When The World Was Steady (1995) - Plot & Excerpts
A impressive novel, and a highly impressive first novel, all the more for being written by a twenty-something-year-old. I debate if a further star is called for, oh crazy system that is Goodreads.Messud has a penetrating insight and the courage to tell a story with two not-terribly-sympathetic protagonists. The story, centered on two middle-aged, British-raised sisters as they clamor for a sense of firmness in their respective off-axis worlds, hasn't got a lot of plot, and as the end neared without any signposts for any sort of denouement to come, I braced for a disappointing ending. Astoundingly, Messud pulls off a stinging, reverberating conclusion from deceptively modest materials.The novel certainly won't satisfy the event-hungry or even those who want to like the main characters. Both sisters are often repellant, but one emerges as surprisingly sympathetic despite her limits. Using a close third-person narration for each sister, the author refuses to editorialize or find excuses for them, or to bathe us in the comforts of hackneyed backstory. This purity of narration allows the book's ideas to rise to the surface, shining in the hard Australian light at book's end. Yet there are full lives lived here, and suffering fully dramatized. The writing is confident and well-crafted, but I sense the author holding back on her descriptions, especially for the sections taking place in Bali, to avoid the novel's becoming a book about beautiful sentences about lush locales, which wouldn't hold with the stories being told here. I have to respect that as well.A rare, original achievement.
Two sisters, one adventurous enough to leave England and start a life in Australia, the other "stuck" at home living with Mother. In middle age, the Australian goes on holiday to Bali and finds herself on the edge of an interesting, criminal, disintegrating, bohemian lifestyle with a charismatic central figure that compels her. Her proper life with a prominent husband has ended in divorce and this is a way for her to play-act for a while without really changing. In the prologue, the sisters' mother peeks in at them as they are sleeping outdoors. It is such a tender moment. When we see her as an old woman, it's shocking to recall that she had such feelings for her children when they were young: "What she felt was a longing, in her limbs and her belly and in her spirit, for her daughters' futures, for every joy or triumph that swirled in their dormant imaginations as well as in her own." By old age, she bickers with her stay-at-home daughter, putting her down, and it's hard to reconcile those early aspirations for her children with her smallish view of them now. It created a feeling of longing in me, too -- for a bigger life, for time to pass fully.
What do You think about When The World Was Steady (1995)?
This was an interesting book. I picked it up because I absolutely loved Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children". "When the World Was Steady" follows the lives of 2 adult sisters by alternating sections devoted to each sister. Both are completely different in the ways their lives have progressed, but both are faced with life-altering experiences and we are shown the strength of their characters by how they react and change with these experiences. I will say that for this book and "The Emperor's Children", I continued to sit and think about the book as a whole long after I had finished reading it. So while not every page may have been great or enjoyable, a book that stays with you long after you have finished it is a book well written in my opinion.
—Katelyn
i raced through this one....mainly so I could get it over with and start Into the Wild. Messud is just not my cup of tea. reading her is like going out for a drink with your highly intelligent, priveleged friend who just whines at you about their not-very-impressive problems...and then continues to look down on absolutely everything around them. One of the characters, Virginia, even admitted so much in the book, that she takes pride in being negative. I tried to think that was the character talking, but I am entirely convinced that Messud's not very imaginative plots, horrendously chauvinstic male characters (some of them -- I liked Nikhil. Maybe it's because he was Indian. But he was a bit dim, sadly), and pathetic, self-loathing female voices are not meant to give us any insight into anything, they're just meant to get us down. Just not where I'm at right now. But Messud does write well, from a purely technical standpoint, so it was not a chore to read in terms of style.
—Brinda
I came about Messud's work in reverse-chronological order, and having done so has allowed me to take more from "When The World Was Steady" than I feel I might have otherwise. I can see the germ of her best work (the novel "The Last Life" and "A Simple Tale" from the volume "The Hunters") here and it is an impressive debut. In conversation, I've described her fiction as 'writerly,' which seems vague and a little simpering in retrospect, but I guess what I mean by that is mostly indicative of the following things.Messud's understated character studies are the hallmark of her craft.
—Andy
