one of the things i love about normal people is marianne & connell's thoughts. all the things that they left unsaid. it was just so beautiful.
multiple times he has tried writing his thoughts about marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them. he's moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks. her hair and clothing. the copy of swann's way she reads at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, with a dark french painting on the cover and a mint-colored spine. her long fingers turning the pages. she's not leading the same kind of life as other people. she acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. he wants to understand how her mind works. if he silently decides not to say something when they're talking, marianne will ask ‘what?’ within one or two seconds. this ‘what?’ question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them. he writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to re-create a precise copy of marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review.
