The Planetarium

Review

My review will be shorter than the average paragraph in this book. The paragraphs are so long and so punctuated by ellipses that after a time my eyes began to slide across the pages and shift up and down and all around trying to track the internal monologues of our characters. I resisted this at first, feeling that I was losing some sense of coherence. Eventually, I gave up on this and understood that the impression of scattered internality is at least a part of the point. These characters are all wrapped up in themselves, and in how their expressions of self communicate status and prestige.

I feel like I have some thoughts on what it feels like to come from lower class origins and feel the need to put out some sense of not-that, but I feel like that passed through me relatively quickly and now my (very) many insecurities are associated with other things. So… I’m not sure. This is a book club pick, and I’m really interested to hear what those folks think about this.

Notes

• p13 - Why pretend? It’s no use. All her efforts for nothing . . . Her hopes . . . her struggles . . . To attain what? In anticipation of what? For whom, after all? Nobody comes to see her for weeks on end, for months . . .
• p21 - Oh, if you don’t think about it, you can hardly see anything, but now that you’ve told me, I do see the filled-in spots . . . But that as just it, that little defect, that minute flaw, that little wart on the face of perfection . . . it must be dominated, annihilated…
• p38 - But he won’t be taken in. No use to kick. With a firm hand, he holds the mask which he had plastered down on her face from the very first, that grotesque, outmoded mask of the vaudeville mother-in-law, of the old woman who sticks her nose into everything, the tyrant who keeps her daughter and son-in-law well in hand.
• p56 - That’s where it comes from, this sensation of weakness in the legs, this fear which she feels again now—our bodies are never wrong: before consciousness, they record, enlarge, assemble, and reveal with relentless brutality to the outside world, tiny, intangible, scattered impressions—that sensation of flabbiness in her entire body, the shiver running up her spine…
• p64 - There’s only one victim here, and that’s myself. My life is ruined . . . All I want . . . a little calm, freedom . . . And I have to listen to all these stupid things . . .