Y4 – Day 275 – update on book reviews

I just wanted to share some excepts from yesterday’s book review that might not show up when you sample the book on the internet.

From Writing Still – “For a while, I thought I might want to be a pianist…I see now that the piano was my training ground…I was preparing for a lifetime of working with words. The phrasing, the pauses, the crescendos and diminuendos, keeping time, the creating of shape…All these are with me as I approach the page.”

“…what goes on internally…is gripping to the point of leaving the reader breathless. We are guided deep into the inner world…tracing thought after thought until we are him, we become him, and this is literature doing its job, which is to penetrate the surface, to dismantle the ordinary, to find the dropped stitch, to show us that we are-all of us-built of these…moments, that they mark the turning points of our lives.”

Isn’t that delectable and rewarding to read and sink into?

And from When Women Were Birds – “My mother left me her journals, and all her journals were blank. My mother’s journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth… no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible. As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.” – this is after seeing Strauss’s opera “The woman without a shadow”, a myth. She explains the entire story and deduces the above. And then she goes on to say, “We are all held captive by something. My mother’s prison was her prescribed role.”

She has great one liners I think can be taken out of context too. ” True eloquence has an edge, sharp and clean.”

She interprets Claudine Herrmann. ” We either flee and disappear or steal, adopt, and adapt to the dominant language of men, often at our own expense.”  – ” I thought if the feminine voice (for lack of a better term) continues to be eclipsed, every aspect of virile thinking will be emblazoned across the face of the Earth at all our peril.”

She makes you ponder your greatness, your need to express yourself and save the small and large parts of nature and of yourself.

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