move on.

    Ah. But I can’t.

    Because maybe there is a difference between being penned somewhere and staying somewhere long enough to become ready to leave.

    I don’t know.

    I’m still thinking about that.

    Always thinking. 

    Is it a choice to turn the page? To let go?

    How do you ready yourself for that?

    And… what about your heart?