/lit/ - Literature

it's about a year in the life of a man who has a relationship with a woman for the first time in a decade, mostly from his perspective, sometimes, devastatingly, from his gf's. it rained all week as i read it. i finished it yesterday as the rain poured down outside and in the novel.
>Wizzie pondered, staring through the window at the torrents of rain. It was as if she were looking through two windows, both made of some substance less transparent than glass, and both in the state in which the whole universe was to the eye of Heraclitus. And if the window of glass and the mock window of water were both of them, in the grey corpse-flesh pallor that had substituted itself for daylight, spectral epitomes of the flowing away of all things, the wall of the King’s Arms stables opposite, usually so mellow and friendly, showed like the side of a drowning galleon, while the path beneath the wall was no longer a road for solid people to walk upon but a phantasmal river for ghosts to gather at, a river where a crowd of Limbo-weary spirits might wave beseeching arms. The only substantial thing Wizzie could see as she looked out was a tradesman’s boy wearing a man’s mackintosh who was pushing his bicycle against the torrential flood. This lad’s face — for the boy didn’t know he was being overlooked or he would have pulled himself together—wore an expression of woebegone desolation. Following that piteous white face with her eyes as it melted into the rain, she felt as if it were drifting on the same fatal tide that was bearing her own life into the unknown.
Ultimately the novel seemed to me to be about how detached from everyone we all are even in close company.

I'm reading Maiden Castle, it's definitely among the best books I've read. It's hard to read other writers with the same enjoyment I used to after discovering Powys and getting used to his style of writing, psychologically they seem so lacking. Anyway he's good at writing and getting into the minds of not just "literally me" male loners but a whole diversity of people, e.g. in this there's a really well-written 3 year old, who in other books would've been barely mentioned or considered.

I'm reading Maiden Castle by John Cowper Powys. I read the first chapter then a neighbor decided to start hammering. So far it's more accessible and funnier than Weymouth Sands, the novel before it.