Self is halfway through The Art of Leaving. She has been through the most gut-wrenching pages, and has learned from goodreads reviews that the author settles down, marries, has kids, becomes middle-class, content, blah blah blah. Therefore, self thinks it is *safe* enough for her to continue reading.
After the good Israeli boy who she dumped three times, (the last time in Miami, hope he doesn’t read this book), Tsabari has further affairs, one with a beautiful Italian woman, and another with a Canadian tourist she meets while backpacking around India. They travel together for two months, write, and she follows him to Vancouver. They get married (she needs a visa to stay in Canada). Alas, the marriage is short-lived, but Tsabari lands on her feet, like so:
- I was wandering the streets of Vancouver searching for a reason to stay. I had just turned twenty-nine. Anand and I had broken up over a year earlier, and for the first few months, despite being broke and homeless, sleeping on friends’ couches, and living off damaged vegetables and expired dairy products, I was the happiest I’d been in years . . . I met Lydia at a belly dancing class in the community center.
This is what self finds so impressive about Tsabari: She never runs out of friends. In any country and in any city — whether it is Tel Aviv, Goa, New Delhi, New York, Los Angeles or Vancouver — there is always a friend ready to lend Tsabari her couch. And Tsabari spends a lot of time on different couches around the world. If it’s not a couch, it’s a rundown motel, where she makes love with her partner of the moment while cockroaches (sometimes rats) skitter across the ceiling. Sometimes, instead of cockroaches or rats, there are monkeys.
What a woman! Charging ahead, all systems go!
Stay cool, dear blog readers. Stay cool.
