Eggshells by Caitriona Lally
My rating: 3/5 cats
I used to bring home damp and gleaming shells, I used to think if I found the perfect shell I would find the shape of the world, but I was always disappointed. When I washed them later, their sea-gleam would trickle down the sink, leaving a dull sheen the colour of dry lament.
this book is 100% character-driven, and how you respond to it as a reader will depend on how long you can appreciate/tolerate being immersed in this character’s particular voice and perspective.
vivian is a sweet oddball of a woman living in dublin whose idiosyncrasies make it difficult for her to connect with others. the book opens with vivian being given the ashes of her recently-deceased great-aunt, with whom she’d been living after her parents died. she tosses a handful of the cremains into envelopes addressed to her great-aunt’s friends, and when she runs out of those, she chooses strangers from the phone book to be recipients of the rest.
it’s those kinds of actions that have always made her a bit different from those around her. she’s tolerated, but pitied, dismissed as “poor vivian” or “away with the fairies.”
she tries to socialize and initiate conversations with other people, mimicking behaviors she observes, but more often than not she ends up frightening people with her intensity and oddness, and she’s alone in the world, entrenched in her aunt’s house, finding comfort in the smells of her unwashed body, the mouse-riddled clutter of her hoard room of treasures, living in her own fantasy world searching for thin spaces that lead to other worlds, overly concerned with the feelings of inanimate objects, tracing her daily routes onto paper into a shapes she can identify and name, and trying, unsuccessfully, to care for her pet yellowfish.
she has family – an older sister who is also named vivian, but older-vivian has a husband and children she does not feel comfortable exposing to her sister’s unpredictability, so vivian decides to make a friend. she advertises for this friend on trees across dublin, specifically for a friend named penelope, and she manages to connect with a penelope as odd and damaged as vivian.
at first, i was really charmed by her colorful, almost poetic observations and the unusual language she used to corral her experiences:
–I wake early and it’s cold, so I decide to keep my night clothes on under my day clothes like stealth pyjamas.
and
–Penelope laughs, the sort of laugh that makes me think of wolf cubs being reunited with their mothers: it’s the tail end of despairing.
but it’s a relentless barrage of flaky fancy and it can be a bit overwhelming. one understands why people find talking to her so off-putting, even when i found myself agreeing with her musings:
–We should be allowed to choose when to use lower and upper case letters; having to use a capital letter at the start of a sentence is like saying the firstborn son gets all the money, no matter how vile he is.
and
–…I change channels to a film. Two cars are racing through narrow streets lined with stalls. The cars plunge through the stalls, people scatter, tables of fruit and vegetables and meat and fish are knocked and sprawled and squashed and smashed. I want to see the film about the cleanup, the film about the people who are injured by the cars, the film about the people whose livelihoods have been ruined by a man in sunglasses who values his life above all else. I feel like I’m the only person rooting for the fruit seller instead of the hero..
vivian’s personality and “offness” is a combination of nature and nurture both. nature because, well – nature – i lack the clinical background to diagnose her – she seems to have bits and pieces of many disorders culminating in a general oddness, and nurture because her abusive parents told her from childhood that she was a changeling, causing her to spend her adult life trying to find the doorway back to her real world.
i’m a fan of using supernatural or otherwise magical elements to explain real-world phenomena, and i thought this book was going to be about an actual changeling who doesn’t fit into our world because she is not of our world and everyone just perceives and dismisses her as “crazy,” but she’s simply responding to things the rest of us can’t see. but it’s not that, and it’s not even ambiguously, mayyyyybe that.
vivian’s is a charming madness, and as a reader, you root for her and feel sympathetic towards her in every one of her failed attempts to connect with a shopkeeper, bus driver, neighbor, but by the end of the book, after being just inundated by quirk and whimsy, you start to get a headache just trying to process it all.
it’s funny, lyrical, always surprising, but when you take away the language, it’s a bit insubstantial. and that’s not a bad thing for many readers – appreciating a book for its language is just as meaningful a distinction as enjoying a book for plot or setting; language is one of nancy pearl’s ‘four doorways to reading’ after all. but while i do like unexpected, lyrical language myself, i also need it to be wrapped around an engaging story, and this one feels like it drifts aimlessly and things will happen, but there’s no real direction or closure to it.
at first, vivian reminded me a little of a Heather O’Neill character, in her memorable and unusual perspective, but she’s a much more timid character than any of o’neill’s, and because there was less actual story here, the voice became a bit too saccharine for my tastes.
i still loved many of her lines:
Penelope may look like an ice cream but she acts like a cone.
and her discomfort with bath-taking made me laugh:
…I can’t relax when I smell like strawberry bubblegum and feel like dirty dishes.
but this was a ‘like, not love’ book for me.
