Memoirs of a Muse
Jun. 21st, 2007 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellenkushner, a 2006 novel by Lara Vapnyar - I'm about to return it to the library, but wanted to type in for you this quote from p. 100:
He is, for her, like a book written in a foreign language and translated into another foreign language. She can't read him. The only way she can interpret him is to construct the meaning of his words and gestures based on her assumptions, which in their turn are based on what she wants to believe. Most people act like that in the beginning of their love affairs, when our lovers are still foreigners to us. We don't understand them and we interpret them the way we want them to be, while building dream castles based on illusion and hopes. Then, of course, we get to know them, the illusions crash, the hopes go.
Salvador [a Spaniard she meets in Paris] is a foreigner in every sense of the word for Polina [who is Russian], and the time that it takes her to understand him is unfortunately long enough for her to build an impossibly tall castle of illusions and hopes, so tall that it would be simply fatal to let it crash.
I thought it expressed well a certain point we were also reaching for in The Fall of the Kings - a very non-traditional point for a genre fantasy novel, which is, I suppose, one of the things that makes Kings somewhat interstitial.
Here's another bit, just because I liked it:
He had the true, genuine laugh of a happy man, happy not because he was naîve and thought that everybody around him was good, but because he was so kind that he forgave people their follies and loved them anyway.
He is, for her, like a book written in a foreign language and translated into another foreign language. She can't read him. The only way she can interpret him is to construct the meaning of his words and gestures based on her assumptions, which in their turn are based on what she wants to believe. Most people act like that in the beginning of their love affairs, when our lovers are still foreigners to us. We don't understand them and we interpret them the way we want them to be, while building dream castles based on illusion and hopes. Then, of course, we get to know them, the illusions crash, the hopes go.
Salvador [a Spaniard she meets in Paris] is a foreigner in every sense of the word for Polina [who is Russian], and the time that it takes her to understand him is unfortunately long enough for her to build an impossibly tall castle of illusions and hopes, so tall that it would be simply fatal to let it crash.
I thought it expressed well a certain point we were also reaching for in The Fall of the Kings - a very non-traditional point for a genre fantasy novel, which is, I suppose, one of the things that makes Kings somewhat interstitial.
Here's another bit, just because I liked it:
He had the true, genuine laugh of a happy man, happy not because he was naîve and thought that everybody around him was good, but because he was so kind that he forgave people their follies and loved them anyway.