| Original Message |
Jenna Hanlon (no login)
Posted Apr 4, 2007 1:27 PM
I was afraid I wasn’t going to have this book done on time and was so excited when I was able to breeze through with the help of ‘on the level’ vernacular, assessable characters and the awesome thematic that drive the novel. While I did believe the narrator’s despair and humanity, this feeling was challenged by her mental illness and actions such as using her husband and son’s untimely death to secure a job at Tesco. The narrator becomes reliant on her loss to propel her into action; where does one go from here?
On page 229 the scene where she explains that when she is too tired to write (to Osama about her loss) she curls up on her sofa and watches the TV with pictures of her kid taped to it because she can no longer afford any distractions… I thought this interestingly paralleled the discussions we’ve had about MySpace memorials and our attraction/need to relieve pain and grief through channels of entertainment (television, internet). Her production/movement throughout the novel is stagnant, aside from her crippling OCD, she chooses to stock shelves, a repetitive action that calls for mindless detachment from monotony, freeing her to be the zombie that she gravitates to; she clearly has taken a repetitive, useless stance on life when she equates Petra’s vein in her neck to a broken record. (111) Her letter to Osama attempts to cling to any sort of pride she can muster, but her pain seems to take on a more concrete and devastating effect than that of any positive feeling she can sustain.
Five pages into this book I was hit over the head by a somewhat basic but incredibly powerful comparison “ …you could listen as hard as you liked and still not know if you were hearing love or murder.” (5) I thought this quote was immensely pertinent to the entire piece as I was unsure while reading the novel whether I was reading a confession of love or murder. I’ve always been intrigued by how similar love and hate can be….
Also, I don’t want to start but I remember hearing something said in class a few weeks ago, a quote from “As Good As It Gets” when Melvin is asked how he writes from a woman’s perspective he replies : “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.” I’m no feminist but I was extremely put off by this quote (mostly because a professor had used it to explicate a similar notion the week prior to it being brought up and was dead serious). I was wondering what everyone thought about Chris Cleave’s portrayal of a woman narrator??
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