State of Paradise by
Laura van den Berg
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
This was a great, quirky read--one of the best takes on Covid that I have read. A ghost writer is still living with her mother after a pandemic which leaves unsettling and ambiguous side effects. People are disappearing, there are sinkholes swallowing up great swathes of land, and it is all connected to a virtual reality game. Van de Berg explores how to be present in your life, and the many ways in which we disappear, sell ourselves short, or don't recognize our influence. And she reveals how the world is constantly changing for good or for bad (or for weird), but that that's ok. We'll look back and at this weird new time one day and be nostalgic for it. For all its insight, I do wish it was a bit more cohesive.
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Ghosting is not how I intended to spend my days on earth
The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox--the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
"Lubber" comes from the Old English word :lobre" lazy--a fitting name for these ambling, flightless pests.
The thing about holes...is that you can't force them to close.
"At first I thought I'd been stabbed by a ghost."
"We've lost you," my father said when he parted the white curtain and saw me in the hospital bed, even though I had, technically speaking, just been found.
The problem, I have decided with people who never leave home is that they are nver forced to become someone else.
People tell stories to will lies into truth.
People tell stories to bend truth into lies.
People tell stories to carve for themselves a legible shape our of an inexplicable existence.
People tell stories to atone for what they have failed to do in life.
A mistake is never his mistake unless he fails to catch it.
Florida is used to disaster, in other words, but it used to disasters it can name.
It always amazes me when people ask what happened? as though the question is a simple one.
"She told me about the etymology of 'utopia", he says. "How the word literally translate to 'no place".
There is a suspicious lack of privacy in many of these utopias.
Sometimes we are called back to the things we most want to flee, perhaps because they left such a mark that we don't know how to leave them behind.
A utopia is, after all, a thing that rises from disaster, ruin, rubble. Without all that failure there can be no such thing as a utopia, since there would be no other reality to compare it to.
When I first became a ghost, the assistants emailed me a tip sheet titled Principles of Plot. From this sheet, I learned that every action in a story is caused by what precedes it. Nothing is random, in other words.
Later I told him that one must be conscious in order to be calm. That these kinds of distinctions mattered.
When the meteorologist asks why the snails didn't find their way back to the water, the zoologist replies, Probably the snails hid in their shells and waited for conditions to improve, but they never did.
Some events are too big to even acknowledge.
when we are denied a story, a light goes off.
We only know what we perceive...And we perceive so very little.
I am attempting to document the world as accurately as I can, even if that means I have to make things up.
Time involves change; a universe in which nothing changes would be a timeless universe.
Isola by Allegra Goodman
