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I ought to have done my homework this weekend, but I did not. I read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake instead. It's a wonderful book: a page turner, despite having only a wisp of a plot, with elegant prose and vivid, layered characters.
These characters are the great triumph of the book but also its great frustration. Over the course of the book one grows to know these characters very well, to know in particular Rose's family with the kind of intensity that one only knows people one has lived with - but without ever understanding them. Their pasts, their desires, their inner worlds remain inaccessible.
The main character, Rose, can sense people's emotions when she eats food she cooks, but despite this ability, deep understanding of the people in her life eludes her. The problem doesn't seem to lie in Rose, but to be inherent in the human condition. Though moments of warmth and connection brighten the story, it's suffused with delicate melancholy: ultimately, every man is an island.
It's a book about the spaces between people, the gulfs in relationships which remain unbridged and maybe are unbridgeable. It's a story about emptiness. Satisfaction remains elusive, both for the characters and the reader - I at least found the ending frustratingly inconclusive - but that's a feature, not a flaw.
These characters are the great triumph of the book but also its great frustration. Over the course of the book one grows to know these characters very well, to know in particular Rose's family with the kind of intensity that one only knows people one has lived with - but without ever understanding them. Their pasts, their desires, their inner worlds remain inaccessible.
The main character, Rose, can sense people's emotions when she eats food she cooks, but despite this ability, deep understanding of the people in her life eludes her. The problem doesn't seem to lie in Rose, but to be inherent in the human condition. Though moments of warmth and connection brighten the story, it's suffused with delicate melancholy: ultimately, every man is an island.
It's a book about the spaces between people, the gulfs in relationships which remain unbridged and maybe are unbridgeable. It's a story about emptiness. Satisfaction remains elusive, both for the characters and the reader - I at least found the ending frustratingly inconclusive - but that's a feature, not a flaw.
