GIRL post 2

      Sometimes, I read this book and I confuse it for a satire for the sole reason that it seems to always be reaching for that next level of absurdity. Every time I think I just got to the weirdest past, it turns out that it always gets more strange. And that's not even the aspect that bothers me the most about the book. The thing that plays most in the forefront of my mind is my reluctance to tolerate the main character. I find it nearly unbearable to force myself to get through the recount of her near constant sexual endeavors and her general indifference for the woes of everyday life. Her lack of interest and emotion makes the stream of her consciousness sort of tedious to read, and the only reason I keep going is to see what messed up thing this girl will do next.
      One of the passages I feel that I understood the best was from page 105 to 106, the one that started with "I met a man." I think it holds a lot of relevance to the story but not in the way that it lists all the different men she encounters in her sexual escapades. The end of the passage contains the line "I met a man and many more and I didn't know you at all" as she addresses her brother internally. A line that can get buried by the length of the list, I think its significance lies in the fact that it essentially summarizes the girl's inability to connect with anyone emotionally. Although she loves her brother, and has this kind of obsession with what he thinks about her, she is unable to know him because she barely has any emotions (at least in what we read. She talks about crying, but we don't really see any of it). This isn't meant to suggest she has incestuous ideas about her brother (although there is still another hundred pages, so maybe?), I just think she has this desire to connect with him emotionally and is unable to because all she knows is sex and physicality. In this same passage, she pinpoints this emotional distance by highlighting her acceptance of his money but never saying thank you. She claims "I don't really know what I was up to," in which the reflective narration shows that she now sees how awful she was and that she was emotionally distant from anyone that was good to her.
     Despite my distaste for this girl narrating the story, I find myself wrapped up in the plot that is unfolding. It sort of reminds me of how I felt reading Nabokov's Lolita: unable to put it down because of the genius and the power of the writing. It takes a lot of talent on the part of these authors to make us want to keep reading a book focused on characters we don't particularly like.