Aschermittwoch

Libro messo in wishlist praticamente solo perché scritto da Ethan Hawke, l'attore, senza sapere nulla della trama. E' la storia di Jimmy e Christy, delle loro esistenze problematiche e del loro tentativo di condividere la vita e formare una famiglia.

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Surprisingly excellent. Really makes a girl fall in love with Ethan Hawke, quite frankly.

I thought I wouldn't like it, but I did. It was a quick and interesting read. The second half was better than the first.

Some of my favourite moments:

1. The basketball challenge between Jimmy and the 12-year-old, who cries when he loses his brother's money.

2. This exchange:

Steve sat down next to me. "Responsibility," he hissed. "Screw a woman over thirty-five and she'll give you the ride of her life - makes an eighteen-year-old look like a blow-up doll. I'm not talking about sex, I'm talking about a sense of play. My wife, man, she doesn't understand that. She's forgotten how to laugh."

"Maybe you never say anything funny," the bearded man blurted out from his corner.

"Oh, I'm funny, don't you worry about that."

3. And this one:

"I hated our wedding," I said out loud. I hadn't ever thought about that before, but at that moment I felt somehow that marriage was responsible for all this misery.

"Shut up about the wedding," Jimmy said, not looking at me. "The wedding was tits, OK? It was the best time you ever had in your life."

A coupke on a road trip - encouraging deep thoughts

I am unashamedly obsessed with this book.

This one almost got two stars, but the last act of the story came together nicely. Hawke writes an OK story, but as a novel, it's weak. The story centers on two characters. Each chapter is written in first person and switches between Jimmy & Christy. These could be two of the most annoying characters I've ever read. One bad choice after another. One moment they hate each other, the next they love each other. The climax happens on, of course, Ash Wednesday. Perhaps I would have enjoyed this book more when I was younger. But as a nearly 40 year old husband and father, these characters annoyed me. And the necessity to write in first person between two characters seemed a bit amateur.

Started slow, began to meander, but finished on a really good note.

(FYI: Yes I know we're supposed to be in 'Nonfiction November' right now, but I was feeling all grumpy and sore when I woke up today, and the task of sorting out a pile of 'maybes' for my NFN TBR pile was getting really exhausting, so I just grabbed this slim volume that I'd read before, and allowed myself a little bit of fiction just once. #WhateverGetsYouThroughTheNight)

I think I picked this book up in a bargain-bin in a book-store, purely because I saw Ethan Hawkes' name on it and was curious to see if the guy was as good a writer as he was an actor. (I'd always found him kinda cute: quirky and intelligent; interesting to watch on screen. And of course, having seen him playing a writer in 'Sinister' I could sort of imagine him sitting down at a typewriter to bleed as he knocked out this book.)

If you've seen Hawke in any of the 'Before Sunrise' or 'Before Sunset' films, you'll know pretty much how the banter between our main characters plays out. Both parties are somehow super-ironic, post-modern, quickly-cynical, and yet incredibly romantic at heart. In 'Ash Wednesday' it was as if I was reading a book set back in New Jersey in the 1980s. It's Tommy and Gina all over again (if Tommy was actually AWOL from the military and Gina was Uma Thurman - sorry Ethan, but the comparisons were too frequent and too immediately recognisable for her not to have been loosely drawn around your wife at the time of this book going to publish; never mind that she would have been pregnant with your son Levon whilst you were writing 'Ash Wednesday'. Heck, knowing how long some authors take to write a book, you could even have been observing her pregnant with Maya a few years earlier too. But I guess it doesn't matter exactly when and what instance was giving you inspiration: the fact is, you're not just writing about what you know here, but who you know. Can't say I'd want to try to try an immortalise any snapshot of my family life, like insects trapped forever in amber. But if you and your ex-missus are okay with it, who am I to judge?

