Quickly, simultaneously, he falls in love with Maxine, the house, and Gerald and Lydia’s manner of living, for t know her and love her is to know and love all of these things. He loves the mess that surrounds Maxine, her hundreds of things always covering her floor and her bedside table, her habit, when they are alone on the fifth floor, of not shutting the door when she goes to the bathroom. Her unkempt ways, a challenge to his increasingly minimalist taste, charm him. He learns to love the food she and her parents eat, the polenta and risotto, the bouillabaisse and osso buco, the meat baked in parchment paper. He comes to expect the weight of their flatware in his hands, and to keep the cloth napkin, still partially folded, on his lap. He learns that one does not grate Parmesan cheese over pasta dishes containing seafood. He learns not to put wooden spoons in the dishwasher, as he had mistakenly done one evening when he was helping to clean up. The nights he spends there, he learns to wake up earlier than he is used to, to the sound of Silas barking downstairs, wanting to be taken for his morning walk. He learns to anticipate, every evening, the sound of a cork emerging from a fresh bottle of wine.
Maxine is open about her past, showing him photographs of her ex-boyfriends in the pages of a marble-papered album, speaking of those relationships without embarrassment or regret. She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realises that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way. This, in his opinion, is the biggest difference between them, a thing more foreign to him than the beautiful house she’d grown up in, her education in private schools. In addition, he is continually amazed by how much Maxine emulates her parents, how much she respects their tastes and their ways….There is none of the exasperation he feels with his own parents. No sense of obligation. Unlike his parents, they pressure her to do nothing, and yet she lives faithfully, happily at their side.
- From The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
[This is a rather long passage to write from a book. As is, possibly, the excerpt from Tanizaki's exquisite Some prefer nettles. Both are favourites and as I was typing them out, I wondered why I like them so much. Why, indeed, they are so different from, for instance, After a while or, even, Dance me to the end of love. Not just in terms of genre or other obvious reasons but because, as I grow older, and as I endeavour to be a writer, what appeals to me is not just the thought behind something but the language used. And I am a great admirer of spare writing. Both passages are stark, minimalist but just how much they say, just how vivid are the potraits they paint.]
