The Woodland Witch

Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage.  I don't think I've felt this confused about a novel since Combray . Truly, opening the book to two full pages of a spiderweb of characters was daunting, to say the least. It reminded me of the time I attempted to read a story wherein the cast was made up of 700 characters... safe to say that I was unsuccessful.  Moving past that, the childhood that Elena the narrator describes was to me, riddled with psychological clues--insecure attachment, abandonment issues, family issues (mommy issues, so to speak)--about how Elena's life might unfold. Unfortunately, I was not surprised.  The entire story--even the way it begins with an almost vengeful feeling from Elena in the prologue, wanting to foil Lila's plan to disappear by taking it upon herself to write the book--seems to me, as a third party, like an unhealthy entanglement. Elena and Lila are everything to each other in the most literal sense of the word--not in a romantic kind ...

 Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage. First of all, I hope all of you had a restful reading break, and enjoyed reading The Time of the Doves . As per usual, I find myself sitting down to write a little before making it to the end of the novel, but at this point I'd like to put down my thoughts before I forget them reading the rest of the story.  As some of you may have guessed from this week's title, I do not like Quimet. I think that he, alongside all the frustrating male characters we've encountered so far, make me even more uncomfortable because there is a good chance that one could encounter them in real life. There is no reassurance that they will remain fictional figures, any of us could meet a Quimet and that  is truly terrifying to me.  If Natalia represents a woman's life gone to ruin, Quimet represents the reason.  My goodness, the things he does to marriage's good name--if I can even give it a good name after seeing what it's done to poor, poor...