TW/ talks of death and suicide
A few months ago I went to Manchester to visit one of my friends. We went to a bookstore together and she pointed out a book that she was interested in. I instantly fell in love with the cover. It was soft pink, and the gorgeous drawing really made me curious about what it was about. It wasn’t until I found myself in another bookstore a week or so later that I decided to get it, its blurb pretty much sealing the deal.
Lilia Liska is eighty-one. She has outlived three husbands, raised five children and has seen the birth of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her attention to one particular strange little book: the diary of a long-forgotten man names Roland Bouley, with whom she had a fleeting affair.
Drawn into an obsession over this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her life, and she returns inexorably to memories of her daughter Lucy.
How does the past shape the future? How do we live in the face of the unanswerable? Must I Go considers these questions underlying an extraordinary life, exploring both the painfully finite nature of human existence and the infinite depths of human being
While the blurb is extremely promising, and one of the reasons why I bought this book in the first place, I think that it is a bit misleading. From the blurb it seems like Lilia is a gentle woman who had an important role in Roland’s life, and that her comments in his diary will revolve around her experience as someone who is part of his life. Instead, it is more of a commentary on life in the 1930s to the 1970s, mortality, memory and loss. While Lilia is reluctant to share her life story with anyone, too proud to believe that her life is worth sharing, she does give a glimpse into her thoughts through her comments.
Overall, the book was wonderfully written and very touching to read, though very slow-paced and sometimes difficult to get through. I am delighted to have read it and it will stay with me for a long time, but I sometimes struggle to pick it up and read it because of its slow pace.
What made this novel really incredible to read were the characters. While we only hear directly from two of them – Roland and Lilia – they all seem like actual people. It almost felt like I was invading their lives as I kept on reading, and I expected them to be actual people. However, that doesn’t mean that I thought they were loveable.
You can really feel as you’re reading that Lilia and Roland are flawed, and no matter how much you want to love them as your main characters, I just couldn’t. I still grew attached to Lilia and her antics, no matter how much I disagreed with her. She had some very interesting insights into life and relationships between men and women, especially during a very different time than ours. I think that this is one of the most interesting things about this novel. There aren’t that many novels written from the perspective of 80 something year olds, but I think that these characters are the one who can have the most to say. Their experience and voices are always invaluable in my opinion.
What threw me off the most were Roland’s journal entries. They are for the most part deliberately banal – as you would expect from a typical journal that is not meant for anyone to read – but it is what makes them difficult to get through, and I had to force myself not to skim through them. Overall, Roland’s journal entries made me think of Holden Caulfield form Sallinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and not for good reasons. He felt like a very self-centred character, focused on the male experience in the mid-20th century. He always looked down on the people he met and always put himself above others, even when he was the most naïve and inexperienced one in the room. He keeps on giving biased descriptions of the women in his life that show just how little he cares about women other from what they can give him.
Lilia’s comments are much more interesting, and she never hesitates to put Roland back in his place.
“A woman’s value, in Lilia’s opinion, “was not measured by the quality of the men in her life, but by the quality of the women in the lives of those men.”
Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?
Ultimately, I think that this novel’s main idea is that it is important to put your feelings to paper, and that we all want to be remembered. Roland himself says that the reason why he wants to write and wants his journals to be published is because he doesn’t want to disappear without leaving his mark on the world. In parallel, the same idea arises when Lilia is offered to participate in a writing seminar at her retirement home. While she refuses to take part in the writing sessions, her annotations on Roland’s journal work as her own memoir, filled with her deepest thoughts, and which will be given to her granddaughter after her death.
In a sense, writing this allows Lilia to deal with feelings that she believes are buried, mostly about her daughter Lucy, whom she had as a result of the affair with Roland, and who committed suicide, leaving behind her daughter Katherine. This novel is filled with moments where Lilia seems to try to explain Lucy’s suicide to Katherine, and the reason for her reaction to it, which at the time seemed to be cold and detached.
“But how do you speak to a granddaughter in her dead mother's stead? Can the responsibility to the dead ever be replaced by the responsibility to the living?”
The journal and its annotation work together to create a dialogue between Lucy’s biological parents and tries to work as an apology and explanation for the inexplicable. Because how can you explain your daughter’s suicide?
While I don’t think that this book is made for everyone, it is still very beautifully written and deals with themes that really relate to the human experience. It isn’t something that you will binge read, nor something that will get you out of a reading slump. But, it will move you and make you think.
“To be forgotten was a defeat. To be doomed to remember someone was a defeat, too.”
Blog Post ByJuliette
@a_spoonful_of_juliette
Comments