Finished The Artist’s Wife. It was quite wonderful. Alma is odious, but I empathized with her to a shameful degree. I winced as my own flaws were voiced in a fin-de-siecle Viennese drawl by a lazy, arrogant trollop.
Max points out that the gold standard in empathy-for-the-odious is Lolita, of which his friend once said: “The genius of that book is you find yourself rooting for this creep to fuck this 12-year-old!”
I think I’m going to have to read TAW again, though I haven’t reread a book in years. That’s one of the drearinesses of being grown-up. Well, I won’t stand for it any more. I shall drink Benedictine and read nothing new unless I want to.
Dervala.com 