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sunshowerdandelion) wrote2025-05-25 05:28 pm
sunshowerdandelion) wrote2025-05-25 05:28 pm
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25.05.2025 (1): Frog Hospitals
I loved it. I can tell why I loved it, this go-around as well, but I can't deny the dressy prose takes a little more untangling, a little less gawking. I think that's what I was doing the first time I read Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Gawking. The prose is dressy and very pretty, achingly personal, very meticulously constructed. The author is very much trying her best, I think, and I love, love that. I think this book goes along with my other favorites of the bildungsroman genre, The Lives of Girls and Women, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/The Member of the Wedding, and Housekeeping.
It's very intimate. I liked the sense that the character, Berie, is telling the story to us and determined to keep her dignity. That's why the dressy prose is there. But all the same she dutifully tells us her insides, and it really is a fairy-tale, even with how world-weary and worn it is. The writing is sharp and well-planned, ornate. The blurb part that says it's a 'hand-painted Russian Easter egg' is right - the writing must have been painstaking, the editing even moreso, and things flow rather well except for the bits with French in them (and that's only because I can't read French).
I really, really liked the parts towards the end where she describes "the anteroom of girlhood." It really was magical for her, for the Sils-at-the-time, for the Berie-at-the-time, and I really resonated with the feeling of lost youth - although mine wasn't as shining, thankfully. And the wonderful, wonderful line: "the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed - I wanted it back! - those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself."
In short I really, really like this book and will comfort read it again and again.
It's very intimate. I liked the sense that the character, Berie, is telling the story to us and determined to keep her dignity. That's why the dressy prose is there. But all the same she dutifully tells us her insides, and it really is a fairy-tale, even with how world-weary and worn it is. The writing is sharp and well-planned, ornate. The blurb part that says it's a 'hand-painted Russian Easter egg' is right - the writing must have been painstaking, the editing even moreso, and things flow rather well except for the bits with French in them (and that's only because I can't read French).
I really, really liked the parts towards the end where she describes "the anteroom of girlhood." It really was magical for her, for the Sils-at-the-time, for the Berie-at-the-time, and I really resonated with the feeling of lost youth - although mine wasn't as shining, thankfully. And the wonderful, wonderful line: "the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed - I wanted it back! - those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself."
In short I really, really like this book and will comfort read it again and again.