Hot Milk is a novel about women. I haven't read a novel that writes about women's feelings so truly and delicately for a long time. Now when it comes to women's writing, the content is mostly to highlight women's freedom from bondage and highlight the meaning of women's existence. In particular, like Angela Carter's work, it fully shows what the world looks like from a female perspective. Hot Milk is clearly not as intense and fierce as Angela Carter's work. It is more like a gentle and gentle Jiangnan woman, light and gentle, bright and elegant. What they all have in common is that they can also leave a deep and vivid character image on the reader.
The whole story is actually not complicated, a mother who has been sick for many years, a daughter who has just reached adulthood, a single-parent family, so the daughter also has to take care of the sick mother. He also accompanied his mother overseas for treatment. Foreshadows all the contradictions of story and emotion. It all revolves around this main line. I like some touching places in the book, especially to highlight the inner feelings of women in life.
While the heroine Sophia takes care of her sick mother, she actually feels very helpless and confused, and even feels helpless and bored. He has shown the powerlessness of a young woman in dealing with these things, she does not want to be bound by her mother, but she can not find a suitable solution, helpless and depressed, such as her plan is to go to the United States to study for a doctorate, so she went to ask her father for advice, mainly she wants her father to help her in taking care of her mother (his ex-wife), because she went to study abroad, she had to work for herself to study, so she had to leave her mother. And leaving her mother alone in England, she herself does not know what to do? But when his father heard this, he put his hands in his pants pockets and said, "Do what you want to do," which is not an encouragement, but more like an impatient expression of the phrase Chinese often said - "What do you want to do?" The father went on to say, "You can apply for a grant to study abroad, and as for your mother, he has chosen the life he wants, and that has nothing to do with me." He had little sympathy for himself and his ex-wife's daughter! More delusional about blood and kinship. The daughter asked again, "What should I do?" Father? The father then said visibly impatiently, please, Sophia. Alexandra (her father's younger sibling in the family now) needs to rest, and so do I." The author then does not write about Sophia's hysteria or Sophia's bitter drooling, and the author goes on to describe the helpless Sophia feelings, "All Greek mythology is related to an unhappy family, which I am part of sleeping on a camp bed in the living room. The name Evangeline means messenger of good news, what is the message I bring? I'm taking care of my father's first wife." The true feelings of a lonely helpless helpless young girl in this situation were immediately highlighted. Such a description was often wept, resentful and complained, and came more really and more powerfully, and when I read this paragraph, my heart suddenly felt inexplicably uncomfortable. Not only lamenting the coldness of the world, but also the coldness of human feelings.
Some of the small details in the book are also particularly flavorful, such as his writing about the gas canister on the beach, which the author sees as a strange desert plant growing from the sand; followed by the change of the author's line of sight, exactly like a set of film shots, from far to near and then from near to far, the camera changes perspective with the swing of the rocker's arm. You see: the author first saw a large cargo ship at sea level, the cargo ship was flying the Greek flag, and then the gaze moved, came to a slightly closer place, the author saw a rusty children's swing, the camera zoomed closer, the author saw that the swing was made of a worn-out tire, and the swing was still creaking and shaking, the author used a metaphor here to say "as if the ghost of a child has just jumped off it." Swinging his arm, his vision changed again, he saw a crane towering from a seawater purification plant, and then he saw a warehouse on the beach, with gray-green cement bags stacked in the warehouse, and I had a project under construction on the beach, "the unfinished hotel and apartment on the beach split the mountain, like a murder scene."
The author's change of perspective of this film lens painting is very well described. What is presented to the reader is a more fluid three-dimensional picture.
There are still many things in the book that are worth carefully experiencing, so read it slowly. I once read a book called The Death of a Beekeeper, and many people said that it was a book about "pain". After reading "Hot Milk", I inexplicably made a comparison with this book, feeling that hot milk should be a book about "treatment", "treatment" not only refers to the content of the mother's treatment of her own diseases in the book, but also contains thinking about the treatment of the relationship between characters in some single-parent families, and if you extend it, it can also be said that in today's Western economic recession, seeking a kind of relationship between members of the family, the "treatment" of interpersonal relations in society.