26 March 2011

my slow exit from hibernation


Spring leads into summer and somehow that leads to a lot of quick-reads. Those funny, easy books that are a hundred percent amusing and straight-forward enough to pick up and put down in the park and at the beach. Perfect example, Douglas Coupland. When you have too much time, those 'summer books' will last you a (rainy) day.

I am still in thought-provoking, romantic and memorable winter reading. The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud is the kind of book you can read with the tv on but you'll miss something, so slow down and absorb some great Canadian lit. It didn't win the Giller Prize for nothing.


"[J]ust before we got to the border, for some time by then returned to silence, my father said, "If you could remember one thing and have that be your life, what would it be?"
"What would it be for you?" I asked.
"I asked you," my father said. "It was a question for you."
I felt suddenly tired. The effort of conversation was after all a very great one, and this was more than I had bargained for.
"I don't know. That's a difficult question," I said. And we left it at that.


My own sadness seemed, at those times, to draw itself in - a complete and separate object - so that it seemed to have nothing to do with me anymore.[..] No, it had to do, instead, I think - that sadness - with those certain smells or shapes or colours that call up a certain moment, or a feeling, just a whiff of one, that you can't quite place. Just something that fills you with a weird longing, all of a sudden. Like you're homesick. Only not for any place that you've been to. And the smell, it doesn't remind you of anything that you've ever smelled before. And the colour or the shape is not one you can connect to a recallable landscape.

Quotes from The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010. Photo from Google Images.

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