Author: christinestaffa

My life's journey has taken me from the streets of New York, up the Hudson Valley, to a little goat farm under Vermont's highest mountain.

Book Corner 2021.43

Wayward

Sam is a woman my age who makes an impulse buy – a house. An adorable old house in the middle of Syracuse; she will live there alone. I.e., she will leave her husband. For the house. For the chance to live in this lovable house alone.

Intrigued by this appealing dream-I-will-never-actually-live, I picked up this novel eagerly, but was disappointed. Sam is just so unlikeable. I mean, I’m unlikeable too, but she is super vitriolic, self-pitying, and self-aware only to the extent that she realizes she’s self-pitying and it makes her more self-pitying. C’mon, I’m not THIS bad, am I?

Also, it turned out to be heavy on the mother-daughter stuff that doesn’t interest me.

My weird predilections aside, being as objective as I can be, I think the book really does suffer from its central character’s unlikability, and weird digressive way of wrapping things up. Thumbs down.

Book Corner 2021.42

I Capture the Castle

by Dodie Smith

This was my second read. Particularly the first five or so chapters, the book is strongly carried by our wonderful narrator, Cassandra Mortmain, a 17-year-old who calls a centuries-old castle in England home. She lives with her highly eccentric family – a famous author father who hasn’t written anything in years; his much younger artist-model wife christened Topaz (though “there is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that”); Cassandra’s slightly older, beloved, but exasperating sister Rose; their slightly younger brother Thomas; and a hired helpmate about their age, though they haven’t been able to pay him anything in years. In fact, they haven’t been able to afford to pay anything or anyone in years; they’ve been selling off furniture bit by bit and scrounging together a living based on that, and when we meet them, they aren’t sure what they’re going to do next.

Then, a la Pride & Prejudice (deftly referenced by the narrator), a nearby property is suddenly let to a single man of means (who, it is a fact universally acknowledged, must fall in love with one or both of our heroines by book’s end).

I do feel that once characters started falling in love with each other, the story got worse. But it’s quite a piece of work nevertheless.

If This Is It

So contemplate for a moment the non-existence of god. Contemplate a materialist worldview, “above us only sky.” Everything you perceive with your senses – that’s all there is.

What has been gelling for me lately during silent non-verbal moments of contemplation is: Tom + Vera = Me. That’s all there is.

It’s not that putting the nail in the coffin of the Mystery answers the nature/nurture question for me so much as it renders it moot. How much does our environment shape our personality? Well, what is a “personality”? Contemplate for a moment the possibility that there’s no such thing. There’s just a bunch of stuff people do.

If “this” (squeezes bit of skin between fingers) is all there is, then I know now precisely “who I am.”

And incidentally, behind the scenes during all of this drama and contemplation have silently stood two people: John & Barbara. And it occurs to me how none of this has the slightest bit to do with them. It seems unfortunate that we do not have separate words for “the woman who gave birth to you” and “the guy who fertilized her ovum” vs. “the female primarily involved in raising you” & “the male primary involved in raising you.” They are just mother and father, at best modified as “biological” mother & father and “adoptive” mother & father. But they are so entirely different.