The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville

The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2001.  In a small Australian town, two out-of-towners meet. They are just regular people, divorces and children behind them. They're plain people wearing clothes that are raggedy and eyeglasses that don't quite flatter them. They have jobs they love and that they're good at, but sometimes they're overlooked because they fly under the radar. 

I can see why this book won a major literary award. The writing was delicious in parts and Grenville's descriptions of people were shockingly honest. But I struggled to finish this book because I just didn't care what happened to these people. 

3/5 stars

Lines of note:

It was the dogs themselves. It was the way they adored you. That was the thing about dogs. Mice did not adore you, and nor did chickens. But dogs did.

    Husbands adored you, too, at least at first.

    Being adored was something she can come to mistrust.

    She felt adoration to be a small and lovely-looking bomb that could blow up in your face at any time. (page 39-40)

I don't usually brag about how much Hannah and I are bonded. I think it's probably clear if you read this blog that the dog and I are quite close. And I do mistrust it. I feel like I could hurt her in 0.2 seconds with a careless action or word and I think she could turn on me in a heartbeat. But it's worth it to see this look of absolute adoration and trust.

Those eyes! Those ears! How did we get so lucky to get her in our lives?

People usually thought museums wanted heirlooms, the cameo brooch, the engraved silver tea-pot, the lace christening robes that had come out from England with the great-great-great-grandparents.

    It was a safe bet that Karakarook was full of lace christening robes and silver tea-pots. They always survived because they were never used, just brought out now and then to be admired.

    The trouble was, the same things that had survived in Karakarook had survived everywhere else as well. No one was going to turn off the freeway to look at somebody else's great-grandmother's silver teapot. 

    What would put Karakarook on the map were the things that were so ordinary that no one had thought of keeping any of them. Ordinary dresses and baby's jumpers and men's work-shirts, and all the improvised things made for their houses by people who never had enough money to buy one from the shops. 

    Those things did not survive, because no one thought they were worth keeping. They were just used until they fell to pieces, or were thrown away as soon as you could afford something better. (page 143)

When I read How to Be a Victorian, one of the things the author talked about was how many artifacts from the time period were just lost, like cardboard that was used as a layer of clothing or cooking utensils that fell apart because they were made of flimsy materials. It's crazy to look around your home and think about what people might want to see in the future (hint: probably not the things in my curio cabinet). 

It was funny how you could live your whole life surrounded by something as ordinary as concrete, and never think of it as special, until you met someone who did. (page 267)

I dated a man once who worked as an engineer at a landfill. His job, as I understood it, was to make decisions about the layers of concrete, soil, and sand that they used to stabilize the landfill between layers of trash. I was utterly mystified by this job (and that it existed!), but I really loved to hear him talk about it because I love to hear people talk about things they have expertise in, even if those things are totally out of my comfort of knowledge zone.