Chez moi + Jeanette Winterson

Last Sunday evening after all of my friends went back to their respective villes, I came home. I'm still not used to walking behind the eerily lit Porte Royale, which with its palm trees and lack of historic description is one of the most out of place monuments I've seen, but the blue and yellow of the apartment welcomes me. On Saturday night as we sat around, eating curry and drinking wine, I took my stack of photos out and taped them up in nice patterns around the square brown light switches. So when I came home to an empty place, it was already a little bit of my own. It's the perfect little apartment too, with a separate bathroom, living room, bedroom, and tiny, but well-equipped kitchen.

The windows were fogged up when I got in. The sun was almost down, and the air was La Rochelle blue-gray. Before I closed my bedroom curtains, I blew on the glass and wiped it clean. I've never lived in an apartment before, and this is the kind where you barely ever see anyone else. It's a strange idea, living in my own little compartment in a big building, with other people on all sides, doing what they do. Like traveling solo, living alone seems to give me some extra space in my head.

The lack of WiFi also gives me more space and time to read. For French practice, I have been reading graphic novels. I found this one in French at the Mediatheque, which is actually set in Portland, Oregon, and contains scribbles of all my favorite cafés and bridges, and panoramas with Mt. Hood couched in the background. What are the chances? When it comes to before-bed reading, though, I welcome English books.

My teacher lent me Jeannette Winterson's Written on the Body, which turned out to be one of the most beautiful love stories I've read. The prose is lyric and sometimes dense, but is grounded in interesting and personal detail. Masterfully structured, the story is compact and consistently moves forward despite the narrator's bouts of stagnant poetics and recounting of past relationships. The gender of the narrator is left undeclared, but knowing that JW is publicly queer makes this question less of an exclusion. It is, however, impressive how neutral the details are, and the neutral relationship I had with the narrator. She is subtle but always present, and never figures herself as authoritative, heroic or even very reliable. The ending is just as neutral, and while this may frustrate some, it works. This is a good winter book, even though the coziest scenes are in the narrator's country cottage where she goes to lonesomely persevere through her loss. It may be about regret, but the regret is presented in a way that makes you think, not cry.