Review: Abstract tragedies
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 23, 2012
When we think of aging, we want to believe we can look better than we do. For men, it seems too easy to simply keep going. For women, they try (in vain) to stay youthfully beautiful. For Esther, it's pure psychological torture with every ticking minute, hour, and day. She and her lover, Jacob, apparently have quite a history together, and by all implications, it's a far longer history than one is used to in any regard. He worries about her worries and quirks, despite his still deep and burning love for her in spite of her age. She reminesces about simpler times when she didn't have to worry about prettying up so much. And hates the things she considers more beautiful than her by any angle.They seem simply (and tragically) solemn through the first half, thinking about all their endeavors and how they were when younger, and the way they remember things and see things now, by the very words they use, make aging in our world all the more stark, dark, twisted, and sadder, much more realistic than we're used to seeing on any given anti-age cream commercial, making it immensely sad, yet Jacob feels to be the personification of hope, for Esther if not the reader as well.During the second half, just when I thought things were strange, they make references to certain taboos in such a casual way that things seem even more bizarre. By the end of everything, even when you find out what all is meant by the "last night" in their place, there are still questions left unanswered, so it's not a squeaky clean package with all questions answered, let alone all the answers available being easy ones, but it did have heart-softening moments to break the hard solemnities throughout. The creepy cover helped out the atmosphere, I must say.