Men don’t like to make decisions, they want God or women to make them.
My mood recently
Over the last week, I had two unread books on my shelf: John Updike’s Marry Me and Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg. Thank you very much, booktok!
I wanted to read Sagittarius first but recently, I can’t seem to take any more idyllic European stories where one ponders on the comedy of life, viewed through yet another string of observations about the mundane. I hope you know the type of story that I’m talking about. I want a zoomed in perspective on the weird creature that is the human being, in all our milky, putrid ways of being so that it is genuinely a little pitiful. I have no idea why.
The book
The writing
It’s incredibly easy to read, but I found myself flying over the boring, mundane descriptions about nature and still life around them, like the Conant’s elm tree and the linear developments found in the children’s reactions etc. I’m sure they meant something but I’d read one line and forget the next second because I just didn’t care. I needed to know what any of the four primary characters were going to say next, but mostly Ruth and Richard, the offended spouse-plaintiffs.
The story
John Updike unraveled the characters slowly and carefully because you already know Jerry and Sally two are assholes, and yet just like in real life, they are able to surprise with more asshole-ry.
There is nothing necessarily new about Jerry and Sally’s affair. It’s the man who deludes himself into a fantasy and the affair partner who thinks of herself as entitled to a new marriage simply because she’s unhappy. But of course, it is always someone else’s duty to address her neuroticism and she is just a poor soul. I was frustrated with Ruth’s decisions and found it difficult to relate to her stance, but even then, there was a logic to sympathise with. Richard was the much more likeable of the bunch, even if none of them are entirely innocent.