This is a secret

[I am writing this after the household has fallen asleep.]

Clare: This is a secret: sometimes I am glad when Henry is gone. Sometimes I enjoy being alone. Sometimes I walk through the house late at night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking, or sitting, or taking a bath. Sometimes I lie on the living room floor and Listen to Fleetwood Mac, the Bangles, the B-53's, the Eagles, bands Henry can't stand. Sometimes I go for long walks with Alba and I don't leave a note saying where I am. Sometimes I meet Celia for coffee, and we talk about Henry, and Ingrid, and whoever Celia's seeing that week. Sometimes I hang out with Charisse and Gomez, and we don't talk abut Henry, and we manage to enjoy ourselves. Once I went to Michigan and when I came back Henry was still gone and I never told him I had been anywhere. Sometimes I get a baby-sitter and I go to the movies or I ride may my bicycle after dark along the bike path by Montrose beach with no lights; it's like flying.

Sometimes I am glad when Henry's gone, but I'm always glad when he comes back.

I must be the last person on the planet to have read Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. A friend had been pressing it on me, loaned me her copy, and I've kept it on standby for months. Being that I'd just read a story that featured a time-traveler's knowledge of the future in all its free-will-versus-determinism glory, now seemed like the right time.

Best book ever? I'll have to tell my friend, No. But very charming, and worth reading. I'm a little puzzled actually, because this friend loves science fiction and disdains romance; this novel, however, has just a hint of sf in its premise, which is mostly incidental to a first-class love story.

It does remind of a few books that I do love, namely, The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers (for the tone, the character interaction) and What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt (for what it says about absence being fully present). Also, the several quotes from A.S. Byatt's Possession has me thinking about rereading that book.

Part of me simply wants to find flaws in this book that seems to be everybody's darling. Clare's too perfect (her loving The Eagles, a definite flaw, seems out of character). The amount of sex this couple has is unrealistic. The lottery didn't seem fair. Some passages tried too hard to be poetic. But who am I kidding? I was late for work one day last week cuz I just had to read to the end of the chapter, and I spent a good chunk of Saturday teary-eyed as I finished it off.

Henry: [...] Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to contol my movement through space if not time and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will. As I run I dispace air, and things come and go around me, and the path moves like a filmstrip beneath my feet. I remember, as a child, long before video games and the Web, threading filmstrips into the dinky projector in the school library and peering into them, turning the knob that advanced the frame at the sound of a beep. I don't remember anymore what they looked like, what they were about, but I remember the smell of the library, and the way the beep made me jump every time. I'm flying now, that golden feeling, as if I could run right into the air, and I'm invincible, nothing can stop me, nothing can stop me, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing — .

This same friend who loaned me The Time Traveler's Wife wonders if I've read other books that jump around in the chronology, books with a nonlinear narrative structure. Of course I have, I thought, but titles fail me, and my bookshelves are staring me down. Possibly The English Patient, but I don't have a copy on hand to check. Can you think of others?

Hope in hopelessness

Maybe because I don't care for Mahler.

The Lost Prince, by Selden Edwards, has a romantic and time-travelly premise, but I never fully engaged with it. It is the sequel to The Little Book, which I haven't read and don't feel compelled to.

The Lost Prince starts in Boston, in 1898. Eleanor Putnam has returned from Vienna with lovely reminiscences and remarkable knowledge. She brings a manuscript she has written about Vienna's musical life; a jewel that will serve her in making her fortune; and a journal that outlines her future. Eleanor in essence leads a secret life, putting in motion events she knows must come to pass.

Spanning 20 years, the book is peopled by William James, Gustav Mahler, JP Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung. Eleanor sings Mahler's praises, so early in the reading of this novel I was inspired to put some on. And I was reminded that I don't really care for Mahler. Too watery. Too florid.

The narration mostly has the tone of a biographical account. There is detachment, but also a sense that the narrator is judging characters in light of how the narrator knows the story to turn out. It's an interesting angle that mirrors how the characters are burdened with their own foreknowledge, but it's to the detriment of forming trust with and extracting sympathy from the reader.

A lot of information is divulged only as its required, as if the narrator suddenly remembered that it might be useful for the reader to know something even though it occurred 14 years previously and there's been no mention of it till now. And as often occurs in biographies, when the "story" shifts to cover another aspect or character, some information is repeated, either to remind the reader or to reconsider it in a new light.

The title was a bit of a mystery to me. It's about halfway through the novel that it becomes clear to whom the title is referring, and only near the end that the title is explained (and it's not relevant at all). I feel the story lacks focus and takes a long time to decide what it wants to be about.

A good chunk of the ssecond half of the novel covers the devastation of the first World War, in the form of letters from the front and later in Eleanor's search of the hospitals and wards that house the unfortunates, unknown and unclaimed.

"There is a great deal of hope within the hopelessness of your mission. There are thousands of unidentified and unaccounted-for soldiers in the aftermath of this horrible war. The odds are on your side."

This novel is about 200 pages too long. The war sections contribute little to the plot; while the repetition of the horrors might work to great literary effect when used by some writers, here it's at cross-purposes with the biographical tone, and so it managed only to bore me. The text is very repetitive, to the point that I felt no guilt in skimming for several pages at a time.

Yet. The Lost Prince has a great number of interesting threads to pull on. The exercise of free will in order to attain that which is predestined. How the present, and even the future, informs our past. Jung's collective unconscious, and how our dreams can inform our waking life.

I know little of William James, and what I know of Freud and Jung is mostly learned from popular culture. I'd be curious to know how well their ideas are represented by Edwards. I wish Edwards had spent more energy on these men and their ideas than on the eponymous subject.