Below are my highlights from my 2014 Reading List selection.
This is a beautiful story that I will want to read again some day soon. A man's wife dies in a tragic accident (for which her family blames him) and this novel is his recollection of her and his love for her. Heartbreaking and beautiful read.
You have 23 highlighted passages
Last annotated on June 2, 2014
Où sont les axolotls? she
wrote in her notebook. Where are they?
their windblown fragments
of speech like lines experimental poetry.
Soon we were watching the
iridescent pastels of the sunset spreading over the water and blazing in the
sky above the strip of jungle between us and the ocean, the whole place
throbbing with bird calls, as if every glowing tree and plant hid a boisterous
bird or two, and we both felt stunned into separate peaceful meditations on the
crazy sublimity of what we were witnessing, each of us filling with a sense of
mystical wonder and loneliness that merged into one mystical wonder and
loneliness together.
It was as if we’d just
been married in a secret ceremony conducted by the birds.
Now, I have to guard
against the danger of confusing how Aura’s mother regarded me or spoke to me
with any aspect of how Aura did—one of death’s corrosive betrayals.
The way she pronounces
Frank when we’re alone, and the way it wakes up my heart. I can hear and feel
it inside me, that soft near-honk caressed by plush lips, a down-stuffed vowel
that floats on her breath past n and lightly smacks k. But in her writing, in
her e-mails, she always called me Paco.
Love is a religion. You
can only believe it when you’ve experienced it.
Moments of temporary
separation and absence and even loss that were like little rehearsals for what
was coming. Not premonition, but actual visitations, death coming through its
portal, taking Aura away, putting her back, receding back into its hole.
To reach the beach where
our hotel was, we’d turn off the highway onto a long stretch of dirt road, the
car hitting the softer surface at nearly highway speed, bouncing and seeming to
lift off and float through a brown cloud of churned-up dirt as if riding one
prolonged note of José José’s sonorous voice, and that sense of dislocation
again, of being propelled through a portal, from an in-between world, back into
the beach town of Tulum.
never understood it, this
awful urge to push her off the subway platform while simultaneously pulling her
to safety, rescuing her from phantom fiends but also from myself.
Love does change your
behavior, it does force you to aim for a higher standard. change
want my friend back, I
thought; we talked in signs and formed a great team. Maybe I feel sick of
people not understanding what this is like, but it’s not like I wish for anyone
else to live through this. I stamped out Aura’s cigarette and lit another one. Hold
her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that’s my advice to all
the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply.
Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same
alive as dead, always. Aura Estrada.
You always felt destined
for stardom of one kind or another. But the fear that maybe that wasn’t true
wouldn’t leave you alone. That you were no more than the classes you’d taken,
the schools you’d attended, the books you’d read, the languages you spoke, your
scholarships, your master’s thesis on Borges and the English writers, and so
on, but nobody unique, with a talent only your own. You were desperate for
something that was yours alone. I was yours alone, but that isn’t what you
meant.
Impulsiveness: an
ungovernable excess bubbling up from within.
Maybe memory is
overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and
I’ll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it’s like juggling
hundred thousand crystal
balls in the air all at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every
time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open
inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever. I
wouldn’t sell that tube of sticks for a thousand dollars.
“As a wave ages, it
gradually grows higher, longer and consequently faster.” Where was Aura’s wave
that night, as we slept in our bunks in the hostel in Oaxaca? Was it already a
murderous old wave, or still a relatively young one,
born only the night
before in a tropical storm maybe only a thousand miles out to sea? There’s a
Borges poem that ends with the lines: ¿Quién es el mar, quién soy? Lo sabré el
dÃa Ulterior que sucede a la agonÃa. Who is the sea, who am I? I’ll know the day
that follows after the agony—agonÃa, in this context, could be even more
accurately translated as “death throes.” Am I the wave?
Inconsolable doesn’t mean
that you are sometimes consolable. The way things are has seemed right to me;
it’s all been as it should be, or as if it could not be any other way. I even
feel grateful for some of the appalling things that have been said to me—Why
can’t you go back to being the way you were before you met Aura?—because they
starkly demarcate a border, showing you a truth about where you are now,
whereas a supposedly sensitive comment might only soften that border a little,
but never make it less impenetrable. You have to, can only, live this on your
own.
Aura said, I don’t want
to die. She said, There’s so much I want to do. No quiero morir
really don’t have much
time left, I thought. It’ll all be over in a blink. I thought of Juanita and
Leopoldo and their hatred of me, and their determination to erase from Aura’s
history our love and marriage. In a way, I thought, it’s as if they took those
windows down and instead of putting them away and keeping them safe, they stole
and hid them. These words came to me: Your hatred can save me. Your hatred can
even free me. Because it leaves behind an emptiness that I have an obligation
to fill in for Aura and me. Those are the words that came to me in that church.
