17 of 52

I didn't love this book until about halfway through it. Up until then, I just kept thinking, "This is so....French." (What did I mean? Who knows. That it was gently satirical, overly philosophical, wordy, obsessed with social class; that it was about things with capital letters: Art, Beauty, Meaning, Futility...maybe. (And in that slow-moving, meditative way, it reminded me of Gilead. But a French Gilead, laced with existentialism instead of American Protestant theology.))

But halfway through I started to love precocious, suicidal 12 year old Paloma and the ugly widowed concierge Renee, and their little essays on such topics as beauty and time and culture. I started to identify with and like them more as characters, and then I was hooked.

The writing was gorgeous and so skillful.

"Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart and my stomach all like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within a never."