What do you think?
Rate this book
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
”She was absolutely not going on to call him today.
She called.
He didn't answer.�
”It's not worth it, she felt.
It's always worth it, she thought.
Worth it or not, I can't give it up, she thought and felt.�
”[Are] we in fact not all to some extent utilitarians, that is consequentialists, that is, we judge things in terms of outcomes, even when we claim to be applying principles?...A consequentialist…is obliged to be against democracy if it turns out to have worse consequences than dictatorship. For her, there can be no intrinsic value in anything other than maximum well-being, whereas for the rights-based ethicist, intrinsic value is the only orientation point. The intrinsic value of freedom and autonomy.�As it happens, this is precisely what I have been mulling over lately when considering the foreign affairs of nations. Andersson’s fascinating study on the monomaniacal intensity of a woman in a relationship she is not able to control, being the partner who cares too much and therefore has less power, dovetails nicely with the direction of my reading and thinking. Part of the pleasure of this novel comes from listening to the undeniably realistic internal confabulations of a woman under the influence of an overwhelming attraction she cannot escape. We’ve all been there, to greater or lesser degrees. The pleasure and pain of an unrequited love is something none of us forget.
”Ester Nilsson…was a poet and essayist who lived by the understanding that the world was as she experienced it. Or to be more precise, that people were so constituted as to experience the world as it was, so long as they did not let their attention wander, or lie to themselves. The subjective was the objective, and the objective was the subjective.�What a remarkable idea, and since it is expressed on the first page of the novel, we are obliged to apply its principle throughout, finding plenty of contradictions in her approach since her passionate though unrequited love clearly colors her reality. She experiences “willful disregard� for facts. The obsessive circuit of her rehashing of events and conversations leads her to conclude that the object of her attention does not love her but the slightest attention on his part can restart the destructive obsessive cycle all over again.
"He often talked like that, she noted, about nobody doing anything, saying anything, having the guts for anything. They were all morally corrupt, bankrupt and cowardly...Ester looked at Hugo. This body and this consciousness were what she had been yearning for, all day every day for almost a year and four months…How is it, she asked, that only Westerners have to answer for their actions and ideas, not other people?"Ester's bewilderment and disgust at this point are very nearly enough to tip her into recognition of her delusions. Undoubtedly a great deal of Ester’s obsessive love was her own construction of what Hugo’s ideas as an artist represented. Hugo was a construct, and what she imagined did not exist outside of her own mind.