Holiday Read No. 2: Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas

Dateline 18 June

Rome, Italy 

One of my favourite booksellers recommended this one to me. I probably would have bought it anyway.  The book is viciously good. There is a staccato frustration to the protagonist's commentary that I quite like and some lines that definitely resonated.

'In Texas, in Conneticut, in France,  in New York, in Missouri, in Mexico City, in my kitchen, bathroom, livingroom, basement bedroom, I could clock mentally from slide to slide each time a man with a well-aimed out down has made me feel worthless.'

'There is no one as interested in the preservation of the like new states of their vestaments as a preening man.'

'Our affair lived in my thoughts like a once-loved but mostly forgotten piece of music, popping up occasionally, brining all sorts of feelings.'

'Grief makes people wild in their thought. As if we are ever punished or rewarded in that kind of way - a random death in exchange for secret indiscretion.' 

The characters are all layered and I am not sure if any are likeable, though try don't have to be.  There is affinity, to be sure. 

The book is enjoyable and frustrating. I felt it lost pace at the end but damn...the charged lust-love that burns her forward, that is so painfully familiar, the overarching imaginative desiring of the idea of someone, then the almost chaste come down as her desire is about to be realised...well. It chafed not unlike the shackles.