“When it’s in a book I don’t think it’ll hurt any more …exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.”
Marguerite Duras, The Lover

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There are two suspects; her own husband, Delray Kruller, from whom she is estranged from and her lover Eddy Diehl.

The story is told by two persons: Krista Diehl (daughter of Eddy Diehl) and Aaron Kruller (son of the murdered woman and Delray Kruller).

It is a story about passionate love, sex, abondance, cruelty, violence, and loss seen through the two young teenagers’ eyes.

Why did I like this novel so much?

Writer Joyce Carol Oates with her cat.

I was intrigued, not knowing who the killer was. Why was Zoe murdered? Reading the same story but through entirely different eyes by the two narrators Aaron and Krista. I was struck by their desperations and loneliness, fanatically defending their own fathers and blaming the other.

The final chapter, which I absolutely loved, showing us the incredible strength of a woman and the power she found in herself to take control of her own life.

It is not until the very end of the novel that we find out the truth about what has happened to Zoe.

I couldn’t stop reading and finished this book in just two days. Can’t wait to start another great novel by Joyce Carol Oates.

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“You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy books and that’s kind of the same thing.”
Anonymous

Girl Reading
Edmund Tarbell – circa 1909

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“I am a writer and I want to write.”
― Jane Bowles

Jane Bowles with her little dog.

Fear and Hope

“Like most people, you are not able to face more than one fear during your lifetime. You also spend your life fleeing from your first fear towards your first hope. Be careful that you do not, through your own wiliness, end up always in the same position in which you began. I do not advise you to spend your life surrounding yourself with those things which you term necessary to your existence. This is regardless of whether or not they are objectively interesting in themselves or even to your own particular intellect.

I believe sincerely that only those men who reach the stage where it is possible for them to combat a second tragedy within themselves, and not the first over and over again, are worthy of being called mature. When you think someone is going ahead, make sure that he is not really standing still. In order to go ahead, you must leave things behind which most people are unwilling to do.

Your first pain, you carry it with you like a lodestone in your breast because all tenderness will come from there. You must carry it with you through your whole life but you must not circle around it. You must give up the search for those symbols which only serve to hide its face from you. You will have the illusion that they are disparate and manifold but they are always the same. if you are only interested in a bearable life, perhaps this letter does not concern you. For god’s sake, a ship leaving port is still a wonderful thing to see.”

Jane Bowles, American Writer (1917-1973)

Jane Bowles and her husband the writer Paul Bowles.

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Tavik Simon, Vilma reading on a Sofa, 1912

“What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?”

Anthony Trollope

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ONE WAY TO READ A BOOK

Save

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Some books leave us free and some books make us free – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them — with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them …”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

Lady Clementina Hawarden
Lady Clementina’s daughter, also called Clementina
1860s

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“To love makes one solitary, she thought.”
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

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“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

Henri Roger-Viollet
1893

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