Quotes from The Diving Pool

Quotes from The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa. I copied them down this morning.

"Her lips were like two maggots that never stopped wriggling, and I found myself wanting to squash them between my fingers."

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"He would come down from the diving board and return to the Light House, where his muscles would warm and soften like silk floss, and then he would soak up all the things that set my nerves on edge—Naoki’s raspy voice, the scraps of food flung about by the children, my mother’s endless chattering. It seemed strange that he could be so good when life had treated him so badly: a father who ran off when he was born and a mother who had abandoned him for the bottle. I prayed desperately to be bathed in his kindness."

- - -

"I was sure that Jun would dive into only pure water, and I wanted his dive into to me to be perfect. I wanted him to enter with no splash at all.

Once we’d finished talking about that morning so many years before, we couldn’t think of anything else to say. The sound of time flowing between us became the sound of the water trickling quietly from the faucet until dawn."

- - -

I'm going to a one year old's birthday party tonight, which actually should be a lot of fun as all of my coworkers will be there. It is rumored that my former boss will be showing up and, most of all, I'm excited to see the one year old's mother (and him, of course, he's a cutie!).

But someone needs to remind me that I need to start reviewing French grammar! Tutoring starts on Tuesday and I'd like to be able to tell him that I actually do know a little bit of French!

The Diving Pool: Three Novellas, by Yoko Ogawa

I decided to take a break from studies to post a book review.



As with Hotel Iris, Ogawa highlights three quiet girls. In the title (and first) story, a high school girl obsessed with her foster brother watches him during his diving practices while looking for ways to release the frustration she feels at being the only child of parents who own an orphanage. In the second story, Pregnancy Diary, a young woman writes about her older sister's pregnancy in a diary. The final story, Dormitory, follows the story of a woman who returns to the dormitory she stayed in throughout college and befriends the manager.

Ogawa is an interesting writer because she introduces these shy, quiet characters and begins to spin a story that is somewhat disturbing. She provides her readers with great character studies. Following along with Hotel Iris, the writing itself is absolutely beautiful. Particularly in the first (and most disturbing) story, there were some gorgeous quotes. I haven't copied them down yet so I don't have any to share with you today, but maybe soon.

(Book cover taken from bn.com.)

Hotel Iris, by Yoko Ogawa

Ogawa (The Housekeeper and the Professor) explores the power of words to allure and destroy in this haiku-like fable of love contorted into obsession. One rainy evening, Mari, a downtrodden 17-year-old who helps her demanding mother run a seedy seaside hotel, overhears a middle-aged male guest ordering an offended prostitute to be silent. In the days that follow, every word—both spoken and conveyed in surreptitious letters—from this man, a hack translator who may have killed his wife, gradually and inexorably leads Mari to submit to his every sadistic desire. Ogawa’s relentlessly spare prose captures both Mari’s yearning for her lost father and the translator’s bipolar oscillation between insecure tenderness and meticulously modulated rage. As this savage novel drives to its inevitable conclusion, Mari’s world collapses around her in both a terrifying bang and a pitiful whimper. (Cover photograph and summary from Barnes & Noble.com.)

Hotel Iris, to me, is a novel of contrasts. There is the contrast of the named versus the unnamed characters, the spoken word versus the written word, and who can share more freely, those who can speak verbally or those who are mute. In this novel, Ogawa illustrates that the reader can come to know the characters referred to only by their titles better than the characters whose actual names are known and that the written word can be more honest and freely given than the spoken word. I felt that the amount of described bondage scenes overshadowed the rest of the novel. It's not that these scenes were incredibly descriptive, it's just that the reader knew this was happening and didn't need as much as detail as was given each time. But the beauty of the writing made this book well worth reading; I found myself anxious to read more as I was soaking up the gorgeous descriptions.

He shook his head, and I felt his every tremor through my cheek as I leaned against his shoulder. Coming through his bones, his voice sounded clearer and calmer, as though it were welling up from the depths. (Pg. 89)