Weather by Jenny Offill

رمان انگلیسی آب و هوا نوشته جنی آفیل

نویسنده:

جنی آفیل

Jenny Offill

ناشر:

Alfred A. Knopf

انتشارات آلفرد ای. کناف

سال انتشار:

۲۰۲۰

about Weather by Jenny Offill

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation

one of the New York Times Book Review‘s Ten Best Books of the Year

a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis

Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree.But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She’s become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.

As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you’ve seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she’s learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks… And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

Weather by Jenny Offill Quotes

“And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.”

“Later, I remember to tell Ben about the girl. “Seconds!” I say, but he is unmoved. “People always talk about email and phones and how they alienate us from one another, but these sorts of fears about technology have always been with us,” he claims.

When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.

Hahaha!

(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)”
― Weather by Jenny Offill

“The adjunct seems paler than usual. He isn’t speaking in complete sentences. Would it be possible to…? Do you mind if…?

They say when you’re lonely you start to lose words.”

“My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.”

“A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person. He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.”

“Funny how when you’re married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you’re anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.”

“My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay, it’s there in the air somehow. The whole thing is more physical than mental, he tells me. Like hackles? The way a dog’s hackles go up? Yes, he says.”
― Weather by Jenny Offill

“Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.”

“What it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances,” she says. She pulls up a slide of people having a picnic by a lake. Blue skies, green trees, white people.

“Suppose you go with some friends to the park to have a picnic. This act is, of course, morally neutral, but if you witness a group of children drowning in the lake and you continue to eat and chat, you have become monstrous.”

― Weather by Jenny Offill

“He had a melodious voice. I wanted every day to be like this, to begin in shame and fear and end in glorious resistance.”

“How do you know all this?” “I’m a fucking librarian.”

“I’m starting to miss him. The warm hum of his body next to me in bed. Certain little jokes and kindnesses. A kind of credit or goodwill, extended and extended again and again whether or not you deserve it.”

“Henry and I make plans to meet for coffee at the place on his block. It is hard for him to get even that far away. “I’m on house arrest,” he whispers. “I’m jumping out of my skin.” I wish I could give him something for his nerves, but of course, I can’t. I remind myself (as I often do) never to become so addicted to drugs or alcohol that I’m not allowed to use them.”

― Weather by Jenny Offill

“There are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting season. “At least most people who hunt up here hunt for food, not sport,” she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her dirt road. “Why don’t they farm deer?” I wonder. “Is it because they are too pretty?” She shakes her head. “It’s because they panic when penned.”

“Somehow, I get seated halfway down the table from her. I’m trapped next to this young techno-optimist guy. He explains that current technology will no longer seem strange when the generation who didn’t grow up with it finally ages out of the conversation. Dies, I think he means. His point is that eventually all those who are unnerved by what is falling away will be gone, and after that, there won’t be any more talk of what has been lost, only of what has been gained. But wait, that sounds bad to me. Doesn’t that mean if we end up somewhere we don’t want to be, we can’t retrace our steps?”
― Weather by Jenny Offill

“It is important to remember that emotional pain comes in waves. Remind yourself that there will be a pause in between waves.”

“Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.”

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