Brookner Redux All Over Again

Just finished Anita Brookner's Making Things Better. It's not her latest but I don't think that matters. It is the same novel over and over again with the same painfully self aware protagonist failing to connect with the world. This is about an older man, alone, retired, trying to come to terms with his final choices. It's very sad but at least the character this time is more aware that his decisions led him to where he ends up. He is timid as all her characters are but not passive.

A typical reflection : "From this he gradually deduced that his relations with women were still inchoate, that good manners had, time and time again, disguised desire, and in disguising it, or in keeping it in its place, had denatured it." The whole book is, as all her books are, lots of thought and reflection no action. maybe that's why I like her so much; I am so the opposite that anyone who thinks so much fascinates me.

Her books are like the Narnia Chronicles where whole life times go by but when the children tumble back into the non-Narnia world no time has passed at all. In Brookner pages and pages of his tortured musings go on while no one has even done anything yet. As always I long for E.M. Forester to come in and slap her characters around shouting "Only connect!". But then although they never connect they are more self aware than I or E.M. will probably ever be.

"He ordered coffee, looked about him with no particular shock of recognition, realized that the true balefulness of age was an inability to bring those memories back to life, to rekindle the intensity of the past as it surely once been felt."