11. the awakening
earlier this week i finished the awakening & it exploded my world. it was written by kate chopin a hundred years ago. i'm often really intimidated by classic books unless theyre written by d.h. lawrence or camus. so naturally, i was really intimidated by this book & it took a lot of courage to pick it up. really, i had to pull my teeth & command read; it'd been on my bookshelf for like a year & a half after a special thing told me he heard my favorite things in it when he read it. his gesture rolled right off my back then.
it's written excellently; i finished it in 2 afternoons. you couldve done it in one, but there was this almighty wind outside & i was really into listening to haunted music in my room & doing nothing else recreational. it's written with this modern air & old fashioned elegant thought which makes a really perfect voice that equals = timeless. it's about edna who is married & young & pretty, long blonde, & lives by the gulf of mexico. she loves her children & loves her husband, but she's bored & weary & chooses to wake up her soul in an effort to defeat boredom, weariness. there were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why, -- when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium & humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable anihilation. she could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses & warm her blood. this was really eerie when i read it. it's not carpe diem shit though; she really subtly wakes her soul, you have to have wide open eyes. she also falls in love with somebody who is not her husband, but she's been falling in love with everybody else all her life. she learns to swim good too.
this book is holy cake or something. i recommend it if you like finding really believable, comic relationships in books. kate chopin's not funny, but her characters are, & theyre accurate humans. i recommend it if you like mad decent english too. i recommend it also if you want to laugh at what willa cather called "sex fiction." ignorant hussy. it'd be more appropriately categorized as a political romance. also, the copy i have is filled with some of her short stories too. those are really good. theyre small but have big ironic endings all about you.
it's written excellently; i finished it in 2 afternoons. you couldve done it in one, but there was this almighty wind outside & i was really into listening to haunted music in my room & doing nothing else recreational. it's written with this modern air & old fashioned elegant thought which makes a really perfect voice that equals = timeless. it's about edna who is married & young & pretty, long blonde, & lives by the gulf of mexico. she loves her children & loves her husband, but she's bored & weary & chooses to wake up her soul in an effort to defeat boredom, weariness. there were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why, -- when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium & humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable anihilation. she could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses & warm her blood. this was really eerie when i read it. it's not carpe diem shit though; she really subtly wakes her soul, you have to have wide open eyes. she also falls in love with somebody who is not her husband, but she's been falling in love with everybody else all her life. she learns to swim good too.
this book is holy cake or something. i recommend it if you like finding really believable, comic relationships in books. kate chopin's not funny, but her characters are, & theyre accurate humans. i recommend it if you like mad decent english too. i recommend it also if you want to laugh at what willa cather called "sex fiction." ignorant hussy. it'd be more appropriately categorized as a political romance. also, the copy i have is filled with some of her short stories too. those are really good. theyre small but have big ironic endings all about you.