The Paris Bookseller

“Joining her identity with that of a man, even one who preferred sharing his bed with another man, was simply not appealing. For joining, she’d noticed, almost always meant subsuming.”

This introspective moment early in the novel foreshadows the unbalanced gender roles and interpersonal dynamics that Sylvia faces as her life unfolds. In many ways, Sylvia does join her identity with that of a man, for her decision to link her professional goals to Joyce’s work causes her life to become largely unbalanced and “subsumed” by the author’s whims and exploitative tendencies. This quote therefore sets the tone for the rest of the novel and foreshadows Sylvia’s pattern of becoming entrenched in her own fears.

“At the end of the day, she’d light a candle and read on her hard cot. Portrait, yes, but it was Whitman who sang her to sleep most nights. Her softened, much-loved volume of Leaves of Grass was like a prayer book that brought her comfort and companionship.”

Sylvia grew up in a household that was necessarily driven by religion because of her father’s work. While Sylvia herself is not religious, she does exhibit a faith-like attitude toward her love of literature, which may be partly informed by her exposure to her father’s faith. Here, she equates poetry itself to prayer, suggesting that she attains the same level of comfort and enlightenment that she would in a religious context.

“First, though, she had to make one more stop in Paris. It was calling to her, another Siren distracting her from that next stage. […] Why, then, did it sound more like Odysseus’s Penelope, a loving voice summoning her home from across the vast that separated them?”

Sylvia’s natural state is to equate personal exploration to literature. Here she uses a simile to understand the draw she feels to the city that will become her home. Ironically, Sylvia ends up being more the Penelope in her relationship with the siren Adrienne.