Love, redux

[radegund]

I'm just back from a lovely holiday in Kerry, on which I finished reading Anne Enright's 2002 novel The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch.¹ There's a paragraph towards the end of the book, just after Eliza has had her first baby, that accosted me with its rightness²:

And then later he is in the crook of my arm. They say you must love a child - but not too much! They say you must do this, or that. But a word like 'love' means nothing to us. It is not even a feeling I have for him, or he for me. It is a silence, or very like a silence. It is the inside shape of me - and it is the outside shape of him. It is nothing that you could stick a word between. (Anne Enright, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, London, Vintage, 2003, pp. 214-15)

What she said.

¹ Mental Health Advisory: I loved the novel, but it does contain some bits that may distress parents. There are certain things that I could've read fairly easily before I had kids, which I now find very painful. Death-of-children stuff, mainly. There's not a great deal of it in this book, but it's there, and I wanted to mention it because I know some of you have a similar reaction.

² Phrase borrowed from gibtsdochnicht.

Comments

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

How come you managed to finish a book and I got very little reading done? Mothers aren't supposed to have free time!

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Simple, really: I read about 4/5ths of it before going to Kerry :-)