![]() ![]() I felt like a ponderous weight was descending on my soul, too, and perhaps more of a weight than the… Yes, anyway. This may seem a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight – perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman” Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. There were words I had to look up, and while looking up new words in the dictionary is one of my great joys in life, these often left me depressed (a “quadroon”: “A person who is one quarter negro” “befurbelowed”: “done up with some kind of flounce or ruffle”). The setting on the Louisiana coast and New Orleans didn’t really sit well with me – give me Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic rather than this transplanted Whartonian sensibility – and the prissiness of some of the writing didn’t seem to fit with the modernist gesture of the abrupt, numbered sections. And the underlinings and scrawls in my copy show that, for quite a while, that wasn’t the case. Of course I knew it was supposed to be good – the book appeared in a lovely looking new Canongate edition in the UK last year, and booky people online were all aflame with it – but I wanted the writing to tell me that, too. But still I’m left with a strange feeling of resentment towards the book, or its writer, that they didn’t let me know earlier how good it was, that it was going to get better. It’s a powerful thing, and I read most of it in a state of mild disappointment, and what I enjoyed about it most of all was the point at which it made me sit up and realise that I’d underestimated it. There is a danger it could slip from my mind, from my reading memory, and become just another finished book, but I don’t want it to. The Awakening has been swimming around in my brain since I read it, a few days ago, most of it on a train journey and the rest the next morning, and I’m still not sure what I think about it. ![]() The Art of the Novella challenge 11: The Awakeningįirst line: A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: “ Allez-vous en! Allez-vous en! Sapristi! That’s all right!” The last day to order and ensure your package arrives in time for Christmas is December 16. The Art of the Novella challenge 11: The Awakening » MobyLives ![]()
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