What: The Almost Moon
Who: Alice Sebold
When: Discussion opens August 1, 2010
Where: Um, here.
Why: Sebold's writing is haunting and poetic, the story is compelling, and I like how she turns a few rules of fiction on their head.
Until August 1!
I just picked up my copy of _The Almost Moon_ today. I've begun reading chapter one and my first impressions are a bit difficult to articulate. I like it and I don't like it. There is a sense in which the text describes in perfect minute detail everything that I find distasteful about American culture in our current era.
ReplyDeleteThe dust-jacket talks about the "violence and danger that lurk beneath life's everyday surface" and the "complex ties within families" but I think of a culture of dysfunctional and disaffected people living sham lives of quiet desperation. The "thin line that separates us from our most haunting impulses" sounds like a euphemism.
Perhaps the story hits just a little too close to home. My maternal grandmother died of Alzheimer's in the fall of 2008. She had been sick for a long time, at least ten years. Watching her decline was one of the most intensely painful experiences of my life. Her body was healthy, her mind was gone. She had long ceased to be the person I remembered, but still, there she was, a person in this body, vaguely resembling my grandmother.
Poverty made it worse. My grandmother spent the last years of her life in one of the most depression nursing homes I've ever encountered. The garish carpet, the crude industrial lighting, the hallways that smelled of piss, shit, old people, and disinfectant. I hated that place. I hated, even more, that a place like that even existed.
So as I read this novel, I find myself confronting some very uncomfortable feelings about death and old age. Which is, I suppose, the point. Still, when I asked, in all seriousness, the man I was engaged to marry, if he would promise to smother me with a pillow when my mind went, he looked at me in horror.
I know -- it seems like all of Sebold's work catches me the same way. It's too painful or uncomfortable to read, but too compelling to walk away from.
ReplyDeleteI find myself frequently staying up way past my bedtime just to "read one more chapter."
ReplyDelete