2020-02-24 21:26
We have a big project going live at work on Friday, which means extra stress for me and even more reason to not find time to write. I get in some Zelda as my relaxation after work, but I've been starting early to get things done. I finished a book, I think... what was it?
I read Eleanor Davis' The Hard Tomorrow the other day via the library. It was... unsatisfying to me. In the end, I felt like it was the setup for a story that didn't get completed, and instead just goes "and then they had a baby" with a whole bunch of full page baby drawings at the end. It offered the baby as the ending or as the reason or as the self-evident goal or solution without actually getting into how that interacted with the near future near dystopia the story is set in. The paratext of the book has Davis offering a dedication to her unborn child, which makes that ending seem perhaps a little too close. In a story where people are protesting and arrested and losing their jobs and giving each other up to the police so they don't get deported, just having a baby doesn't seem like the answer to the question.
I remember watching Claire Denis 35 Shots of Rum which also felt incomplete. It was a beautifully filmed movie, but in the end I wasn't actually sure what the movie was about or what it was trying to say or what I was supposed to get out of it. It was apparently inspired by Ozu's Late Spring with a close knit father/daughter and then the daughter's marriage, though in this film the marriage aspect seemed rather subtle.
Maybe I'm just in a way of not getting stuff I'm consuming this week.