Everything in this book feels dusty. Like the air is so arid it might just cause your lungs to burn, until we get to Louisiana and then it's all humidity and uncomfortable heat, to aggravate all the impossibly happy people celebrating in the carnival. It's really only at this point that things start to ramp up a little after a really slow-burn, and we finally get to see who each of the characters are as fully fledged people. I can see what it is that scares them, excites them and upsets them. Before this point it's a lot of back and forth, with two rather unlikeable characters expressing themselves with the intellectual insouciance and dark cynicism that many of the late boomer / early Gen-X-ers would often vacillate between. The dialogue isn't the most realistic, but it's sometimes fun to read on a page, where all the punctuation shows the reader exactly where all the emphasis lies within each character's outburst.

It often feels more as if Jimmy & Christy are performing monologues - only they end up talking over one another - than speaking, listening and engaging in any real conversation. They both know what they want to do, but aren't exactly convinced that the other has made a definite decision, so we often end up veering off a little from what ought to have been a very well planned itinerary, for a very important trip. It doesn't bode well for one potential outcome when the "flying-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants" approach leaves them stranded in New Orleans during Mardis Gras, with no hotel rooms booked, no idea where they're going to go or what they're going to do. This is typical of Jimmy, who has yet to step up and embrace the maturity and masculinity required to be a man...much to Christy's increasing chagrin

But it's in Louisiana that with Jimmy's vulnerability, combined with his determination to be a better guy for Christy, there seems to be something of a heavy blanket lifted off of this story. All at once I found myself thinking back to certain sentences or paragraphs that I'd read earlier in the book, and I was able to see that on top of there being some deeply woven threads of foreshadowing in there, there was an earnestness that I think I'd missed in Jimmy's thoughts / speech; I'd written him off as a dumb young guy who was flaky and irritating. But he'd been filled with more and more emotions as this trip began. And being a young man he'd simply been trying to couch the sincerity of his feelings in a hard outer shell of sarcasm, cynicism, and nihilism.

I really loved the way everything came together at the exact right time, without actually telling us too much about what happened next. So it wasn't a HEA but more of a "let's hope everything works out well for them" - and that's much more preferable to someone like me, whose own Gen-X heart rarely skips a beat at the sight, sound or storytelling of anything too twee or romantic.

I'm really doing my best to not give any spoilers here, so I know this might all sound wildly batshit, but this isn't a long book. Nor is it difficult to read. In fact it has some genuinely unique insights and perspectives peppered throughout all of the other "slacker-nihilist" schtick. But whereas the first part of the book left me feeling nothing but the desperate need to get it all over with, I'm glad I did stick with it, because both of our characters seem to go on a kind of redemption arc towards the end of the book. And at one point something akin to emotion sorta kicked me in the guts. I floated through those final chapters, misty eyed by the end felt as though I'd been on an emotional rollercoaster throughout the whole book...I just hadn't realised the effect that the earlier chapters had been having on my subconscious.

Is it the greatest piece of fiction every written? Hell no. Was I expecting this to be a weak celebrity offering? Hmm....yeah, kind of. Was I wrong to write it off so soon? Absolutely. Should you give this book a try? Yes.

I'm a sucker for any scenes in a book set in Louisiana anyway to be honest, but it had a greater meaning by the end of the book than I expected to find at the beginning. Yes that Ethan Hawke way of being almost artificially articulate and effortlessly erudite, despite his character not being someone whom we are expected to believe would communicate with such deftly clever, obviously choreographed arguments, is little jarring at first. But you get used to it. And you also start to warm to both of our main characters as the story progresses...to the point where by the end you can't help but find yourself rooting for them.

So, not earth-shattering or mind-blowing, but a pleasant enough read that gets better the longer you stay with it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this tale of young love. While his characters and their story are not me or mine, Hawke’s writing brought them to life quite vividly. I could empathize with their doubts and fears, their pleasures and discouragements. At heart, their story is everyone’s. And so, it made me care.

Ash Wednesday’s about a love story, but it’s also about two people coming of age. Coming of age at the beginning of Lent, a time of fasting, reflection and self-denial but a time of expectation and hope as well. We’re giving up candy for Lent but Easter’s coming with Chocolate Bunnies and Jelly Beans. The lovers’ story is beginning and maybe their Easter will come. Stay tuned.