From: Naomi Alderman, "Disobedience". Penguin Books, 2007. ========================================================== -------------------------- {Here we have personification METAPHOR involving books talking -- and NB not conveying their own contents but rather the thoughts of the narrator. But it's not just a way the narrator, Ronit, is thinking of the books, but she actually feels them talking to her, to the extent that she has to put on radio to block out the sound.} {Arguably, the books are METONYMICALLY connected to her father the dead Rav and more broadly the Orthodox Jewish community he represents; the thoughts in question originate from pronouncements/attitudes of here fathr and that community.} p.74/5: How many books were there [in the house of her recently deceased father]? I estimated ... : 5,922, give or take. I wondered if I'd read 5,922 books in total in my life. But you weren't supposed to read us, the quiet books murmured, you were supposed to get married and have children. You were to bring grandchildren to this [p.75] house. Have you done so, wayward and rebellious daughter? Be quiet, I said, stop talking. [NP] _This_ is the problem with having been brought up in an Orthodox Jewish home, with those ancient stories about Torah scrolls that debate with each other, or letters of the alphabet with personality, or the sun and the moon having an argument. All that anthropomorphizing gets you in the end. There's still a part of me that believes that books can talk. That isn't surprised when they start to do it. And, naturally, books in my father's house would be hyper-critical. I could hear them, in that room, whispering to each other: no grandchildren, they said, not even a husband. ... [NP] So I took the only route open to me. [Puts a radio on loud with pop music.] I turned it up as loud as it would go, counting on the thousands of books to soundproof the neighbours. [NP] I went back to the study. The books were silent. I started work. [EP, and end of a section] -------------- p.79f; 84: {Very vivid visuo-tactile description of the pain and other feelings in violent frequent headaches the character Dovid has. Includes personification of the headache/pain.} -------------- p.86: {The Rav responds to Dovid's account of his headaches. Talks about a synaesthetic religious experience, altered state of consciousness.} `We learn that at Mount Sinai, when our forefathers received the Torah, God spoke to them directly, face to face.' ... `Can you imagine it! To be addressed by [God] himself! The chachamin teach that the experience was overwhelming: it mingled one sense with another. The Children of Israel _saw_ the words. They tasted them, they smelled them. They _heard_ colours and _saw_ sounds. Confronted with this inhuman burden, they fainted.' --------------- p.89: Dovid drew breath to speak, but a smoky yellow thought began to curl at the back of his mind. He said, "All right. I'm sure we'd love to come." [NP] As Dovid walked home, the residual pain telegraphing across his skull dissolved into pure tiredness. {Probably the yellowness and smokiness is to do with the headache pain experience he's recently had, much as in descriptions above. The experience included a yellow hum. But could it also/instead be related to his hatching a provocative plan, in that the conversation is about taking rebellious Ronit to a dinner they've been invited to, with the inviter not realising that it's Ronit who will be coming?} ------------- p.102/3: [NP, and start of a section] Esti closed her eyes. Her breaths were soft and regular. She listened to the sounds of the synagogue around her. A low murmur of chatter, of pages being turned and children quieted, buzzed in the ladies' gallery. Below, in the man's section, a man was reading the Torah portion ... This reader's voice was rich and fluid. She allowed her mind to catch on one or two of the Hebrew words as they [p.103] passed by, translating them, savouring them and then releasing them. The subdued activity murmured on around her. ... [More sound descriptions.] ... Let it go, let it all go. [NP] Esti spread her mind wider and wider around the synagogue until she inhabited every space of it in her slow breathing. She was in the puckered ceiling plaster ..., in the red plastic of the chairs, in the electric wires within the walls and in the throat pulse of every man and woman. She breathed and felt the synagogue inhale and exhale with her. [NP] Dwelling within the congregation, she noted the familiar soup of thought and emotion. There were angers here, bitter hatreds, fear and boredom and resentment and guilt and sorrow. She saw herself from outside herself. Am I really? she thought. Can that be me, that person who appears so strange to all these others? She saw herself through a dozen pairs of eyes, each one registering her oddness with fear or disgust or confusion. She smiled at the people as she passed through them, saying, ah yes, you think I'm strange. But I know something you don't know. [NP] She swept herself around the synagogue in a lazy arc from the men's section below up, slowly, into the laides' gallery, ... She moved around the rims of the gallery, ... She investigated showly. She knew what she was looking for. ... ------------------------ p.121: [NP] I [Ronit] marched through Golders Green, passing by the rows of Jewish stores. The little world my people have built here. The kosher butchers' shops frowned at me, asking why I hadn't tried their chopped liver, now only 2.25 [pounds] a quarter. The recruitment agency smiled widely, inviting me to apply for a job with a Sabbath-observant company, half-day Fridays in the winter. Moishe's salon raised an eyebrow at my hairstyle and wondered if I wouldn't like something, maybe, a bit more like everyone else? [EP] --------------------- p.135/6: I [Ronit] could even stay I'm my old room. I walked across the door and pushed open the door. [NP] I suppose I was, in a small part of my mind, hoping that my old [p.136] bedroom would have been kept as a shrine to me; everything as it was the day I left. ... [S]ome aspects of the room had remained the same. My school photograph was tsill on the wall, ... But these things were only barely visible above the boxes, suitcases and black dustbin-bags piled in a great disorderly mound across the room. ---------------------- p.172: Esti felt another wave of fatigue break over her, veined-pink and roiling. Her eyes defocused and for a moment there were two women in front of her, not one, each of their cornrows swaying slightly. ... Esti clutched at the thing [a pregnancy tester] in her hand, looked at it again. `Results in one minute,' it said. She looked at her watch: 4.25pm. Friday muttered and growled. Less than two hours to go [before the start of Sabbath]. Tick-tock, tick-tock, no time for this nonsense. {Incl. METONYMY in that the pink-veined quality of her vision and her roling feeling are acribed to the fatigue? Also METONYMY there of THING FOR REPRESENTATION, in the "two women". Personification METAPHOR re Friday, with implicit projection of her own thoughts onto the day.} p.173: [NP] By the time Esti arrived home, only thirty-four minutes remained before the start of Sabbath. The small package in her hand [a pregnancy tester] spoke of its reliable results in only one minute. But the soup muttered coldly, with round syllables of fat on its surface. And the chickens, knowing their own incompleteness, ruffled non-existent feathers, demanding a perfect brown to replace their own. ... She worked, warming the soup, roasting the chickens, ... Friday marked off the moments more and more clearly: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Slow and steady, neither aggrieved nor impatient, but inexorable as the tide. Tick-tock, tick-tock. [EP] {Personification METAPHOR}