Forgive Me

Because this is such a short chapter I'll take the opportunity to discuss the style of the novel as a whole along with the content and character development that I have been mainly addressing so far.

In this chapter, we have a third person narrator for the first time.  Chapter one was narrated by Leo Gursky, who I discuss in my post The Last Words on Earth, and chapter two was narrated by Alma Singer, discussed in My Mother's Sadness, my previous post.  What that did for me, was make this chapter a bit less personal and a bit more about connecting the stories of our two narrators (not that it had anything to do with Leo that I know of so far) because it put our fairly limited story of Alma and her family, into a real-world context which will hopefully be explained further.

Things I have noticed:
The sections narrated by Leo are stylistically focused on flashback, yet there is also a distinct present tense in which a bizarre, albeit fairly simple plot develops.  The same is true of the story line in Alma's section, however the style is different in that she writes her ideas in lists.  Her style follows time from past to present much more closely than Leo's and She seems generally more organized because of this and her list format.  I also liked the lists because it gave the title's a little more potency than the rest of the chapter.  Otherwise they might not have stuck out as much, but I found them interesting and important.
Each Narrator has a symbol at the beginning of their chapter; Leo has a heart and Alma has a compass.  Leo's heart reminds me of the fact that he can never give up on love, and it reminds me of his heart attack in which a large amount of his heart muscle died.  Alma's compass reminds me of her astute sense of moral direction, and her intrigue of adventure because of her dad.  It will be interesting to see how those continue to form and relate to the characters in different ways.

Specifically in this chapter we get an insight into the man responsible for the book The History of Love.  Most interesting to me, is that this book seems to cover just about every person this book affected.  I kind of assumed that it would have been more popular.  It makes me wonder about the other books out there that have only been printed a few times but are really moving.  Maybe I should read more... I think a teacher just got wings somewhere or something.

Anyway, I want to know how all these stories intertwine, but it's looking like this book is going to get a thumbs up from me.  It is definitely different from other books I've read in the character types.