Literature, or rather the narrative capacity of a writer, can manage to summarize two distant lives, present a mirror from which we are offered a progressive fusion between two symmetrical souls.
The mirror in this case is established between two very different temporary spaces. On one side we meet Lexie Sinclair, who leads an apparent peaceful life in the English countryside in the mid-XNUMXth century. Until Lexie herself makes us see that the peaceful can end up being overwhelming, exasperating, alienating. When Lexie decides to leave her home, London seems to welcome her with the open arms of her newfound freedom. Together with Kent he will get to know the bohemian, the brightness of the night and the harmony with other restless spirits that do not find their space in the routine reality either.
On the other side of the symmetry we left until we discovered Elina in a current time. She is a mother who perhaps did not want to be. With the responsibility of the new life behind her, Elina will travel between doubts and dispersion. Your partner seems at times to make the same trip to another distant space, without any remnants of the harmony that at other times could have united them.
Very different moments of life between the Lexie of the last century and the Elina of today. And yet, under the complicity of the city of London, we discover the same steps in both women, as if the city knew that both shared their essence on both sides of the temporal plane.
Ultimately, it is about inertia and customs, about whether your path was truly your path. If you have achieved something of what you expected or if you have only occupied yourself with burying dreams under the daily routine.
Maggie O'Farrell achieves in this parallel a literary alchemy, an empathy that sprinkles us all between the person we think we are and the person we finally were.
It may never be too late to change. In fact, while you are alive there is always an opportunity to rewrite your blog. Only that the situations are what they are, the limitations and responsibilities rule. The margin that remains can end up leading to melancholy, as happens to Ted, Elina's partner. Only that she, like Lexie, feels strong enough to change everything. Either that or succumb to nothingness.
You can now buy the novel The first hand that held mine, Maggie O'Farrell's new book, here: