“If you thought about reading you couldn’t do it… What a bizarre activity, when you considered it: transformative like an act of magic, the brain rapidly translating arcane symbols into sounds and signs that it understood… You could only read if you forgot you had a body located in time and space, if you allowed yourself to become transported. To that new place where you had never been before. A land of bliss. Yet at the same time it was the body that responded, shuddering all over the pleasure given by the prose.”
~ from The Mistressclass by Michèle Roberts.
I started reading this book today and I’m really into it. Roberts, author of 12 novels and short-listed for a Booker Prize, has given us a story of a love triangle. Two sisters, Vinnie and Catherine are writers living in contemporary London. They are vastly different but what brings them together are their memories of betrayal and the past. The novel flashes back and forth in time and also uses the lives of two other sisters, the Brontës, to explore our passions and desires.
Has anyone read Roberts before? I’d love to hear your thoughts. But for now, let me get back to the book.
