Figes, Eva - Peter Ackroyd
PETER ACKROYD
[The day I spent reading Eva Figes's Days] passed extremely slowly. But this was probably in unconscious sympathy with the heroine of the novel, who spends what little life she has in the private ward of a large hospital. Her meanderings, which set the pace let alone the content of the narrative, are couched in Beckett's perpetual present—deriving as they do from the I of a needle: "I merely think this. In actual fact I can only conjecture about what lies beyond the walls of this room. And in the last analysis it does not matter. I no longer allow it to concern me." Luckily for her, but not for us as she roams over her attenuated past like a fly over cold soup….
It is only, of course, in the ruined choirs of Romanticism that a monologue can be found appealing. This happy fallacy has never stirred my particular stumps and a stream-of-consciousness retains its interest only for a very short time. It is also the case that a frayed or...
[The entire page is 394 words long]
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