Thursday, August 21, 2008

"The Secret Scripture"

First impressions? Did you like it? Favorite parts?
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5 comments:

kc said...

I loved it — a lot! even though it was often gut-wrenching to read. It struck me more as a fierce and somber poem than a novel. It's the most poignant portrait of loneliness I've ever read.

7:26 PM, August 21, 2008
kc said...

Favorite parts? I don't know. There were so many. The feathers and hammers scenes blew me away.

The sudden, senseless loss of Tom, like a death she couldn't mourn, that she had no one on earth to mourn with her.

Roseanne's relationship with her father. I mentioned in a comment above that the novel was a mother quest in the end, but there's also the fantastic allure of that wonderful man, Roseanne's father, who has this uncrushable joy in him — something like the Great Gatsby's endless "capacity for wonder" — and it was like a flame of hope in her life and a model of love. This passage about his death nearly killed me:

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Do you know the grief of it? I hope not. the grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father.

I cry out for him.

8:16 PM, August 21, 2008
kc said...

And the way they wrote about love and sex — in a culture of repression — was so lovely and uplifting, like James Joyce's "yes, yes, yes."

When she led her husband's brother to bed, with nothing but love in her heart. I went over to him like a mouse, quietly, quietly, in case I would scare him, and took one of those calloused hands of his, and led him to the room behind ...

Then after that later, we were lying there like two stone figures on a tomb, quite as happy as any moment of childhood. (how fabulous, the juxtaposition of the tomb and childhood happiness)

And the doctor says of the priest: He betrays at every stroke an intense hatred of ... the sexuality of women ... For him it is the devil's cloak and hood, whereas for me, it is a sort of saving grace of being alive.

Roseanne:Tom McNulty, a man that had every right to life because he honoured it so in the enjoyment of it.

The doctor: ...a surrender to adolescence, when such fumblings seemed heroic and poetic....

We like to characterise humanity as savage, lustful, and basic, but that is to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer (fantastic)

Roseanne: I did have a shocking desire for Tom myself. The whole lot of him. I don't know. He had me dizzy on a constant basis. There's some things you can't get enough of ... I liked drinking cups of tea with him. I liked kissing his ears. Maybe I was never a proper woman. God forgive me. Maybe the biggest error I made was I always felt the equal of him. (Did that knock out anyone else?! And when she compared them to Bonnie and Clyde "expressing their love in curious ways")

The doctor: Clinton and his cigar was so much greater a man than Bush and his rifle.

Roseanne: Can you love a man you only knew — in the Biblical sense — for a night? I do not know. But there was love there, gentle, fierce proper love. God forgive me.

Roseanne: Oh, it is girls of seventeen and eighteen know how to live life, and love the living of it, if we are let.

And, Erin! This reminded me of that touching melancholy in your later diaries: I felt I was in a condition of waiting, waiting for something unknown to replace the grace of being young. Of course I was young, very young, but, as I remember it, no one is ever quite so old as a fifteen-year-old girl.

And this, too, reminded me of you and your diary— when she's looking at the teenage boys: I seem to remember thinking a sort of music rose from them ... How I heard music arising from such rough forms I do not know at this distance. But such is the magicianship of girls, that they can transform mere clay into large and classic ideas. That is so you. Hehe

This book is a wonder.

9:05 PM, August 21, 2008
Erin said...

I loved it, too! And I'm also having trouble coming up with favorite parts because every part was so fantastic. I marked some of those same passages. Here are a few others I loved:

The light of the candles pierced everywhere, into the lines of my father's face as he sat beside me, into the stones of the church, into the voice of the minister as he spoke his words in that mysterious and stirring English of the bible, in through my own breastbone, right into my young heart, piercing me fiercely there, so that I wanted to cry out, but cry out what I could not say. Cry out against my father's fate, my mother's silence, but also, cry out in praise of something, the beauty of my mother that was going but still there. I felt as if my mother and my father were in my care, and that it was by some action of my own that they would be rescued. For some reason this plumped me up with sudden joy, a feeling so scarce in that time, so that when the local voices began to sing some forgotten hymn, I began to flush with weird happiness, and then in the sparkling dark, to cry, long full hot tears of treacherous relief.

There is a moment in the history of every beaten child when his mind parts with hopes of dignity -- pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain.

Now yet again I discover I do not have the language, the lingo, to talk to her about this, or about anything. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.

I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like one of those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches. God knows why, because you cannot see a thing in them.

I regret Bet's exodus to the maid's room above all other regrets. My dalliance -- oh, a quaint word chosen by my stupid inner self to hide my sin -- with another, whose life I also altered for the worse, being the cause. I think it was the cause. More likely, the sudden view she got of me in the light of it. A smaller, nastier person than she had thought.

It is hard to know a person's age in a bathing suit, in the riot of the sunlight, and I can't see what age I was, I am peering back with my mind's eye, and all I see is fabulous glitter.

11:31 PM, August 23, 2008
kc said...

Those are all lovely passages, Erin. His mind must be enchanted. It moves so gracefully between impressionistic images (faltering memory) and precise details (those razor-sharp reminders).

10:11 AM, August 25, 2008

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