Finished on 10.5.25

I was so excited to read this after finishing the first one, and put it on hold at the library right away. This book takes the story in an exciting new direction, with the narrator deciding that she misses seasons and should start traveling to find snow. It’s such an interesting place to go with this book, and I found myself bristling a bit at her meandering nature again—but I obviously need to chill out.

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My favorite quotes:

“Last night when I went to bed I forgot to take the coin out of my pocket and put it under my pillow, but when I woke this morning it was still there. I can feel it as I roam the streets. If I had a dog I could say I was walking the dog. Now I am walking a Roman coin. An odd companion.”

“I can count my days and I do. I can write about them and I do. I have a small notebook containing strokes and numbers. I have a folder full of notes from the eighteenth of November, I have money and credit cards. I have a pen with the inscription 7éme Salon Lumiéres, I can write whatever I please, I can go wherever I please, I want for nothing.”

“The dog had lain on his bed because it was the closest it could get to the other dog. I was just in the way, the dog owner said. It tolerated me, he said. But the speckled dog would really rather have been alone on the bed with the other dog. The one that had died. I was just in the way, he said, and when the old dog died the speckled one no longer had any reason to lie on the bed. It retreated to a blanket in the living room.”

“I think of catastrophes great and small. I think of my own, I think of fresh catastrophes and of those that have had time to take shape. The catastrophe in the railway compartment is slight and breathless, it possesses details that would be private were they not so fresh. Perhaps she thinks I cannot understand her because I spoke to her in English when I entered the compartment. But it makes no difference. I am not here. I don’t think it matters whether I am here or not. In her world there is only a stunned daughter and a listening mother.”

“My father did not think it was stealing. He felt, rather, that the broadcasting of private phone conversations in public spaces was theft. Of other people’s peace and quiet, their privacy, possibly even their humanity. As if the speaker was sitting in their own private space and regarded the other passengers as fixtures and fittings: like a door, a seat, a luggage rack, he said. As if fellow passengers were not people but objects.”

“I see myself circulating through these seasons, returning to them, that I will have need of winter again, and of spring. I see myself having to create my own summers, that I am working my way toward a template, a pattern by which to live. I am filled with a strange excitement. There is something to look forward to: to the spring that I will build myself. But first I must have winter. Things have to fit. And in the spring I can look forward to summer.”

“I have grown used to these lightning strikes. I have grown used to the idea that nothing can be put off till tomorrow, that everything has to happen instantly and that, in my few encounters with other people, I always have to convince them that everything needs to be done that very minute, I can’t come back the next day, it has to be here and now because tomorrow is today, although I don’t usually tell them that.”