Fox and Goose

Obsession has been the subject of both these books, but rather different ones. 'How to be Human' by Paula Cocozza (who should get herself a website) was the one the library had after I read a review of 'Speak to me' in the Guardian. In it Mary, recovering badly from a recent breakup, becomes obsessed with a fox who visits her garden. She is jealous of the neighbour couple's 'perfect' life and tiny baby and is plagued by inadequacy and insecurity. Her imagination runs wild, along with the fox, and she thinks she has formed a bond with it. Does the fox really deliver the neighbour's baby to her doorstep ... it seems unlikely? It felt more like a story about an emotional breakdown, and she uses the fox, like a force field, to defend herself from the controlling boyfriend when he tries to inveigle himself back into her life. It was surreal but utterly engaging, magical realism allowing the reader to enter into the world she finds herself in and just go along for the ride. 

"Mary had spoken quietly. But the trees were listening, and all the half-awake things in the woods were listening, and in her ears her voice boomed. She scrambled to a stand, tugging down the ankles of her jogging bottoms against another assault on the nettles. Her ears buzzed with a distant drone. She strained in the direction of the scent, trying to glean some reliable outline from the darkness. 'Are you there?' she called again. She felt herself to be in the eye of an intense, unlocatable gaze. Not a shadow flinched. She stared at the place where she thought she smelt him. 

'It's me,' she said again.

She pictured his ears pricked into two pointed portals opening up their dark, Gothic chapels, snuffing out all the night sounds like wicks till the only flickering was her breath. She inhaled with a flutey whistle, which winged its way towards him. Soft and sad." (p.181)

'The Book of Goose' by Yiyun Li is about Agnes and her childhood obsessional friendship with Fabienne. Fabienne makes her life more exciting, is the leader in all their adventures, but you sense as they have gotten older she is wanting to grow up, where Agnes wants things to continue the same forever. They live a dull rural life in a nowhere small town, and knowing their lives will unfold in a predicable and unavoidable path Fabienne instigates their writing of a book of disturbing stories that the local postmaster takes to a publisher. The ensuing media interest is avoided by Fabienne who refuses to put her name to the book, encouraging Agnes to take the limelight. It results in Agnes being taken to England to a finishing school, which she hates. Poor Agnes, I felt like everyone was using her. Fabienne just seems to enjoy having a pawn to control. The publisher and the school headmistress are just exploiting her celebrity for their own gain. But maybe Fabienne has done her a favour by forcing her out into the big wide world? This one quote I noted down seems to sum up everything:

"Nothing is more inexplicable than friendship in childhood. It is not companionship, thought the two are often confused. Childhood companionship is forced upon the children: two playmates whose parents like to share a drink on the weekend, a boy and a girl assigned to sit next to each other at school, families renting the neighbouring holiday cabins every summer. Childhood friendship, though it has to meet the same geographical and temporal prerequisites, is something rarer: a child does not seek to bond with another child. The bond, defying knowledge and understanding, either is there, or is not; once a bond comes into existence, no child knows how to break from it until the setting is changed. It baffles me at often songs and poems are written about love at first sight: those who claim to experience the phenomena have preened themselves, ready for love. There is nothing extraordinary about that. Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens." (p.107-8)

Much reading happening ... very little blog posting. Many library books need returning. Trying not to beat myself up about it.

Stay safe. Be kind.