I was behind you
Posted by Gordon on June 20, 2010
At first a narcissistic monomaniacal guy in the mould of Nicholson Baker; a lot less funny, perhaps a bit more serious, eventually you accept he is in a destructive relationship. He dances around his position on it, quite a lot of ‘I am too weak ‘, a fair bit of ‘she’s too controlling’. He justifies his equivocating as similar to, if in a different league from, DV. Are we meant to buy the downplaying here? iI it just a book about how a woman can be as bullying as a man, albeit in different and generally less physically injurious ways? But large parts of it ring true, both the obsessiveness and the carelessness, the guilt and the semi-strident assertion of some kind of right to be free .. followed closely by guilt at the thought the uncriticised acceptance that to claim such a ‘right’ is not ‘ethical’. Free of of what exactly – can’t change yourself, which is part of the problem here (ie the dishonesty of not saying what you really think).
And it goes into even riskier territory – she is black, her problems – or his problem with her – comes from racial differences, a heritage of oppression that we can only conclude cannot be bridged by love!
But the other woman – who hits on him in highly improbably circumstances - holds out the prospect of a happiness he is not entitled too.
She even makes me think of a lunch at the Hotel Ivoire , in Abidjan, one July in 1982, when watching the clouds in a limitless sky made me long for a place that was too absolute, too abstract, too beyond, something I couldn’t express and which, already, at that young age, I felt I’d never find, , and unchanging world of landscapes, skies and lights identical to those of this wold but not of this world, less concrete, less down-to-earth, or something. .. p120
It’s a well structured novel as well. But somehow it is hard to enjoy. Maybe he knows too much, plays too much with culture on top of the story?
But it’s impossible to enjoy happiness consciously.The humdrum appearance of reality, with all its interference and flaws always gets in the way. At the time its inevitable, you have a vague felling that something good is happening, but you’re too busy experiencing it in real time to enjoy it properly, Haven’t you noticed that happiness is always a memory, never the present? I remember reading somewhere “Happiness is when the light is good and you’re not necessarily aware that things are going well.” That’s what lost time is, that’s what any time is-it’s the impossible equation of wanting to hold back time which never stops passing. I’m sure this must also be why human being try to pair up; to make moments of happiness last as long as possible without constantly having to look for them in the past, to try and make things last with the woman who once intoxicated us despite the sobering efefct of time. Because happiness is a woman,isn’t it? Don’t you agree? ‘As happy as with a woman’ wrote Rimbaud. Mind you his poem’s called ‘Sensation’. which just goes to show how much self-persuasion is needed to identify happiness with a woman. Because in fact a women isn’t the emolument of happiness, she’s just the suggestion that [lah blah] … . happiness .. is the absolute felling I get when when I listen to certain songs or when the sky is a colour I particularly like. Every time I feel the need to share moments like this in order to give them more substance I think of an ideal woman … p80-81
