Molly McCloskey

There is such wisdom in Molly McCloskey’s writing. This is a book about love, marriage, affairs, and aging told from the perspective of a middle-aged woman looking back at her life. Her relationships to her husband, lover, and parents form the biggest part of it, but she also writes about her experiences in NGO work around the world and makes sober assessments about the nature of mankind. She seems to write effortlessly as she blends together emotions, humor, and pathos, and through it all there is great honesty. The sexual aspects of the affair hinted at by the book’s title are very restrained, but all the more erotic because of it, especially when the narrator is so intelligent. Highly recommended.

Quotes:
On aging:
“Now I am old enough to know that there are people I would like to see again whom I have already seen for the last time, there are places I dream of returning to that I will never revisit, and that though a few things do come around again and offer themselves, many more do not.”

On Americans:
“I had seen that what gave rise to the greatest derision was the tendency of Americans to be both credulous and easily impressed.”

On death:
“When I returned to Nairobi after her funeral, I felt my mother everywhere. I was awash in an indiscriminate tenderness I neither expected nor understood. Everything moved me. Everything – from a birdcall, to the green of the grass, to the children playing soccer on the pitch near my home – overwhelmed me with its life. I swung between a lightness of being that bordered on vertigo and a sorrow that made the least movement difficult. In my grief, I felt awakened to the world, and a strange, acute euphoria sometimes stole over me. What I felt, in fact, was perpetually astonished.”

On love and marriage:
“I read once that to commit to love is to commit to love’s diminishment. Which means that commitment is less about optimism than it is about realism – accepting that love is doomed to become less of itself, and proceeding anyway, in the faith that one will be equal to that truth when it arrives.”

On mankind:
“Then Harry says that the difference between nations is the degree to which acts of everyday barbarity are tucked away, conducted out of sight, and that what we call civilization, and what we know as peace, is only the papering over of what we really are: violent, venal, full of fear.”

On men and women:
“Harry keeps eyeing me but doesn’t comment. He is doing that thing men sometimes do. You tell them something big and confusing, something that’s really rocked you, the sort of thing that would make a woman scoot forward on her chair so that the two of you could parse the thing to death, and they say nothing. And you are never sure if they are holding it there, in silence and respect, letting you sort it the way they sort things, or if they are simply at a loss, unable to cross easily from the territory of information to the territory of feeling.”… (plus d'informations)

Alice is an American living in Ireland, and When Light is Like Water chronicles her reflections many years down the line on an affair she embarked on and its aftermath.

I found this to be an enjoyable, quick page turner. McCloskey offers up interesting perspectives around the affair and Alice's marriage, depicting well the many layers to relationships and the rashness that was easier to jump headlong into rather then facing her doubts about the marriage. Having Alice look back at the affair through the passage of time worked well - as a reader we got inside her head during the affair, but we also lived out how her opinion of her husband and the marriage changed as she got older.

4 stars - I didn't overly feel much for the characters, but it sucked me in nonetheless.… (plus d'informations)