Carleigh and I don’t know why EVERY SINGLE BOOK we read in this class induces Floor Time™. Thanks, Dr. Scanlon.
This line sent us: “I don’t know how time moves or which of our sorrows and desires it is able to wash away.” I read this like five times and noted how it uses the word “wash,” associating time with water. Obviously water is a central motif in the book (the drowning, the “nu’o’c” thing…) but it hit me after reading this line that the whole book is about being lost in time and/or water. It starts off with Ba and the girl being afloat in the sea, drifting, and ends with a scene of her running into the sea as a little girl, presumably in an attempt to connect with her brother.
She says that even after twenty years, she expects her brother to come back out of the sea. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed if she doesn’t think about time like that.
Oof. Happy Friday, everybody! I’ll be on the floor 🙂
Is it an attempt to connect with her brother? I felt that the main character is somehow jealous of her brother. I think she trying to connect with his fate (not necessarily him). I have written at the end that she feels displaced and no-man’s land (the ocean) may seem like a more hospitable place for her. Death, in a sense, accepts all. Dark yet strangely beautiful.
Oh, I genuinely love the connection you’ve made between time and water. Two fluid things, two things that in this book are at once comfort and threat, two things she loses family members to. And that final image of her running into the sea – as her parents stand still, too. When I read it, I thought of it as her running forward in time (away from her parents, leaving them behind). But is she running backward in time (toward her brother)? Is it somehow both at once? Is there a way for the brother to be part of the future she imagines, if he’s with her as consistently as he seems to be?
Anyway. On a spiritual level at least, I’ll be joining you on the floor.