05/12/22
The first thing that will come to my mind every time when I'll be thinking about this book will be: black tea and heartache. I drank an unhealthy amount of it, while drifting through people's minds and both the tea and the thoughts often left a pleasant, but bitter aftertaste.
This is no easy book to read. It was my first experience with Virginia and her writing and I don't know what I was expecting, but when I started to read this little book at three in the morning I got very suddenly and very completely lost and confused. I had no idea whose thoughts I was reading, the consciousnesses (what is this word) merged together and the timeline was a mystery to me. The opening is especially brutal in this, it still looks like the hardest part to make sense of. So I closed it and a few days later, when I was less tired, started again. And fully focused and prepared for her writing, it was much easier. For me at least, it still doesn't have to be for someone else even the second time around. And someone else maybe won't have any troubles at all, but I still think her writing can be objectively labelled as difficult.
The second time felt like lying in the ocean, being carried by waves, each whispering and talking about something else. The change of the waves is almost unnoticeable but you learn to tell them apart. You need concentration for this book, but at the same time not to focus too hard and just… let it carry you. The imaginary was often insanely beautiful, the philosophy and psychology aspects interesting and there were some quotes that spoke to me on some primal level and still linger. When you spend a few nights with someone's thoughts, almost unfiltered, you will miss them a little when the book is closed and it's quiet. Your own stream of thoughts seems even louder then and there is something different about it - little pieces of their thoughts that became yours and stayed. Or they were always yours, now you just finally hear them. Maybe we are really all just different parts of one merged consciousness - that was exactly how reading this book felt like.
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