I'm a little over halfway through this book and I have no idea what it is about, except perhaps, erudition looking for a creative outlet and pushing onwards in the hope of finding one.
Part Two has just concluded. I've no real idea of how Part 2 was distinct from Part 1 and I don't expect to find out in Part 3.
There was a point, a few chapters ago, where I thought I might finally, like a man digging in what might be a shallow grave but could just be disturbed earth, have heard my shovel hit a solid piece of plot. There was a death. Secrets were shared. A main character seemed frayed. Our narrator appeared to be about to undergo a seismic shift in her perceptions. And then...
...she and her father went to Paris for the Christmas vacation and everything stopped.
The narrator's precocious erudition continued to war with her teenage angst and her father continued to exhibit a compulsive need to tilt at intellectual windmills and wait for applause that would never come and which he would anyway find contemptible but these things have become like the noise of a plane in motion as heard by passengers, constant but only significant if it stops unexpectedly. The whole episode in Paris might as well have been replaced with a quote from Virginia Woolf: "Time passes".
Still, to paraphrase Macbeth,
"I am in dense text
Stepped in so far that, should I read no more,
DNFng were as tedious as go o'er."
So, onwards to Part Three, now travelling more in hope than expectation.
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