Vinegar Girl | Anne Tyler
“You could really feel physically wounded if someone hurt your feelings badly enough.”
I have the Serbian translation of the novel, which is a bit irritating 'cause I want to read more books in English, but now I feel it's too wasteful to buy the original version of a book I already own. Book lovers' dilemmas. Anyway, this is a modern retelling of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" (which I've never read, I regret to say) and just the mention of him tickled my fancy and made me want to see what it's all about.
The "shrew" or the "vinegar girl" in Anne Tyler's modern world is a pre-school teacher Kate who is not very lucky in love. Or life, for that matter. She lives a very structured life with her father and younger sister. She's taking care of both of them and following the same routine her father had established many years ago. She hates her job and spend her days bickering and being irritated by small humans and their parents. And then, one day, because he's in a bit of a pickle, his father asks her to marry his assistant so he wouldn't be deported. Trouble ensues.
“'But she is family!' Pyotr said. He pronounced the word as if it were holy; he surrounded it with invisible cushions.”
Although this is the plot of a classic rom-com, I still found it heartbreaking in places. I actually felt for Kate and her feeling of isolation (I too, have no friends) and her lack of elf-worth. Well, maybe not exactly that, but when she thinks about why her father asked her to marry Pyotr it truly made me cry. Even Pyotr is such and interesting character. He is Russian (I think?) and his grasp on the English language isn't terribly good and a lot of subtext and word play flies right over his head. This can be truly funny but also sad because he feels so lost and is unable to center himself in the culture and even express his thoughts and feelings.
“It is the language, maybe?” he asked. “I know the vocabulary, but still I am not capable to work the language the way I want to. There is no special word for ‘you’ when it is you that I am speaking to. In English there is only one ‘you,’ and I have to say the same ‘you’ to you that I would say to a stranger; I cannot express my closeness.”
This is a very fast and easy read. I loved the heroine and the awkward relationship of the two leads and I liked how neither of them was perfect. Actually, no character here is perfect but by the end of the novel enchanting traits are discovered in each of them. I liked the book for what it is and have given it 3 stars on Goodreads.
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