Livro: An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel

Sinopse

It was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel McBain had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina, and Julianne were escaping the dreary English countryside for a London University hall of residence. Interspersing accounts of her current position as a university student with recollections of her childhood and an ever difficult relationship with her longtime schoolmate Karina, Carmel reflects on a generation of girls desiring the power of men, but fearful of abandoning what is expected and proper. When these bright but confused young women land in late 1960s London, they are confronted with a slew of new preoccupations--sex, politics, food, and fertility--and a pointless grotesque tragedy of their own.

Minha opinião

O retrato do ensino às mulheres num colégio católico nos anos 60 em Inglaterra. A luta pelo poder, os grupinhos das populares, das pobres, das góticas, das que já fazem sexo, a disputa pela atenção, a amizade entre grandes amigas, o ódio no ano escolar seguinte ou o desprezo no ambiente universitário.

Algumas frases que ficaram: 

"I've not set foot in church since my schooldays - by the assumption that Catholics have easy lives: that they sin as and when and where they like, then pop into the confessional and get it wiped off the state. I'm afraid it's not that simple as that. First, you have to be sorry for your sin. Second, you have to do your best not to repeat it. Third, if there is anything you can do to make up for it, you must do it."

"I think women carry this faculty into later life: the faculty for love, I mean. Men will never understand it till they stop confusing love with sex, which will be never. Even today, there are ten or twenty women I love: for a turn of phrase or wrist, for a bruised-looking ankle where the veins have blossomed out, for a voice on the end of the phone. I would no more go to bed with any of them that I would drown myself; and drowning is my most feared form of death. Perhaps I love too easily."

"If you knew at twenty what you know at thirty-five, what a marvellous life you could have; on the other hand, you might find that you couldn't be bothered to have any life at all.

"You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear."

An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars