domingo, 6 de setembro de 2009

My Sister´s Keeper



Okay. I´ve just finished reading the interview with the author in the back of the book, so NOW I´ll finally return it to you, C, and you´ll be able to spread the weeping-leukemia-story joy to the girls.
I don´t really know if I like Jodi Picoult or not. I know she´s got style. I know she has that annoying habit of stopping the narrative just as it´s getting good and inserting some long lost memory (honestly, does that ever happen in real-non-middle-age-crisis life? I don´t think so) and then going back at the story when you´ve already forgotten all about it. I know she can work the first-person narrative so you don´t die of boredom. I know she likes to include all the polemic she can put her hands on. And I specially know she´s a cruel author - and not the Stephenie Meyer they-raped-and-left-her-to-die-in-the-cold-freaking-night sort of cruel, but the 'Making plans is challenging God' sort. And for all of that, I look foward to reading her other books. But the thing about her interview is that she tried to put a reason behind everything, and I mean everything, and that seemed like forcing it. Even if she did quote The Catcher in the Rye. Not everything happens for a purpose. I guess she´s more Freudian and more metaphorical than I´d like.
But then again, if you ignore the interview you can put meaning into the bigger, screaming things. Brian being a firefighter, for example. It´s great because then she can include all the fire and the rescuer wanting-to-be-deep kind of sentences without sounding too bold. But him being the only one who works in the household is already huge. Not only does he have somewhere to escape to whenever Kate´s issues get more complicated, but he also gets the perspective that Sara so irritatingly lacks (that combined with the astronomy factor is pretty fantastic).
Sara is the character that most bothers me. And Jodi Picoult makes me feel guity about it, afterall she is the mother of a dying little girl and that must be excruciating and blablabla. True, she should feel like the world is about to crack over her head, but she also should be a mother to all of her children. She´s so focused on Kate possibly relapsing again that she doesn´t see her husband or Anna or Jesse, and they´re all screaming for her attention, and it might be a little too much for one person, but just add that to the list of unfair things. The whole part where she describes her pregnancy and delivering Anna is just maddening, she treats her not like a baby, but rather like an organic... thing. The only one excited about having another girl is Brian, and even so, when talking about the night she was born, neither of them stood by her side, they all ran to Kate´s hospital room. That, in my non-mother non-sister view, is called neglecting. Reading how she acts and what she thinks, you kinda want to scream and point out the fact that Kate has been fighting leukemia for 13 years, and Sara has been focused on the bad all through them. What´s the point of sacrificing her children, husband and herself just to keep on being miserable?
Other than the leukemia-part, the book also has tons of sibling relationship issues, which looks new to me because as an only child I always picture it romantically. It all sounds much more complicated now: Kate feels like everyone is giving up things for her (which is true, but not her fault), Anna feels like she was only conceived because of her sister and therefore not really wanted for who she was, but what she could give; Jesse feels like he disappointed everyone because he wasn´t a match and can´t do anything for Kate. Everyone feels bad. Come on. (It´s like that House episode, with the Chinese adopted girl and the later biological ones: the adopted felt like she was disposable since they had managed to have children of their own, the biologicals felt they were disposable because they hadn´t been chosen. Everyone felt bad. People are really messy, aren´t they?)
And if you, like me, tend to hate those dying-cancer-guilt, Buy Me, sort of best seller, behold: there´re nice romantic plots parallel to the dying, and nice human characters that will bewilder you. And bewilderment is just too good to be missed.
Julia is on my Wanna Be list right next to vampire Jodi. (unnecessary comment, but she´s greeeeat. how could i not talk about julia this whole time?)
reeead it. scared of the movie. i think they´ll ruin it. AGAIN.

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(pluuuus, see that cover? It´s a movie picture, but it doesn´t scream 'movie picture', it´s watermark-y without the actors´ name on top because it´s a BOOK. It´s cute. If it was this version I wouldn´t have read it. BOOK not trashy soap.)

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