I didn’t write down a thing about this book, and it is now a month and a half later. I remember thinking that this may be my favorite Toni Morrison book though I couldn’t explain to you exactly why. All the little pieces and people are swimming in my memory. Maybe it was the epic scope of this story or the warmth of the characters.

Most of the time while reading this book, I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not. The narrative is purposefully fragmented in a curious way. Our narrator is the daughter of a renowned poet, a woman who is talented to the degree that she can’t always function in the world outside of her writing. At the beginning, we are told that the daughter said goodbye to her mother at Grand Central Station, and then her mother disappeared. Her father and brother take off shortly afterward as well. The novel is basically a game of hide-and-seek with the circumstances of her disappearance, through memories and imagined scenes from her mother’s childhood. Perhaps to other people it would be obvious all along; yet I got caught up in trying to glean the future from these past-focused moments, and the narrator’s “present day” thoughts were seemingly focused but ultimately distracted. Slowly the shroud falls. The first half of the last part of the book is brilliant—at that moment I loved it. But by the time I’d read the last remaining bits of the book, I was back to my uncertainty.

Morrison’s stories unfold like legends and somehow her simple, unadorned, language becomes richly poetic.

… she saw through the open door a slim figure in blue, gliding, with just a hint of a strut, down the path toward the road. One hand was pressed to the head to hold down the large hat against the warm June breeze. Even from the rear Nel could tell that it was Sula and that she was smiling; that something deep down in that litheness was amused. It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.

A literal event with metaphorical overtones. I read this many years ago, and it’s interesting to find what stuck with me and what I feel will stick with me this time. The plain truth of the ending struck me anew.

I’ve been so good at writing about the books I’ve read for the past couple of years, it’s kind of shameful to finally look at my pile of notes and find more of a title+date list than entries ready to be typed. I summed up Quicksand: “A tale of ‘he said, she said’-style deception.”

More challenging than And Her Soul Out of Nothing but very alive.

small quilled poem with no taste for spring

In spring all the poems that need
            to be written

Have. You are neither dejected
            nor relieved. Scrape and

Paint. Scrape and paint a
            grey house white.

Feel something! Your husband,
            the one married to all the appetites,

Shouts to someone up on a ladder,
            someone who looks sort of

Like you: disinterested, spated,
            thin as a cloud.

It’s spring again and so the
            melancholiacs. And so the fat

Sharp animals pace your roof
            at night: feeding, quilled, recurrent

Dreams. You will never live
            up to this

Life, they will never refer to
            you as voluptuous.

You can’t remember the
            last time

you wore a dress.             You
           pressed your mouth

To the phone.

(I probably got the spacings wrong, typing this from my handwritten note on scrap paper, over two months after I read this.)

I love novels with multilinear narratives that reinforce each other as they develop. As well as novels that include maps in the beginning (and it’s a very attractive map). The melancholy moments of being outside of the regular world seemed especially insightful. This might be my favorite Murakami book, it’s possible.

On my way to my 2005 goal.