Phillips, Thomas - Sentimentality
Beneath all the social preening lurks banality and mediocrity. Such is worse, corrosive even, when the most limited of souls are regarded as “influencers,” major and minor.
Or are smug, petty bullies.
Fortunately, for the blissfully ignorant, there is Honorine. Librarian by day, murderer at night (I write librarian, yet Honorine’s duties suggest she is a page).
She whiles away her free time reading quality books, the literary genre, and viewing arthouse films. Isabelle Huppert is a favorite (as she is with me).
“…The library has been quiet of late. I worry about reading, the loss of reading, or its denigration at the hands of developmentally-arrested hordes whose attention to language is so crippled as to resemble the salted slug…But you can always count on the homeless to make an appearance. Perhaps there will come a time when they’re the only ones left who remember books while everyone else is so deep into constantly updating screens and sound bite expression, so hot-rodded with chips just under the skin for quick access to goods and services that they will have lost all sense of artfully-sculpted word collections…”
Hovering nearby is her husband. Ex-husband, actually. Well, if you want to be technical, dead husband. This is no ghost story, nor a supernatural one, so perhaps he is her better angel. Her outlook, bleak and jaded, could use tempering.
“… The dumbing down (of history), as it happens, has always been here, like weather patterns, craving things, and all-too-human power dynamics. All the points in history of this or that politician (even cave people had politicians) towing the line of fascist tendencies that obviously require citizens to severely limit the scope of what they absorb as truth…”
Sentimentality runs this course throughout. Meditations on social shortcomings, providing justification for messy liquidations.
This is a ferocious satire, so dark and so intelligent, one may miss the black laughter. In gallows humor, this echoes his In This Glass House. Both are delicious pleasures for misanthropes.