Rating: 7/10
Halley’s Comet last ‘visited’ the Earth in 1986. I was two years old. For some reason I have a strong memory of watching the comet at a slightly older age. Obviously this isn’t possible, so I wonder where this false memory comes from.
This isn’t unrelated to the themes in The Archive, as it follows the evolution of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale through a series of back-and-forth interconnected stories, timed to the apparitions of Halley’s Comet.
In this short novel, we look at sibling relationships and the purpose of stories and how they are remembered, shared, edited, censored, and passed-on.
A few quotes that particularly resonated:
- soft arcs are deceptive, in stories or on paths. That nothing in this life is unbent, and as such all things intersect.
- what it means to desire. Does it require participation, or can it surface more covertly, realized but dormant, carefully concealed?
- Learn and Love and Lose, the three great obligations.
- Our lives will never again be in such close proximity. It will always be a moving away from each other, from this point on. Which is to say, to love a sibling is to anchor your life to a series of sanctioned departures.
- story is fact in the safe costume of fiction.
- In order to record a tale, something must always be lost. Some things must be left unsaid and disguised. The art of storytelling, his brother said, is all about where and how to leave the
- In order to record a tale, something must always be lost. Some things must be left unsaid and disguised. The art of storytelling, his brother said, is all about where and how to leave the voids.
- The brain computes that the story is about strife, abandonment, the possibilities of leaving bits of yourself behind in order to find your way home. Home is used here figuratively, meaning that which is familiar and comfortable and safe.
- People pass stories on to be remembered. People pass stories on to forget.
- study folktales because I am interested in what is lost when stories passed on by voice are committed to paper. I study folktales because I am interested in sacrifice.
- I study folktales because I am interested in what is lost when stories passed on by voice are committed to paper. I study folktales because I am interested in sacrifice.
- I study folktales because I am interested in vanished voices, but I also study folktales because I wonder about The Woods. Behind the sandbox of our youth lies a wide and gaping expanse of trees. When I was young I wanted desperately to enter that domain, to trek the forest in order to learn about the secrets the trees kept.
- It is easy to forget, but stories need not always have a purpose. We are quick to say that folktales have a moral or a lesson or a creed. But most of the stories that have survived the ages are told for one purpose only, and that purpose is to say this: “Being human is difficult. Here is some evidence.”
- there are two kinds of labyrinths: those you are born into and must escape, and those you choose to enter in search of what lies inside.
- She had nodded, understood that part of invention is a bloated faith in the self. Part of creation, she thinks, slicing the bread, is making believe.
- the same internal code of curiosity engrained in our veins that once pushed our species to keep roaming the world. It’s that tendency we have to look at a vista in admiration, but just a beat afterward wonder what lies beyond.
- [Of twins:] No one alive knows who was born first, and so no one knows in which body he dwells—the original or the copy.
- the brothers live to capture and steal the stories, then brand them with their shared name. But by capturing, they pollute them. Instead of permitting the stories to bend and fold with each new teller, the scripts are like coffins that calcify the tales.