Another book I read not realizing it’s part of a “thematic” trilogy, so not really part of a trilogy. Anyway, this book begins with our lead character, a middle-aged woman, whose husband goes to a foreign country to bring back her boss, and ends up being murdered in the street. She doesn’t find this out until she’s at the airport to pick up both men and sees her boss and her husband’s coffin. From there, she inherits an uncle’s large mansion and taxidermy collection. It goes from there.
The from there is mostly for the reading, not really so much for the discussing, and what I mean by this is that this is a book completely subsumed (mostly in a good way) by tone. The tone through which the events and plots elements I describe above is quite interesting (and kind of detached) where she gets to explore these new circumstance not entirely through either guilt or shame.
I’m not sure I liked this book as much as I’ve liked other Lydia Millet books, and as is true with almost all slightly off-beat contemporary literature, I probably would have liked it better as an audiobook.
“Oh how the world reflected you in its unending streams of atoms, churning atoms out of which significance beamed–significance, but not purpose.”
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17573689-magnificence)