Is it just me or do books that weave a canonized poet's work into their own narratives seem pretentious? Despite that impression, I enjoyed this book. In the beginning chapters were kept to around three pages so I felt like I was really cruising but that pace eventually slowed as the content got heavier. The archivist's wife slowly descends into a debilitating depression that only gets worse when he tries to help by having her committed. Along with T.S. Eliot's words, history and the war is a central theme.
Pretentious excerpt:
Perhaps all children are solipsists; perhaps I was merely more of one than most. I don't know; I only know that when I was eighteen, reading for the first time those astonishing lines in "The Waste Land" -- I can connect / Nothing with nothing -- I felt like T. S. Eliot had stated exactly the terms of my life.
16 down, 10 to go.
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