Entry by @axlrosstumanut
SPOILERS AHEAD
For the most part, reading this novel makes you wish that the end or the big reveal happens sooner than later. I’ve read Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, both of which are gripping novels that tackled the theme of guilt. Perhaps having knowledge of the Second World War gave me ideas on what kind of tensions could possibly arise in these novels, and it helped build anticipation on how the stories would turn out.
I am afraid this is a review that will never end. For I know next year I’ll come to it and think differently of it. Not in the sense of how it is written, but what it wants to say to me. I’m not normally the type to go back for a second reading, but I just know I’m not done with it.
A reader once commented about my work: my chapters are unusually short. I don’t know if my physical limitations constrained me to write more succinctly, or if a decisive nature of my words just flowed through me in that period. I found that Bauby wrote the same way. His chapters were short but full. I had been avoiding this book for so long, thinking it to be a most somber one. How could it not be? He wrote the entire thing with his left eyelid. But surprisingly, the book was quite hopeful, its tone almost unapologetic about the author’s illness. Sure, it was a mammoth that sat on his fate, but after a while, it was just that – a...
Submitted by: @marissa_carmela i didn’t want to breeze through this, but maybe that’s just how it goes when you’re really rooting for someone to finally come up for air after swimming in murky waters.
As a freshman lawyer, I was tasked to research on some questions in an environmental case. A retired justice sat to preside over our brainstorming sessions, with the entire slate of newly minted lawyers recruited to help him. He was so old that he dozed off every time we began to recite our answers. He then would wake as we were about to conclude and deduce an opposite idea from what we’ve just posited. But we’d keep our silence, out of respect, and let the senior associate steer him to what we just said.