"Brooklyn"

[fiefoe]

I tried Colm Toibin's "The Master" before and couldn't get into it. This novel is simple and small in its focus, and reminds me of "My Name is Lucy Barton" a bit. I intuited the tragedy in the last third of the novel.

• Now, she felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared, and this, despite the fear it carried with it, gave her a feeling, or more a set of feelings, she thought she might experience in the days before her wedding, days in which everyone looked at her in the rush of arrangement with light in their eyes, days in which herself was fizzy with excitement but careful not to think too precisely about what the next few weeks would be like in case she lost her nerve.
• There was no day that passed without an event... The house was, she thought unusually almost unnaturally happy.
• It struck her on one of those nights she laid awake that the next time she would open that suitcase it would be a different room, a different country. And then the thought came unbidden to her mind that she would be happier if it would be opened by another person, who could keep the clothes, shoes and wear them everyday. She would prefer to stay at home, sleep in this room, live in this house, do without the shoes and the clothes. The arrangements being made, all the bustle and talk, would be better if they were for someone else, she thought, like her, someone the same age and size, who maybe even looked the same as she did, as long as she, the person who was thinking now, could wake in this bed every morning and moves as the day went on in these familiar streets, and come home to the kitchen, to her mother and Rose. <> Even though she let these thoughts run as fast as they would, she still stopped when her mind moved towards read fear or dread, or worse, towards the thought that she was going to lose this world forever, that she would never have an ordinary day again in this ordinary place, that the rest of her life would be a struggle with the unfamiliar.
• She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that is must be the prospect of home.
• Eilis was fascinated by [...] his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them.
• She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep.
• in this waking time his presence, once so solid, lacked any substance or form; it was merely a shadow at the edge of every moment of the day and night.
• And then it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance.
• 'She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.