Monday, 3 November 2014

The Stone Diaries

I’m going to start by saying I simply loved this book.  It’s sort of just the life story of a woman, but it resonates.  I don’t know what it is at the moment, but I’m really into the whole story of a life thing.  I loved Cat’sEye and I love The Stone Diaries.  The stories and lives written about aren’t that extraordinary, but they’re deeply interesting.  It might be the sense of the daily grind building up to the bigger picture that they end up creating.  At one point in this book one of the characters describes her daily existence, ‘the alarm going off on winter mornings when it’s dark and cold.’  It’s a comfort to know it all adds up to something.

The novel tells the story of Daisy Goodwill.  Born in Canada in 1905 and dying in Florida in the 1990s, the book encompasses her entire life.  It’s odd at times, her first marriage is awkwardly and shockingly unfulfilled and her second is to a man who helped raise her.  This one has a pseudo-incestuous feeling to it.  Her life is lived in stages, in way very few are.  Love begins after her first marriage ends, and work follows that.  It’s neatly divided.  While I don’t believe for a second that anyone’s life is actually like this, or even was like this for a housewife in the 1950s, it allows for snippets of each event in Daisy’s life and structured character evolution.  It keeps things fresh too.  Ninety-odd years of ‘Daisy did the washing on a Saturday,’ would be bloody tedious.

What I like about The Stone Diaries is the way it uses documentary evidence as though it were are real biography.  In the middle of the book are photos of all the main characters excepting Daisy herself.  Entire chapters and events are told in an epistolary way.  Letters make up the bulk of multiple chapters and after she dies the story is told entirely through newspaper clippings and snatched moments of conversation.  It adds another element to it all.  Rather than just being Daisy’s life story we’re left with impressions of Daisy from her loved ones.

The last couple of chapters about Daisy’s old age and death particularly struck me.  It could be because my grandmother was currently very sick when I read it, and has since died.  The two chapters reflect on the gap between Daisy’s family and her; the infrequent trans-Atlantic visits from her daughter and the calls arranging care between her three children are all too familiar.  After she finally does die, her children are left piecing together her life from the objects she leaves behind.  Her life is reduced to lists of places lived, illnesses suffered, scrawled notes and old books.  They don’t discover her previous marriage until after she dies.  Reading it and knowing that my grandmother would die soon it made me wonder what she’s left, what we’ll find that doesn’t fit with the picture we hold of her and the things we’ll completely misinterpret.  I’m sure it will happen; there’s always something…


I’m currently reading Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.  Again, I’m coming to the stark realisation that I know nothing about African politics.

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