By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart
My rating: 2/5 cats
when i was thirteen, i had a journal. and i would lie on my tummy and kick my feet in the air and record my tiny thoughts.
when i was fifteen, i had a journal. and i would smoke a joint and lie on my tummy and record my huge earthshattering thoughts.
when i was nineteen, i had a journal. and – well, let’s save something for the biopic, shall we?
i don’t have a journal anymore. and you know why?
because i write huge purple monsters of sentences and only end up making myself small and shy when i come across them years later.
this book suffers from many of these sentences.
i should have known from the first page:
I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire.
ugh. i can feel raymond carver hurling an empty bottle of booze at this sentence in disgust, and for once, i am with him.
there is a way to be evocative and complicated and beautiful all at once, “the smile on your face was the deadest thing alive enough to have the strength to die,” anyone??
this?? this ain’t that. and as an opening sentence it just stuck in my craw and tainted the rest of the book.
i like crisp prose, clean lines, smart phrasings. this seemed too self-indulgent – too emotionally bloated. too much “why use one word when you can use ten and still say nothing??” going on.
Not God, but bats and a spider who is weaving my guilt, keep the rendezvous with me, and shame copulates with every September housefly. My room echoes with the screams she never uttered, and under my floor the vines of remorse get ready to push up through the damp. The cricket drips remembrance unceasingly into my ear, lest I mislay any items of cruelty’s fiendish inventory.
oh, yeah?? is that what shame does?? it copulates with houseflies, does it?? gosh, i hope the maggot gets shame’s eyes…i have no patience for this sort of thing.
Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour.
i say no thank you.
brigid brophy‘s introduction is excellent. i read it last, of course, and it made me appreciate the book so much more in retrospect, and it also reminded me of the several parts i did enjoy. but i have to give it two stars cats, because i really didn’t enjoy reading it. there were moments of great beauty, but too many parts where i was just gagging on her prose. i am all for pain and howling emotions, but isn’t it the responsibility of the writer to marry the vulnerable raw nerves with craft?? it is true there were many moments where i was totally on-board with her writing, but when it was bad, it was very very bad.
and, oh, what’s this??
someone has come to interrupt my ravings…it’s me – a week later!
okay, so i have been really sad for a couple of days now. and i have reread great swathes of this book under the influence of my own ragged emotions. and i am ashamed to admit that i like it more now. i have to keep the two-stars cats for that is how i felt when i really read it, but might i suggest reading this when you are in the throes of some sort of emotional tidal wave?? it was not meant for happy eyes. although there still isn’t any shame copulating with any houseflies here at my place.
