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AngandRyan
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Country: United States
State: Michigan
Metro: Muskegon
Birthday: 9/10/1981
Gender: Female
Interests: art, music, reading, faith, ryan, family, running, truth, friends, good conversation
Expertise: teaching, empathy, expressing myself with music, telling long stories with too many insignificant details, seeking affirmation by being nice.
Occupation: Education/training
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
6/16/2005
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| This was another amazing story. It was difficult to face so much pain and loss...but it was also so full of redemption and truth.
But I don't really care about the book right now.
This is all I've been 'reading' lately...
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| I haven't been so captivated by a book in a while.
The setting, the ancient and secretive Geisha district, Gion, is so exotic and distant. It doesn't even seem real or possible...
Behind its facade of haunting beauty the district turns out to be a viciously competitive place where women vie desperately for men's favor, where a young girl's virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder, where personal trust is almost nonexistent, and where no woman can afford even to dream about love or happiness.
Sayuri is sold to a Geisha house as a very little girl by her dying father (who fears for her life as an orphan in a remote fishing village). As she comes to understand her new destiny, she struggles between her desperate desire to succeed and become a great geisha and her natural and childlike impulse to escape from this strangely beautiful yet horrifying slavery.
Her story is beautiful and desperate...and incredibly sad.
I wish I could keep reading....
But I'm done, and there is no more.
I can't wait to see the film version.
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| I can't wait to read this one by E.M. Forester. I loved Howard's End. (Did I write about that one from this summer? I'll have to look back and see.) I still haven't seen the movie, but I'm excited to see some of my favorite actors tell the story.
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| Just finished this novel by the same author that wrote The Secret Life of Bees (a beautiful and rich story that I loved). I can't say that I liked this one quite as much.
It told the story of a woman who was 'happily' married to a loving husband for over twenty years. They loved each other deeply, but seemed to just co-exist sometimes. Feeling trapped and stagnant in her domestic and predictable life, she goes home to be with her sick mother on the island where she grew up. In her solitude on the island, she comes to realize that her husband had taken the place of the father she had lost as a little girl, and they were both living out their 'roles' as father and daughter rather than co-dependant husband and wife. Despite her husband's patient pursuit and genuine desire to understand her struggle and even give her space, she tries to 'find herself' by having an affair. Ultimately though, she realizes that this new relationship won't make her comfortable with herself either.
Maybe I'm not old enough to really know what this woman feels. I do know that I have strong moral biases that affect my sense of truth and will always be reflected in my judgement, but I always have a difficult time fully empathizing with this story. I've seen it countless times in real people's lives and relationships, and I've tried to just be understanding. I think I do understand this desperate need for fulfillment, identity, and purpose...that sometimes marriages can be suffocating (though I've yet to experience that). But I get so frustrated when hurting people make choices that will only bring more hurt and disappointment.
So for most of the novel, I kept reading...getting more and more angry, yet hoping that there would be redemption in the end.
It wasn't a fairy tale ending. Everything was not neatly and perfectly resolved, but it was worth finishing. And despite my ranting...it was worth reading.
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