LiToC Day15

The story of Urbino & Fermina's marriage begins get fuller, and I begin to like them, and the book more.  We've got these stages:

• Courtship 
• Honeymoon
• Return from Paris, unhappy years living at the Urbino family home with his sharp tongued, repectable mother
• Another sojourn in Europe, where they become in love again
• The return from Europe on the matriarch's death, and a period of greater happiness.

It summed up on p224, saying that after 30 years they were like a "single divided being" The a nice passage about overcoming the "conjugal conspiracy" - rising above the petty hates and feuds that can arise when two people just share their lives in a marriage together without thought or depth, when they "loved each other best without hurry or excess".

It's a great paragraph setting out what a marriage could be, what it should be, and I like it for that, but somehow it lacks warmth, emotion, depth of feeling. It feels almost sentimental in this context.  I find it hard to see and picture either of them as actual people, they appear in the text as social shells, with inner lives for sure, but nothing I really connect with.

I've just got to the affair that Fermina scents (literally - she smells Miss Lynch's health on his clothes). It's another piece of repressed sensuality, as he palpates Miss :Lynch's full beauttiful body. But I've found that I am speeding over text and language that I should be reading more slowly. Partly it is because I need to go out and get some fresh air, common or garden ordinary reasons to stop reading, partly it is because, again it overflows with ripeness and eroticism that isn't, well, that erotic, it's too controlled maybe?  I haven't finished this passage - maybe it will become more compelling.