Euphoria by Lily King

Euphoria by Lily King was our book club book for our last 2024 meeting. I was not there when this book was chosen because I was sick for our last book club meeting, but I assure you that I would have tried to pick a different book because my feelings about Writers and Lovers, another Lily King joint, made me want to scream in frustration. But I was not there, so Euphoria was chosen and I got the library book right away, but then I sort of forgot that book club was last Sunday, so grabbed the audiobook with one of my two November Hoopla loans, and listened to it while I was walking the dog and cooking over the course of a few days. 

And here's the what what. I do not care for Lily King. LOL. 

This book was set in New Guinea and follows three anthropologists, a married couple and a single man, who are studying indigenous peoples. Eh. I didn't care about these people. Here we are, in a fascinating, interesting setting, and King focuses on the love triangle among the white people? FFS. 

2.5/5 stars (Note: I think this is not the author for me.)

Lines of note:

She'd ask next about the rest of the family, so I thought I should head her off. "Everyone else is dead so she seems to have a great deal of energy for me."
"Who is everybody else?"
"My father and brothers."
"How?"
There was an American anthropologist for you. No delicate changing of the subject, no You have my deepest condolences or even How ghastly for you, but just a no-nonsense, straight-on How the heck did that happen? (page 47-48)

Americans could surprise you with the things they knew. (page 70)

You wouldn't know that King is an American with lines like this. 

But I don't trust a crowd - hundreds of people together without cognition and only the basest impulses: food, drink, sex. Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain you find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is my point exactly. (page 161)

My husband HATES crowds. If there are more than twenty people in a room, I think he's convinced that Nazi salutes are about to break out. You should see his extreme discomfort at games when "The Star-Spangled Banner" is played. 

I loved the sound of our two typewriters; it felt like we were in a band, making a strange sort of music. It felt like I was a part of something, and that the work was important. She always made me feel that the work was important. (page 208)

I like it when my husband and I are both clickety clacketing on our keyboards, too. 

I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love's first mistake. Perhaps love's only mistake. Time for you and time for me, though I never did warm to Eliot. (page 212)

This is the poem referenced here, if you're interested. 

Things I looked up:

quai (page 88) - a structure used by boats and ships for taking on or landing cargo and passengers, usually found along riverbanks

pinnace (page 88) - a small boat, with sails or oars, forming part of the equipment of a warship or other large vessel

Vailala Madness (page 88) - a social movement in the Territory of Papua, beginning in the later part of 1919 and declining after 1922; tt was the first well-documented cargo cult (diverse spiritual and political movements that arose among indigenous Melanesians following Western colonization of the region in the late 19th century. Most cargo cult groups were led by charismatic prophet figures foretelling an imminent cataclysm and/or a coming utopia for followers—a worldview known as millenarianism) - This is a rabbit hole I could have spent hours on, but I'm stopping here for now. 

calaboose (page 108) - jail, frequently a synonym for local jail

blackbirding (page 108) - the act or practice of kidnapping people, especially Pacific Islanders, and selling them into slavery abroad, usually in Australia

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

"Nellie?" my mother said. "Are you all right?" and apparently I said, "I've spit on your dresses and I've spit on your hats and now I'm waiting for more spit." (page 69)

"That is a best less seemly than spitting on hats, isn't it?" (page 69)

My heart starts racing - and then I remember that it has all already played out and I see her standing at the quai in Marseille in her blue hat and I see me coming off the ship with Fen. (page 88)

H in her blue hat on the quai, her lips quivering: I've left Stanley, her first words to me, and then Fen not giving us the time he'd promised me, coming up right behind me, leaving no doubt, no room for an explanation. (page 94)

She jumped up, flashed out of one mosquito room and into the other, and returned with hat, pipe, and camera. (page 163)

That was how I made the long walk past these display cases, past an enormous blowup of the photograph Fen had taken of Nell and me with my big suitcase and his pipe and hat and sago fronts across our shoulders. (page 256)

Then we put Nell in the hat with the cases and the pipe and took a few more. (page 164)