“She looks at me intently, as she always would — pale, beautiful, raven-haired, they would have called her, had she been a heroine though she was not, I could have told her; neither then nor now — not to me, not to anyone. No one will remember you, I want to say to her. No one. But I don’t have the heart. Her wrists are so thin — is she already starving?”
Books are a funny thing. You can love a book for entirely different reasons, and the person sitting next to you could hate it. This such book, I loved for a variety of reasons. Not for its ease of reading, when in actuality, it is meaty, difficult, and sometimes exhausting to dissect the who and the what. Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women, struck me. As a woman, as a daughter and a granddaughter, there is a connectedness that is almost unnamed, and difficult to grasp. In her novel she brilliantly captures this essence. You must read it, you must fall in love with Evelyn.
“I find it is the dark of the night when you least expect it — whatever this thing is — regret, perhaps, but not, it is bigger than that, more epic, somehow, padded and full and weirdly historical: this restlessness, this discontent. You’ve done it all wrong, again, and you were going to do it perfectly. You’ve lost the forest for the trees.”
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