Review

This was a hard book for me to get through because I sometimes failed to see the overarching mystery that the summary alludes to. Though the untimely death of Theodore's mother seems totally random and unexplained, the cause of it seems to be ignored more than I anticipated it to be. I also felt a certain lull through certain scenes involving Boris when he's an adult because the book takes a turn into a mob/gangster-like sort of scenario that is completely out of the blue and a little stereotypical for a Russian (or was he Ukranian?) character. Despite these lags in the plot, however, I really did admire some of the emotions Tart was able to capture of the bleakness of human life that underlies Theodore's entire being. There seems to be so little for him to live for, that at times, I feel like I almost wanted him to die if only to relieve the endless amount of pain he's had to endure since his mother's death. Right when you think Theodore hits rock bottom, he actually just goes even deeper into despair. This is not an emotionally light read, but it does have a sense of optimism towards the end that unexpectedly portrays the beauty of life in a manner that is not usually common for advocating why life is worth living.

Quotes - There are a lot of lovely ones here!

Quotes about the beauty of life:

“And yet to be with Boris was to know that life was full of great, ridiculous possibilities -- far bigger than anything they taught in school."

"I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe."

“And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I'd taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings..."

"I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel how even my sadness can make me happy..."

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Quotes about the bad parts of life:

“...does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end--and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play with a kind of joy?"

(bare with me on this one...This was a passage I read when I felt cynical and it really hit the spot)

"Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most poeple seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossipped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessently with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better to have never been born -- never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything."

"Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature -- fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place."

"How can so many things become a bore by middle age-- philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods -- but heartbreak keeps its sting?"

"This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time."

"What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?"

“...does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end--and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play with a kind of joy?"

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Quotes about love and being in love:

“...you've actually been in love, you can't live with 'will do; it's worse than living with youself."

“She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone."

“More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud on to him on the street -- which was, of course, I love you."

“I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place to close, never."

“Her expectant watching-the-crowd face. Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours."