The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

Quaintly reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a real paper edition, so fo course can't easily copy the quotes into this blog - though I'm guessing that someone somewhere has quoted the passages that struck me hard as well.  Let's Google and see. 

"Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty had remained"

No one else has thought to quote it. It's a perfect summary of the feeling that remains when a loved one has gone away.

Oh and I was a bit unfair to Breaking Bad - in that the Ambiguous Last Redeeming Act was the only possible way of ending the series with any kind of closure. Not quite just the beauty remaining, but a sense that we had got away with it even if Walt hadn't.

Thursbitch, Boneland Alan Garner, Breaking Bad (warning: SPOILER if you haven't seen the last episode)

It's sad reading the shrill cries of disappointment of people who read Boneland wanting, expecting the same safe/frightening/comfortable swords and sorcery of the first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingaman and Elidor, but it's entirely understandable. Alan Garner's moved on, and the medium through which he was trying to show/write his first books is long lost to him, just like my childhood readings of the books. All his books became bitterer and harder up to Red Shift, then sighed and sat in the poetic with the Stone Book Quartet. After that the books just scream of things nearly said, but unsayable.  There is a deep pain that tries to articulate itself in Thursbitch and Boneland, and set against the venal knowing psychoanalyst it feels more real, though harsher, more present, though inexpressible. Both books have an intense struggle in them, sometimes just local name after local name reverberating in the text, saying this is the land we lived in and its still there, weatherbeaten and mysterious, sometimes pages of spare dialogue that doesn't quite work in its hint of inexpressible forces unspoken and hinted at only in the tone or rhythm that the reader can give in the reading of it.

And then there was the last episode of Breaking Bad, with the expected (by me anyway) and obligatory (why I expected it) Ambiguous Last Redeeming Act.  Did Walt call for Jesse to be present so that he could kill him too, then, seeing the state he was in dive on him to save him from the hail of automated bullets. All far too simple, in its way.

LiToC Day 4

An epistolary love affair, as tense as anything in Clarissa, approaches its culmination, with the white carnation.  It was a short read this morning, just a few sentences before a shower, and I have cross contamination from the world of online on demand series from Netflix.  Having watched Lost in Austen, as an antidote to the growing evil and tension in Breaking Bad, I can see that love and decorum are an unholy mix, as Amanda Price finds out, when the world she dreams of becomes more complicated and difficult than we thought. LiToC also has the savagery of the constant civil wars as a background, just as Breaking Bad has the wars and feuds between the cartels. Which is better, which is worth more? What are our concepts of worth, well,  worth.