A friend posted about randomly getting this from the library and enjoying it and mentioned that one could read it in 20 minutes. A few hours later we were at the library and sure enough they had it, so I brought it home, and sure enough, you can read it in 20 minutes. And it’s really great. It’s a collection of sentences from a diary that Scanlan found at an estate sale, written by an elderly woman from 1968-1972. They’re marvelous in a way that is hard to explain. “Terrible windy everything loose is traveling.”
Scanlan has a real ear for the incredible, gnomic qualities of someone else’s speech. You see it in Kick the Latch (which I really enjoyed), too. But this is also an excellent companion piece to Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries — both are fascinating ways of using estrangement to create a heightened awareness of what day to day life is like, and the strange beauty of the language that seeks, almost unthinkingly, to capture it.
Kasia Reads 