1/9/2019 – Pages 1 to 57
My first impressions of this book are quite great. I very much like Lionel Shriver’s writing style. He is quite descriptive not of objects or people but of actions and emotions. His descriptions are usually similes which link two completely opposite things and gives me a new perspective to look at the situation from. The pace of the book as well is perfect for me. Shriver stretches a few of the more meaningful part, giving me adequate time to meet each character and understand the situation, while also moving steadily past anything that is not of significance so I don’t get bored.
The book is actually a series of letters written from Eva to Franklin, and although some of them are about Kevin, a lot of them are actually about their history. There is a lot of insight into Eva’s life before Franklin as well. She describes how she always thought she would end up with someone quite quirky, maybe a vegan, a specialist in an odd field. But how in reality she found herself in love with a patriotic American who refused to drive anything besides a pickup truck. I think this unexpected turn of events set the scene for Eva’s character, someone who tries to plan and see her future but ends up with the opposite, quite like the situation with Kevin.
Only in one letter till now has an interaction between her and Kevin been explored, and it was at prison. This scene was quite heavy for me, we got to see her strength slowly slip. When she first started visiting him she tried to be like all moms, asking about the food and his friends. But over time she adapts herself to be more like him, think more like him, as if the only way to keep the relationship with her son is to start a whole new one. When she was leaving, Kevin said he hated her, and she responded but with the same. That scene hit me quite hard because I could never imagine the amount of emotional suffering a child must put their mother to in order for her to reach the point where she no longer loves them.
The struggle between trying to keep her life as normal but also as different as possible, I believe, is starting to take a toll on Eva. She tries to keep a job and do her groceries like everybody else, but isolates and punishes herself at the same time. I think that her need for a fresh start alongside something comfortable, might be what triggered her to write to Franklin in the first place. The balance between starting again and keeping normalcy is going to be an ongoing theme throughout the book.
