I always have high expectations when opening an NYRB Classics book, but this one felt a little slight. The relationship between the narrator and the subject, is interesting but the machinery of the narrative is really rather basic. A thing unfolds.

Update: Book is being praised on Twitter again, reminding me that that’s what led me to this book. Many smart and discerning people love it… de gustibus I guess.

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Thoroughly investigating the predicament of being an attractive young woman in a misogynist society. Could easily be merely aggrieved or narcissistic material in a lesser poet’s hands, but Gatwood is clear-eyed enough to build a world of it.

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Lighthouses appear, as do waves. Sensibility has to come before style, is what I take away from Woolf. One has to apprehend the ephemerality of consciousness before one can write with such a light hand about the dark.

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