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I finally read it!! And I loved it! Any book that's got me reading to the finish in my car in the Kroger parking lot, while my friends are waiting, the rain is falling, and a cop cruises by to see if I'm up to no good -- well, that kind of book gets five stars. I had a couple small complaints (the sheer length, the presumption of not translating some of the French and German quotes), but overall, I felt like this was a rich tapestry of real life: living in a city you love, what people ate and wore and danced to, what it's like to spend many years observing and interacting with the person you love most. Favorite quotes: "Clare is silent. Her pragmatism and her romantic feelings about Jesus and Mary are, at thirteen, almost equally balanced. A year ago she would have said God without hesitation. In ten years she will vote for determinism, and ten years after that Clare will believe that the universe is arbitrary, that if God exists he does not hear our prayers, that cause and effect are inescapable and brutal, but meaningless. And after that? I don't know." (77) (I was very intrigued by the idea of looking at someone's core beliefs from a lifetime perspective: I supposed all of our beliefs and feelings go through changes when you are talking about decades, not just months or years.) "Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to control my movements through space if not time, and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will." (154) "We didn't think the library was funny-looking in its faux Greek splendor, nor did we find the cuisine limited and bland, or the movies at Michigan Theater relentlessly American and mindless. These were opinions I came to later, after I became a denizen of a City, an expatriate anxious to distance herself from the bumpkin ways of her youth. I am suddenly consumed with nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret." (p. 168) "The cure might be worse than the problem." (254) "The pain has receded but what's left is the shell of the pain, an empty space where there should be pain but instead there is the expectation of pain." (493)

2022-10-29 03:54