Barbery.

Loved, loved, loved this book.

But I so hated the first 50 pages. I really did. I thought it was pretentious, that it was just trying too hard to be fancy & philosophical & unique.

But then something happened, & I just fell in love. I think the characters suddenly became human for me. I finally deciphered who was who, & how they fit together. And then - I couldn't put it down. I finished it in a few hours. I thought it was such a beautiful story with such a real ending.

One of my favorite snippets, from Paloma -

In any case, this is true at our place. If you want to understand my family, all you have to do is look at the cats. Our two cars are fat windbags who eat designer kibble & have no interesting interaction with human beings. They drag themselves from one sofa to the next & leave their fur everywhere, & no one seems to have grasped that they have no affection for any of us. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such dropping bellies that this does not apply to them (pg. 51).

I loved Paloma's wit, as unlikely as it is that any 12 year old would be so engaging. But I thought that she was just clever - & we share a distaste for cats.

Another favorite deep thought from Paloma -

If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go round the way it does. But that's not even the problem. What his sentence means isn't that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it's words & not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer & make our territory safe, & the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction (57).

From Renee -

From their box hidden behind the sheets at the back of the wardrobe I have brought out 2 earrings inherited from my mother-in-law, the monstrous Yvette - antique silver, dangling, with 2 pear-shaped garnets. I made 6 attempts before I managed to clip them properly to my earlobes & now must live with teh sensation of having 2 potbellied cats hanging from my distended lobes. 54 years without jewelry do not prepare one for the travails of dressing up. I smeared my lips with 1 layer of "Deep Carmine" lipstick that I had bought 20 years ago for a cousin's wedding. The longevity of such a useless item, when valiant lives are lost every day, will never cease to confound me. I belong to the 8% of the world population who calm their apprehension by drowning it in numbers (301).

I love that after all of this preparation, after all of her anxiety, after not being recognized by the other tenants in the building, that Ozu says, I would recognize you anywhere. I really enjoyed seeing their love story develop, their simple friendship, two people with such sad hearts who are able to find happiness in each other.

The ending. Sigh.

Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart & my stomach ll like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that's it, an always within never.

Don't worry Renee, I won't commit suicide & I won't burn a thing. Because from now on, for you, I'll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world (325).

I guess that in the end, I wanted Ozu & Renee to get married & adopt Paloma. That would have just been perfect, right? A happy, incredibly brilliant little family.

It didn't work out that way, but I think that there was redemption. And that makes me feel okay. Bittersweet perhaps, but okay.

I'm going to go read Netherland now.