To read or not to read...a fictional tale about a controversial painter

In keeping with this month's ReadWatchPlay theme of  #artreads, this novel was a Booker prize finalist in1989. It is the story of a controversial painter who returns to her hometown for a retrospective of her art, only to find herself  vividly reflecting on her childhood and youth.  

Read these opening paragraphs then decide whether to read or not to read the rest of this book...

 Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once. 

It was my brother Stephen who told me that, when he wore his raveling maroon sweater to study in and spent a lot of time standing on his head so that the blood would run down into his brain and nourish it. I didn't understand what he meant, but maybe he didn't explain it very well. He was already moving away from the impression of words. 

But I began to then think of time as having a shape, something you couldn't see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one thing laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. 

 Chapter 2. 

"Stephen says time is not a line" I say. Cordelia rolls her eyes, as I knew she would. 

"So?" she says. This answer pleases both of us. It puts the nature of time in its place, and also Stephen, who calls us "the teenagers, " as if he himself is not one. 

Cordelia and I  are riding in the streetcar, going downtown, as we do on winter Saturdays. The streetcar is muggy with twice- breathed air and the smell of wool. Cordelia sits with nonchalance, nudging me with her elbow now and then, staring blankly at the other people with her gray-green eyes, opaque and glinting as metal. She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We're impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. 

To keep reading this book, request it from the Library.