PattyMacDotComma's Reviews > Addition

5★
“Juicy and funny. . . A gem!” So said one of Australia’s premier newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald about this award-winning 2008 debut novel by Aussie author Toni Jordan.

This is a heartfelt, funny, sensitive look at how obsessions and compulsions can affect everyone around you. Grace is a smart, funny attractive young woman who happens to love numbers. She wonders if a cavewoman invented counting (cavemen would have been out hunting, of course) because she wanted to remember her monthly cycle or figure out how much food was needed.

Grace loves her childhood Cuisenaire rods. [I miss the ones my kids had, and the vintage ones now are worth a bundle! but I digress.] She is obsessed with Nikola Tesla, best known for being the quintessential mad genius who was largely responsible for giving us AC electricity, among other things. [His surname will now be forever associated with cars and batteries, but I digress again]. Grace idolised him for his tall, dark and handsome, moustachioed looks and his brilliance with numbers. She keeps his photo on her bedside table and fantasises about him, swooning with gusto!

“Nikola, like all truly great people, had a truly great obsession. People don’t understand obsessions. An obsession is not a weakness. An obsession is what lifts people up; what makes them different from the grey masses. Do you think we’d still be talking about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ today, over four hundred years since its first performance, if the two lovebirds had followed their parents’ advice and each settled down with more appropriate partners in four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom neo-Georgians in a new subdivision on the outskirts of Verona?”

Choosing what to wear, she pulls items out of the washing machine at random (random!), hangs them to dry in that order, puts them back in her wardrobe in that order, and wears them in that order.

“I don’t worry about co-ordination but there is a disproportionate amount of solid, dark colour in my wardrobe. Patterns and prints are asking for trouble.”

Ridiculous? Well, yes. Easy? Also yes. So who’s nuts?

Her sister is a distracted, busy, suburban mother, married with a couple of kids, one of whom is a kindred spirit for Grace. Her mother is a bit of a nut herself. Both call her every Sunday, at exactly the right time. Mother collects and cheerily passes on the grimmest news, apropos of nothing.

She mentions a neighbour she bumped into. “You’ll never believe what happened to her cousin’s daughter’s yoga teacher.” (She died horrifically with her baby son when her car’s brakes failed and they slammed into the back of a truck is what happened, not what Grace needs to hear every Sunday!)

Early on in the story, Grace bumps into Seamus, a pleasant young Irish bloke, at the supermarket checkout as she quietly steals a banana from his basket. Somehow she collected only 9, and it is imperative that she buy everything in lots of 10. Walking home lugging plastic bags with ten boxes of washing powder is a finger-numbing challenge.

Seamus interrupts her life and seems to enjoy her in spite of her foibles. She however, finds herself increasingly disturbed, and one night she wakes suddenly thinking of numbers and how out of sync she’s become with her usual schedule.

“It was the unflossing and the unbrushing and the unwashing . . . these are not small, these wrongs disguised as nothings. They are somethings. They are tiny cracks in the world that run for miles underground. They cause earthquakes and landslides and in my mind I see the kind of people who suffer in disasters like these; an old woman, perhaps, or motherless children, wide eyes turned to a photographer they hope will tell the world and then someone stronger will come and lift them up. . . it will all crack and split and I will fall into the ground and there will be nothing but the fall and nothing solid not even an end to this crevice. And the worst is the knowledge that it is me. It is me who has shaken it. My foolish, stupid forgetting.”

It’s the butterfly effect for real. Every flutter moves a passing zephyr, a breeze, all the way to a typhoon somewhere. Grace knows she is responsible for it all.

When she attempts to smooth off some of the edges of her square-pegged self to fit the round holes of society, she bumps into some unexpected problems, which gives a lot of food for thought. Some of it is terribly funny and some is quite poignant. Therapists, groups, medication, advice. It’s all there and then some.

At one point, much to Grace's amusement, her mother says,

“I was just wondering . . . if you’ve decided you prefer girls. It seems to be so popular nowadays. . . Imagine not having to do all the housework, and if you found a nice girl the same size you’d have double the wardrobe and you’d never have to shave your legs or clean whiskers out of the sink. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.”

It is such a funny, perceptive book, and I loved it, shoe-counting, room-measuring, Cuisenaire rods and all!

Nikola Tesla - info and his compelling photos. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_...