The Nix by
Nathan Hill
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
An interesting read about family, choices, and the interconnectedness of life. Still, as with most long novels, I found this could have been edited down a bit. Each character, (and there are several) discovers the truth of the nix...that the things you love will be your undoing. There’s even a bit, superfluous as it is, about a tangential character who is addicted to video games and it almost kills him. Not really necessary to the plot, but I do want to send that chapter to all the kids I know addicted to video games...it really goes into the science of how it rewires your brain. The fact that this is the bulk of my review maybe tells you the gist of the book....slightly interesting, good writing, but overall not compelling.
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He did not know she had been leaving for many months now—in secret, and in pieces.
Samuel heard a story about a certain kind of African turtle that swam across the ocean to lay its eggs in South America. Scientists could find no reason for the enormous trip. Why did the turtles do it? The leading theory was that they began doing it eons ago, when South America and Africa were still locked together. Back then, only a river might have separated the continents, and the turtles laid their eggs on the river’s far bank. But then the continents began drifting apart, and the river widened by about an inch per year, which would have been invisible to the turtles. So they kept going to the same spot, the far bank of the river, each generation swimming a tiny bit farther than the last one, and after a hundred million years of this, the river had become an ocean, and yet the turtles never noticed.
And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane
.
“You take responsibility for your actions by facing the consequences for them.”
was easy to forget when looking at the chaos of the cereal aisle that all these hundreds of options were actually one option.
This was the price of hope, he realized, this shattering disappointment.
“Because when all you have is the memory of a thing,” she said, “all you can think about is how the thing is gone.”
What kept people where they were, in their normal orbits? Nothing, he realized for the first time. There was nothing to stop anyone from, on any given day, vanishing.
Anyway, what they discovered is that our memories are tangible, physical things. Like, you can actually see the cell where each memory is stored. The way it works is, first, you have a perfectly pristine, untouched cell. Then that cell is zapped and gets all deformed and mangled. And that mutilation is, itself, the memory. It never really goes away.”
“Every memory is really a scar.”
Faye sits and waits for the orchestra to begin playing again and thinks about this—harvest—and how it always makes her sad, how the cornfields in November look like battlegrounds, the chopped-down plants blanched and bonelike, cornstalks like femurs half buried and poking sharply out of the ground.
There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything.
Not heavy, exactly, but given enough time, any weight can become too much to bear.
Tonight, it was carnal. Tomorrow, carnage.
Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.
What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones.
Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp. And the more she believes she only has one true self, the more she flees to find it. She’s like someone trapped in quicksand whose efforts to escape only make her drown faster.
That when he looked at her he never really saw her. And she wonders now if all her panic attacks and problems had been elaborate attempts to be paid attention to, to be seen. She’d convinced herself she was haunted by ghosts from the old country because—even though she didn’t understand it in these terms—maybe she was trying to be Freya for him.
It would be a memory that sustained him his whole life, but it would also be the thing that haunted him.
“even the things we do to break the routine become routine. Even the things we do to escape the sadness of our lives have themselves become sad. What this ad acknowledges is that you’ve been eating all these snacks and yet you are not happy, and you’ve been watching all these shows and yet you still feel lonely, and you’ve been seeing all this news and yet the world makes no sense, and you’ve been playing all these games and yet the melancholy sinks deeper and deeper into you.
Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom.
The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
