I recently read a searingly loving and painful essay a friend wrote about her mother's early-onset Alzheimer's. Homero's chapters reminded me of that, of Charles Wallace Within Chuck in A Swiftly Moving Planet and his slippery time, of dear Littlejohn in the eponymous novel. Cosima and Halimeda, a close pair of sisters who consider their parent unfeeling; Cosima, unable to see the love Homero demonstrates, avoiding responsibility, not remembering stories from her childhood. If Cosima had been the younger of the sisters, three years apart, this book might have devoured me instead of vice versa. Older Cosima doesn't remember something that younger Halimeda does; this reminded me uncomfortably of my not remembering family incidents that happened when I was 12 that were repeats of things that had happened when my sister was 9, when she remembers more from a younger age.
Twins have been a theme lately. Loyd and Leander here; Magid and Millat in White Teeth, Ormus and Gayomart in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, John and Paul? Ottokar in Whistling Woman. Why Loyd had only one L is never explained. Because he's not Welsh, presumably. But the name reminded me of the neighbor-widow's unmissed dead husband in the Anastasia books, of the woman's never being able to take her husband seriously after he asked her to pronounce his name "Yoyd" as if it were a Spanish instead of a Welsh invention.
Animal Dreams. Wow.
That too clever-for-my-own-good first-person tone. I managed it for To Say Nothing of the Dog and that was thrice as long. I can handle it in this, as long as there aren't too many names like Paige Turner.
Names to look up, because I assume none is without its joke: Landen Parke-Laine (I get the Parke-Laine part). Milton Keens. Lamber Thwalts. Acheron Hades. Fillip Tamworth. Buckett. Edmund Capillary. Filbert Snood.
Books to contribute to the Invisible Library: Millon de Floss, A Short History of the Special Operations Network and Thursday Next--A Biography; Acheron Hades, Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit; Landen Parke-Laine, Once Were Scroundrels; Thursday Next, A Life in Special Ops.