![]() ![]() I’ve never met a protagonist who thinks in the same haphazard, anecdotal terms as I do. I’m sitting in a coffee shop, crunching ice because I think I made myself anemic, and someone once told me that anemic people crunch ice, and I’m jarred. She never sees the boy again and she never ends up reading Noam Chomsky. When she meets the boy who makes her want to read Noam Chomsky, it’s on the only day of her life when she ate multiple scones. We get her wedding engagement through her anger and ankle pain. The entire novel dances this line between Leda’s contemplations and her reality, constantly allowing one to inform the other. Leda’s life isn’t grand or spectacular in any way - but it is privileged, and it’s made up of these astonishingly vital, mundane instances. It should be noted, though, that there’s an inherent privilege in being able to both exist as and identify with a character who has enough time to endlessly simmer in her own thoughts. Everything that happens to Leda leads to something else happening and everything that doesn’t happen to her creates a cavity for something else that never happens. Moving with a sharp fluidity, Casale trails Leda as the years turn into decades, and she turns every moment into something important for Leda - a moment that, 10 or 20 or 37 years later, she wouldn’t be the same without. She putters around her studio apartment, taking magazine quizzes with her feet up on the wall and listening to Édith Piaf until she’s bored because everything gets boring at some point - even putting your feet up on the wall and reading about how you’re a “fierce and relentless” sexual warrior. She eats cold, leftover spaghetti over the sink because she didn ’t want to eat too much in front of the boy with whom she just had dinner. She studies in coffee shops because of the way they make her feel.
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