Some have called The Little Locksmith a “masterpiece." I always wonder, when I see that word, why we haven't come up with a gender-neutral equivalent to praise a book or work of art by a woman. "Mistresspiece" would be weighted with other connotations!
Few books achieve perfection and maybe every author decides at some point to just stop and move on to the next one. This book, in my humble opinion, is not perfect--but it's oh so good where it's good!
Books are like our imperfect selves and our imperfect friends. You can see their flaws and love them anyway.
At times, Kitty--who I came to know very well on the page--reminded me of the sort of friend who goes on and on and on and could use a few pauses along the way. At times she reminded me of the sort of friend who tells stories in confusing order or tacks on an ending to a story that doesn't fit the story she's telling. But often she says things that blow me away, off the bed where I'm reading, off the chair, in search of a pen. In the end, I wished for the sequel she planned to write, and would have, had she lived longer.
This little book is worth its friendship for its stunning insights and candor--and for the many lines that are keepers. It's worth the friendship because in its best places it's luminous and wise and disarmingly honest. Lee Smith called it "the best book on writing" ever written.
Remodeling her large house:
It would have relieved me a little if I could have seen something that disappointed me; that even when I discovered, too late to change it, that one side of the new fireplace was not quite straight I couldn't really mind. Imperfection and perfection were both included in the universe and I had good reason to make friends with imperfection....
But I didn't want a cute name for my sober, grand, romantic house, the house which I thought of as an expression of my rebellion against cuteness....
And so a kind of mystic marriage, an impregnation, took place between me and that piece of land and the buildings that stood on it. And it was a happy marriage....
Certain places are fond of certain people, and I am sure that place was fond of me....
On writing:
I believed passionately that every human being could be happy. I believed that everybody should pursue his own kind of happiness boldly and positively....My particular kind of joy happened to come through the medium of writing.
Cloisters and monasteries were invented in order to protect the life of the spirit from the life of the world....Any young person who in modern times tries to live the life of the spirit without protection is almost sure to come to grief. When...the life of the spirit was injured or thwarted or even threatened I suffered, in seemed, out of all reason. I felt as if a storm or an earthquake had struck my psyche.
Beginning gradually and imperceptibly the way sleep comes, something would begin to happen on the paper in front of me. The people in my story would begin to move. The place they were in, the rooms, the house, would come alive before me, opening like a flower, mysterious, ravishing....
...When anger is not allowed to explode it flooded my interior in a heavy, unhappy, sullen silence....
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