What You Can See from Here by Mariana Leky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I decided I would marry Martin one day because I believed that someone who would spare you from having to watch the world take its course had to be the right person.
It took me forever to read this book. I started it and then there were so many characters that I just couldn’t get into it. They were each interesting but none of them were interesting enough to keep my attention for some reason. Maybe because I was distracted and my attention kept wavering.
“No, Selma, I mean as a couple,” my mother had insisted. “I mean have you thought of being a couple with the optician?” Selma had looked at my mother as if she were a cocker spaniel and said, “But I already had my couple.”
But I wasn’t willing to give up on it. I put it down and then picked it back up many, many times. I grew frustrated with myself. I grew frustrated with the book. Why couldn’t i just read it and enjoy it?
He loved Alaska. My father saw him only rarely, which made love much simpler, because those who are absent can’t misbehave.
Each of the characters had their own story and then slowly they started intertwining. And slowly I found myself falling in love with each of the quirky characters. Enough that I didn’t want to let them go.
“Hello, Luisa,” Frederik said, and because it was so obvious, he understood right away that I didn’t have an opening sentence. In the blink of an eye, he took over and simply pretended he had called me.
And the story enveloped me into a lovely cocoon. I was transported into their town, into their lives. I cared about their stories, their pain, their joys. The author had slowly managed to make me fall in love with each of them.
You can live for years with a gnawing question, you can let it hollow you out, and then have it disappear in a flash, in a single moment of waking with a start. My mother left my father; the fact that he had left her already some time before didn’t change a thing. My mother was in a different time zone and so, from her point of view, she had left him first.
The characters in this story are real. They are quirky and they are real. They have real pain, dreams, joys, and they care about each other deeply. The writing is exquisite. This story has incredible heart. It’s the closest I’ve seen a writer get to Fredrick Backman.
So I’m going to tell you now: When the time comes, when the question arises and you can’t find an answer right away, then remember that you made your grandmother and me very happy, you brought us enough happiness for an entire life from beginning to end. The older I get, the more I believe that the two of us were only invented for you. And if there ever was a good reason to be invented, then it’s you.
In the end, I loved this book so much. I do wish there was a way for the beginning to be a little less slow but alas it takes time to fall in love with people, even in books.
with gratitude to netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
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