halfcactus

Read a couple of books that unexpectedly ended up pairing well, tone/vibes-wise: The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, a novel loosely based on a real-life 17th century Danish witch trial, from the perspective of one of the accused women's omniscient wax doll/poppet, and I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid, in which a young woman's road trip with her boyfriend to meet his parents for the first time (and probably last, given her doubts about the relationship) gets weird. I probably wouldn't actually have considered these similar if not for the accident of reading them back-to-back, but there's an aspect of a Greek chorus in both— in The Wax Child, a number of passages are packed-together snippets of conversations (e.g., women trading jokes and complaints over communal work like carding wool or gutting fish); in I'm Thinking of . . ., the first person POV narrative is interspersed with oblique, anonymous community gossip about a shocking local tragedy— and they're both just kind of... narratively unsettling? The Wax Child has the unhooked-from-time-ness of a story told more or less chronologically from the POV of a character who, basically, Sees All; Reid's novel takes a frog-in-boiling-water approach, the narrative peeling back layer by layer until it hits ( spoilers )

In War and Peace, since separating from his wife, Pierre has had an existential crisis and joined the Freemasons, because sure, why not. I had vaguely remembered his induction into the Masonic rites as a dramatic scene but this time it mostly struck me as unexpectedly funny, what with Pierre being the embodiment of tomorrow I'm going to lock in and turn my entire life around! it will definitely work this time!

Half an hour later, the Rhetor returned to inform the seeker of the seven virtues, corresponding to the seven steps of Solomon's temple, which every Freemason should cultivate in himself. These virtues were: 1. Discretion, the keeping of the secrets of the Order. 2. Obedience to those of higher ranks in the Order. 3. Morality. 4. Love of mankind. 5. Courage. 6. Generosity. 7. The love of death.

. . . But five of the other virtues {besides "love of death"} which Pierre recalled, counting them on his fingers, he felt already in his soul: courage, generosity, morality, love of mankind, and especially obedience—which did not even seem to him a virtue, but a joy. (He now felt so glad to be free from his own lawlessness and to submit his will to those who knew the indubitable truth.) He forgot what the seventh virtue was and could not recall it.

(Also funny, at least to me: the guy explaining the concept of hieroglyphs while Pierre stands there blindfolded thinking yes, I know what hieroglyphs are, and how "{a}s he was being led up to some object he noticed a hesitation and uncertainty among his conductors. He heard those around him disputing in whispers and one of them insisting that he should be led along a certain carpet.")