PAEE: 204-the end

Quiz

Free write: "I struggled to my feet and began to walk. My father had been right — the paintings were not to be found — and had turned back as soon as he sensed this, which was almost instantly. I had gone on, blindly. I was a work on paper: weightless, sketchy, all impulse" (210). What is Max realizing about himself? What insight does this offer us into his character? Into the character of his father?

Now -- bring it to you. Reflect on and write about a time when your parents saw something more quickly than you did. And I'm not talking about seeing a spider or a deer crossing the road. I'm talking about seeing something monumental, something important that it took you a while to understand.

Discussion
1. Let's look at Micheline as she appears throughout the novel. In what ways does the discovery of Micheline make Max rethink his past?
2. On p. 220, Daniel says, "Let us never speak of this again." What does Daniel want to forget? Thin literally and figuratively.
3. p. 225: "And so my father's picture joined the other images in the lost museum of my mind."
4. p. 227: "The will told me Rose was most likely in Paris, and I felt a vague unpleasant anger toward the dead. How often had my father been in contact with her during my decades of faithful silence? With what knowledge had he died."
5. p. 231: "Did this mean that a son's love and grief for his father triumphed over all? Or that, in a moment of reckoning, I had seen and remembered nothing? I understood then that Rose had begun to bid only once I had stopped. She had been sent to Drouot's, or went of her own accord, in case I had forgotten what I would see there."
6. p. 231: "The shimmering of the city was also part of the canvas: Matisse's lemons seemed to float above the table and the white plate on which they might have rested, if they had been given rest. It was a still life that had not been granted stillness. I thought of the dimensions of the painting, of its flat and hovering planes, and that somewhere, in between the two, lingered those whom I had lost."