This took me a long time to read, for some reason, because it’s quite short, and I was mostly riveted when I did read it, I guess because while the tone is somehow quite familiar (coolly analytical), the kinds of family dynamics described are quite alien to me — having parents, whom you live with, who are basically strangers. I used to wonder how kids could possibly grow up not knowing the languages of their parents (I understand it much better now — it’s hard raising a bilingual kid, especially when your partner doesn’t know the other language), but this is an even more radical alienation, I think. And a very grim take on multi-cultural and mixed-race identity. Or maybe grim isn’t the right word; just because we are accustomed to celebrating multiculturalism, I suppose it doesn’t mean that detachment is a bad thing. But it does seem rather austere. I know, you might be saying, that’s just her prose style, but there is a distinct sense of emptiness, a sort of blank space where one might expect a self.
This is perhaps what makes the two big turns in the later part of the book, the first about ballet, the second about a love affair, seem apropos. The ballet section, to me anyhow, is about being just passionate enough about something to know that you aren’t passionate enough about it to really lose yourself inside it. And then the love affair, well, the simplistic reading is that it’s compensating for the missing father, maybe, but I think there’s also a fascination with foreign-ness, a lack of assimilation, and also a relationship that takes for granted a certain amount of distance. I don’t know. It made perfect sense to me — all the parts fit, though it’s hard to explain how or why.
Kasia Reads 