While I loved The Golden Notebook, I hated this so much I couldn't even get half way through. Her characters are all just hateful. Which is the point, I suppose, but it's hard to get into a book when you just want to throw it across the room.

Very, very good. It's so penetrative. The characters are just dissected, the way they think. Written in 1985. Things were so different, but the same of course.

A quote - from the afterword, not the story - that seems like the truest thing I've ever read. "Living is like going up a mountain: every time you go a little higher up, the view looks completely different. "

Este libro lo empecé porque alguien me dijo que me iba a identificar mucho con Alice.

Efectivamente, Alice me llega mucho, me hace pensar mucho. Tiene una excelente opinión de sí misma y hace de todo para que el resto de la gente también tenga una excelente opinión de ella y la ame. No es consciente de ello, creo. A veces hace cosas horribles y egoístas y las tuerce de tal manera en su cabeza que hasta te ríes de lo absurdo, pero para ella es totalmente un asunto serio: “Lo hice porque es lo correcto, es lo justo, es lo que merecen”. A veces solo está ahí para hacer cosas amables y que la pisoteen y sentirse frustrada porque no la reconocen: “Pero es que nadie te pidió que lo hicieras, Alice”. Aún así le duele. A veces la odio mucho y a veces quisiera poder abrazarla y decirle que no es por ahí, no. O sí, hazlo, anímate.

Lo más grande de Alice es que parece una persona. No es buena ni mala, solo es una mujer que va viviendo conforme sus ideales, conforme las telarañas de su cabeza, conforme la gente a su alrededor lo va permitiendo. A veces duda. A veces tiene unos desplantes de fantasía bárbaros. A veces parece hasta discapacitada de alguna manera, su estructura de pensamiento no es tan típica. Es “rara”.

Los demás en el libro también son tan reales que a veces me provocan náuseas. Humanos sucios, humanos débiles, humanos estúpidos. Jóvenes queriendo jugar a ser terroristas, pero sin mancharse las manos. Yendo a marchas, pintando paredes, haciendo fiestas y emborrachándose luego del tema. Viviendo la vida en la miseria injusta del capitalismo, pero aún así, cobrando sus cheques de asistencia. Se nota que no saben bien qué es lo que hacen, son ingenuos e inocentes. Hasta cuando dicen “soy totalmente serio en eso” uno piensa “jajaja, no”.

Creo que la autora tiene un gran don para expresar la personalidad de alguien con sus pros y contras. No son héroes y villanos. Todos son perfectamente despreciables y perfectamente comprensibles en su entorno. Son frágiles. Son hermosos.

La historia es un poco extraña, porque realmente no llegas a ningún lado. Conoces a la gente un poco, va pasando la historia en esa casa que Alice llega a arreglar para formar un hogar, mientras que los demás piensan que están formando la base de un partido. Los ves crecer, los ves retroceder y fracasar, los ves volver a intentar. Los ves. Hasta que llega el gran evento y entonces termina. Como un slice of life.

Me gustó mucho el libro porque la historia no es tan relevante como la gente. Eso es algo más o menos nuevo para mi.

There are a lot of defenders of the notion that satire doesn't actually have to obviously criticize whatever odious mechanisms are incorporated into its workings in order to call itself such. Those people can stay in their paradisaical lah-dee-dah-I-Live-In-A-Vacuum-Land and far far away from me. If I wanted to engage with normalizing of Everything Fucked Up In The World instead of deconstructing the lot entirely, I'd go nearly everywhere else other than the world of satire. True, not all is written in my vein of goal. True, even some of that which is in my lane does more harm than good. However, thinking's a good thing to do. I like thinking. I'm going to keep on starting there rather than within the brick wall a great deal seem to prefer.

The interesting thing about empathy is how easily it is trained. It does not communicate. It does not seek to change itself. What it does is push the empathetic individual to latch on to the most appealing targets that will be the easiest to "fix" when the more painful aspects of the biological capability arise. This compatibility between empathetic and empathized depends on a variety of factors: aesthetic appeal, ideological structure, proneness to violence, etc, etc. In main concerned character Alice's case, we have some special characteristics: civilized hospitality is All, violation of civilized hospitality (spanning from personal to governmental to international depending on Alice's pertaining awareness) is Evil Incarnate, and blind (and memory troubled) adherence to the former will Always End Well. When the successful track record runs long enough, it is hard to remember the holes and the luck.

In terms of not being like myself, an armchair critic who continues to reside in a well off suburban area, Alice gets full marks. In terms of her shitting on with one hand and entitling herself with the other to the fruits of capitalism, colonialism, feminism, and any other isms she cannot cure with a batch of soup, Alice is nothing more than a maternal figure with a need for a peculiar breed of urban warfare thrills. Armchair critic I may be, but as a member of a settler state, I am aware of how easily my death (among many) could appear in a chapter that touched upon "The Driving out of the Invaders of the North Americas" in the longer history of things, if the continent would even still be termed said Eurocentric such. Unlike Alice, I do not pretend to be entitled to any more death and destruction for "the greater good."

There are huge numbers of protests going around my country right now, and there will continue to be so while politics commits certain groups to the sector of Open Season. Those who see politics as useless, solely the fault of the populace, a mass hallucination of the young, a laughable thought of community in the state of supreme individualism, or solely the act of voting, walk away. Walk away, and only come back when you can tell me why this book is a tragedy, and how it came to be that some forms of slaughtering human beings for nothing are acceptable, and some are not.

It dragged in the middle but I stuck it out and I'm glad I did; it picks back up and the ending is interesting.

As a fan of Lessing, I liked this one. Published in 1985, I half-expected this to have aged poorly Thatcher's Britain? A squat filled with a communist-splinter faction wanting to ally themselves with the IRA? Surely this couldn't remain relevant!

But it does.

Terribly ironic in tone, Lessing has captured the reality of the well-intentioned, but woefully misguided detritus of the middle class. Lovely!