Bad Marie | 
"He might have been handsome if he did not seem somehow so incredibly ridiculous." ?
1 like
The lack of contractions in the dialogue is kind of weird.
"Marie looked at Benoît. He didn‘t move. He smoked his cigarette, like the ridiculous French person that he was."
"Why was success required of a person? And once you were successful, life required you to do it again and again."
""My husband is not interested in you."
"No, of course he isn‘t."
"Benoît thinks that you are immature."
This interested Marie. Why immature? Was that all that he had said? What hadn‘t he said? They had talked about her. Was Ellen testing her husband with Marie? She was out of her mind, taking a risk like that.
"Of course I am immature. Look at my sneakers.""
"Ellen had also wanted Marie to clean, to dust and do laundry, make beds, but Marie had refused. “I am not my mother. I won‘t be your maid,” she had said. It turned out that Marie had no ambition, but she did have pride. Ellen backed down. Ellen had never trusted Marie; she needed a servant."
Gawd, rich normies deserve the chair.
"Marie rolled her chopsticks back and forth between her hands, as if she could generate heat with the friction. She wanted Ellen to be afraid—to consider the possibility that Marie could stick one of these splintered wooden chopsticks right up into the meat of Ellen‘s eyeball."
FUCK YES, Marie, fucking get her superfluous, rich ass.
"The situation would have been humiliating had Marie any ambition in life. Fortunately, Marie was not in any way ambitious."
Mood.
panI was hoping for a character study of an unlikable character fueled by strong dialogue a la Moshfegh's "Eileen." This is diet Eileen. This is generic diet Eileen. Filled with ridiculous scenarios & a character who Dermansky herself seems to despise (it seems that in order to successfully write a flawed character, the author needs to like them maybe even more than a sympathetic character). ?
#ReadJanuary Aside from my 2 current reads and 2 library holds that just came in, I have no earthly idea what I'm reading this month. I'm taking Hope in the Dark slowly and am about halfway through Bad Marie. #JanuaryTBR
pick