6. to make you feel my

[harborshore]

Today was less than awesome. Someone stole stuff from our porch, which means they basically walked around outside and watched me sleep, because I forgot to close the blinds last night. Yeah. I don't hate people, but sometimes I violently dislike them. Also they made my dad sad (they took his XC skis, which he has kept on the porch every winter for years--you have to store them outside in order to not make them get warm when you want to ski), and I'm not happy with people making my dad upset.

So in an effort not to go completely misanthropic, I'm going to remember that I had good health news on Monday and I'm going to review a book that made me very, very happy, and then I'm going to make the second half of the dough in my fridge (thesamefire's peanutbutter chocolate chip cookie recipe is AMAZING).


Free Love by Ali Smith.



Oh, this is how short stories should be written. Every one of them is such a great little slice of life, a person, someone we relate to or no, sad or no, etc. It's absolutely gorgeous, her prose and the way she thinks about people, just, everything.

Sometimes she gets fantastical, like in the story of the girl who leaves her apartment behind and gets her friend to mail her her own books, one or two at a time, as she travels all over and rips the pages out as she reads them:

There are poems in gutters and drains, under the rails laid for trains, pages of novels on the pavements, in the supermarkets, stuck to people's feet or the wheels of their bikes or cars; there are poems in the desert. Somewhere where there are no houses, no people, only sky, wind, a wide-open world, a poem about a dormant grass-covered volcano lies held down half-buried in sand, bleaching in the light and heat like the small skull of a bird.

Her prose, you guys. I want to write that well. And the image of pages floating all over, of literature literally everywhere, I can't stop smiling whenever I reread that paragraph.

Also there are lesbians. *grins* This narrator, for instance, has a crush on the girl who works in the movie theatre. It's a great story both because Smith knows how to write about the slightly creepy part of crushing from a distance, the way we create versions of those we want in our heads, but also because she uses movie conventions, well, like this:

If we were on a bus trip together and she were to fall out of the emergency door down the side of a dangerous cliff, I would jump down after her as fast as anything and save her from falling into the ravine by catching her hand just at the moment when she couldn't hold on to the tree root any longer, I would climb up the side of the cliff with her on my back, her arms round my neck, and everybody on the bus would clap as we reached the top and she opened her eyes.

Lastly, she knows how to write about grief.

YOU BASTARD she shouted at the sea. YOU BASTARD. She heaved this out of herself with all her force. Then it struck her that the words didn't matter. The sea roared at her. She threw her head back and roared at the sea:

YOUAAAAAARH YOOUUUIIIAAAAARH

Her whole body bent and strained with the noise she was making; when the noise had gone all her muscles hurt. It was funny to do this, to be howling at the sea. She was amazed how funny it was and she laughed out loud, but that hurt too. Rain filled her eyes, it ran down from her face into her mouth.

She took as deep a breath as she could, filling herself until it was painful. Then she breathed it out, slowly, holding it back then letting it go. She breathed like this, small and drenched at the edge of the sea. She measured its distance with her eyes. She followed the line from the blank horizon all the way back to her own feet on the stones.

She was learning, she told herself. That's what she was doing, she was learning.

Previous reviews: Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey | The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera | Libyrinth by Pearl North | Ash by Malinda Lo | The Changeover by Margaret Mahy

Comments

[thesamefire.livejournal.com]

THAT IS WHY I WILL NEVER LIVE ON THE GROUND FLOOR. UGH. And I am so sorry about your dad's skis, that's absolutely awful :(((

we are playing you in men's curling right now, by the looks of it! i love hearing the swedish team bark at each other in swedish! i have no idea what they're saying but it is fun to listen to!

[turps33.livejournal.com]

That sucks about your dad's skies. It sickens me that some people think it's okay to take like that.