{"id":30420,"date":"2025-09-18T23:01:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T23:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/30420\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T23:01:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T23:01:10","slug":"sarah-moss-ripeness-looks-at-two-eras-in-a-womans-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/30420\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Moss’ ‘Ripeness’ looks at two eras in a woman’s life"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the arresting opening scene of Sarah Moss\u2019 new novel, \u201cRipeness,\u201d we meet Edith, 73, smushed beneath the substantial body of her once-a-week lover, a potter named Gunther.<\/p>\n

Lines from Sylvia Plath\u2019s poem \u201cDaddy\u201d flit through her mind \u2014 \u201cEvery woman adores a Fascist\u201d \u2014 leading to the reflection that Gunther is hardly a Fascist, unless \u201chis politics are so far to the left he\u2019s come around the other side,\u201d his fierce dedication to veganism butting right against the border. <\/p>\n

In the pages that follow, we will spend a great deal of time inside Edith\u2019s head, a busy place, swirling with interesting thoughts, some of which pop right out of her mouth, as in an early scene where she\u2019s thinking about whether a slice of sour cream cake she\u2019s sharing with her friend M\u00e9abh is Ukrainian or Jewish in origin (she is Jewish herself). Moss\u2019 style runs the characters\u2019 thoughts and the spoken sentences together, without punctuation: <\/p>\n

\u201cShe takes another spoonful. People who share recipes, who bake the same birthday cakes, stuff the same flatbreads with the same herbs, are perfectly capable of burning down each other\u2019s houses, raping each other\u2019s daughters and mutilating each other\u2019s sons. The evidence would suggest it\u2019s in all of us, both the baking and the bloodlust. What, says M\u00e9abh, it\u2019s just a cake, let\u2019s order another slice.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s dizzying, but in a good way.<\/p>\n

Along with Edith at 73, living in rural Ireland, we also meet Edith at 17, in a villa in Italy. In alternating chapters \u2014 presented as her first-person narrative \u2014 she tells the story of being sent to spend the summer with her sister Lydia, a ballerina, as Lydia awaited the birth of a baby she planned to give up for adoption. That pregnancy is a scandalous situation, perpetrated by the director of the corps de ballet, Igor, whom we hear about but never meet in person.<\/p>\n

This younger Edith is just as prone as the elder to philosophical flights of the mind, which come fast and thick as she tries to take in the onslaught of new experiences the summer brings.<\/p>\n

\"cover<\/p>\n

Ripeness (Farrar Straus & Giroux)<\/p>\n

\u201cImpossible to hold in one\u2019s head, in one\u2019s seventeen-year-old head, the idea that all the women in the village, all the humans in the bowl of the mountains, along the boot of Italy, across the continent of Europe \u2013 never mind the grass and the squirrels \u2013 have their own reality, are the central characters in their own worlds, that there are as many tragedies and comedies as entries in the census; I had not, of course, yet learnt that tragedy and comedy, plot and endings, are merely the tools of fiction, fairy tale. Ripeness, not readiness, is all.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the arresting opening scene of Sarah Moss\u2019 new novel, \u201cRipeness,\u201d we meet Edith, 73, smushed beneath the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-30420","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}