Identity
Really enjoyed the book, right up to the last couple of chapters where things seemed to go off piste a bit too much and came to an end a bit too soon for me. The book was written in 1996 and the absence of anyone in the story having a mobile phone is notable – when somebody goes out there is no way of quickly telling where they are and I kept thinking ‘just phone or text them!’
That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a levelling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status.
this is the real and only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah memories between friends, would long ago have disappeared.
No, what she needs is not a loving gaze but a flood of alien, crude, lustful looks settling on her with no good will, no discrimination, no tenderness or politeness – settling on her fatefully, inescapably. Those are the looks that sustain her within human society. The gaze of love rips her out of it.
But no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.