February 15, 2009

I finished the book a few classes ago, but kept my mouth shut in class so I wouldn’t ruin it for everyone else. The end of the book was very surprising to me, but I was also really frustrated with everything that was happening. It is great that Clarissa finally found her mother, but I was expecting a happy meeting, not a tense and awkward one. I wondered if my reaction to them meeting was like Clarissa’s own reaction. If I had not seen my mother, who left me, for years and years, I would expect it to be a little tense, but you would think its your own daughter, it would be exciting. Her mother seems like such a nasty woman, she jus has nothing nice to say at all, it was really frustrating to read it. It had to have been for her as well. I did like Anna Kristine though. She seems more like a mother to Clarissa than her own. She cares for her, nurtures her, and lets her into her home and allows her to stay there. Anna Kristine’s family almost becomes her own family.

At the end of the novel, when Clarissa tells her mother that Richard, one of her husbands died a few weeks ago, her immediate response was shocking. She acted like she didn’t even care, let alone know him. Later in that chapter, I was very very shocked when Clarissa found her mother crying. I believe it was over Richard, but it doesn’t say. When she tells Clarissa, “you don’t know what I have been through”, I was really mad because its like she doesn’t know what you have been through because you abandoned her, how is she supposed to know? Olivia seems like a woman that wants everyone to pity her, and to sink into her sappy life. But this pitiful life she leads, is what she has created for herself. She chose to leave, and to never return, to contact her family. She almost deserves it all.

The end of the novel, when Clarissa is talking about writing Pankaj, and not returning to him in New York, was not really a shock to me. I knew she was not going to go back to him. But what is shocking is how she finds an Australian man, raises their child, what we learn to know is a daughter, and they would live in an apartment overlooking a bay. And that they would tell her of her real father, who they would visit in New York City. It is amazing that Clarissa is doing what happened to herself, to her own daughter. It is a vicious cycle. Her daughter is going to go through EXACTLY what she went through, knowing nothing about her life, her real father, her real family. It is almost a let down to know that she is allowing this happen after everything she has been through. Clearly Clarissa has learned nothing from life. She is once again, echoing her mothers footsteps.

Overall, this is my favorite book I have ever read. I cant wait to give it to my mom to read. I feel as if this paper will be easy for me to write because I loved the book so much. As of right now, my narrative sequence paper is going to focus on Clarissa and her mindset. I would like to analyze her mind, and research how she acts so suddenly and on impulse, just like her mother. I know that I can get a lot of quotes and examples, so hopefully it will work out and be a good paper!