Sunday, February 1, 2015

Anyone Else Read The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells?

I both loved and hated this book. I think I loved it until the last ten or so pages--which makes my hate more bitter than if I'd been meh until then. I loved the prose. I loved the tension. I loved all the pretty sentences that made me stop and think about the people we love and lose.
But I really hated the ending. I think Greer took an easy out. Greta didn't arc--she just sort of flattened and picked an easy road. By so doing, she made all the other Greta's subject to her choice, and that made her seem weak, selfish, and cruel.
I think it would have been much more satisfying if she had realized that life is simply what we make of it. We don't get to choose who lives, dies or stays. We have to go forward, making the best of things.

But Greer did write pages and pages of lovely prose. Here's some of my favorite lines.

You can't marry such hopes--they won't be faithful.

What is the perfect world--except the one that needs you?

I understand that it wasn't that you didn't want to be with me anymore, but you didn't want to be yourself--the one you were with me.

It was wearying, getting everything wrong.

A shift in the weather, and we are a different person.

The darkness had drained all color, so we were in silent-movie tones.

They aren't fixed, they're just back.

There is the thing you hope for, and then beyond it, there is the thing you dare not hope for.

Everybody knows the thing that would change your life, and yet no one is friend enough to tell you.

They think I should be someone else.

No comments:

Post a Comment