From John Williams’s Stoner to Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone, literary natures render a vital spark of human connection
“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Simply through our adoration and love can we create the illusion that for the moment we’re not alone.” Orson Welles wrote those texts for the movie Someone to Love in 1987. Welles forgot to add that we can do it with printed utterances too. Recollections sundered by miles or by millennia can be joined, sometimes permanently, by the spark of human connection that can be found simply by reading a book.
Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone tells the story of a young lady who, coasting through life, has fornication for the first time and meets herself pregnant. The story that follows is not just a matter a pilgrimage through the world countries of pregnancy and motherhood in the 1960 s, but an extraordinary emotional bloom, as the narrator sorts a bond with her infant daughter, and- through her- with the world countries. It is subtly clever, nearly slyly feminist, and by the end you will be as urgently involved with the daughter’s wellbeing as her own imaginary mother.
Read more: theguardian.com
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