Fiction, 1965
Sometimes, after I finish certain novels, I wish I had a hammock on hand. When the end of a novel moves me, I would like to physically replicate this internal sensation by swaying through the air, as if the words I just read can ripple through me as I lay in a stupor. Sometimes, a cigarette will also do.
Reading The Millstone, it’s hard not to underline every line, not to crowd every paragraph with asinine annotations of “:)”, “;)”, or “:0”. The words are simply powerful enough to feel a need to scribble. The reader is immediately introduced to Rosamund Stacey, a woman working on her thesis (Elizabethan sonnets) in 1960s London. The pubs are full, the beer is flowing, eroticism litters the streets. She has a habit of seeing multiple men at once, never sleeping with any of them, but letting the other assume she is. This continues until one day, she has sex for the first time and gets pregnant. Between the bare plot are musings on what it means to be a rich socialist, harboring intuition, and the complex intricacies of socialisation.
Drabble’s writing is so excellent that you can randomly pick a page and find words strung into a sentence that can only be called exquisite. For you, I tried this experiment and landed on page 21: “Perhaps we were both about to see each other in an unpleasantly revealing social light which would finish off our distant pleasantries forever.” Delectable. Who doesn’t need a good sway after that?
Song: Fade Into You - Mazzy Star
Film - Fleabag Season 2 (Is this cheating? If it is, “My House, My Rules, My Coffee”)
I wait for these every day that is not Monday, good morning