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sunshowerdandelion) wrote2024-07-17 06:43 pm
sunshowerdandelion) wrote2024-07-17 06:43 pm
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Day 63.1: The Moons of Jupiter - Chaddeleys and Flemings - I. Connection
A story in two parts. The first one, Connection, is sort of loud for an Alice piece in that the protagonist's husband is very blatantly unsympathetic (first person thing probably), but I really loved the push-pull of nostalgia and 'worldliness' (as in, the pull of anywhere other than Dalgleish, the fictional Huron County town). The aunts in the first story were wonderful, and I really loved the moment where the protagonist tries to love Aunt Iris, who's visiting the protagonist in her new upscale, urban home... but then fails to. The subjunctives really sell how ambivalent the protagonist is about her aunts and the 'worldliness' and her 'background':
Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
But then, after Aunt Iris reveals that she's not an object on nostalgia, does not represent the 'good old times' and begins to pooh-pooh the 'good old times' of the protagonist, allying herself instead with the snide snob husband, and not two pages later the protagonist says:
I was dishonest when I said that I wished we had met elsewhere, that I wished I had appreciated her...
And then at the end she flip-flops again and gets into a row with her snob husband defending... not exactly Aunt Iris, but her 'background' (which the husband has tried to wring out of her), and holding fast to the notion that the past exists, and can be returned to. The last paragraphs give an extremely beautiful and haunting coda, and, I think, represents the protagonist defending her history and nostalgia but also being surprised that the past, so vivid in memory, can cease to be or turn out to not be true at all.
The story is full of instants of ambivalence like this. The bit about the Chaddeleys' grandfather and his murky ancestry, the snobbishness about England, the trade in dubious histories and gossip. The past isn't solid, and I think that's very wonderful.
Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
But then, after Aunt Iris reveals that she's not an object on nostalgia, does not represent the 'good old times' and begins to pooh-pooh the 'good old times' of the protagonist, allying herself instead with the snide snob husband, and not two pages later the protagonist says:
I was dishonest when I said that I wished we had met elsewhere, that I wished I had appreciated her...
And then at the end she flip-flops again and gets into a row with her snob husband defending... not exactly Aunt Iris, but her 'background' (which the husband has tried to wring out of her), and holding fast to the notion that the past exists, and can be returned to. The last paragraphs give an extremely beautiful and haunting coda, and, I think, represents the protagonist defending her history and nostalgia but also being surprised that the past, so vivid in memory, can cease to be or turn out to not be true at all.
The story is full of instants of ambivalence like this. The bit about the Chaddeleys' grandfather and his murky ancestry, the snobbishness about England, the trade in dubious histories and gossip. The past isn't solid, and I think that's very wonderful.