Claire Meadows, a 92-year-old retired piano teacher, lies in bed, waiting to be taken to her friend’s 102nd birthday party. She has baked a cake for this man – an acclaimed writer who is possibly in love with her – as she has done for the past 70 years.
As she waits for her lift from a former boyfriend, now in a relationship with another man, Claire reflects on her life, comparing her past sexual encounters with several long-dead lovers. Unburdened by the typical physical irritations, limitations and mental vagaries associated with advanced age, Claire remains lucid and sharp and still sexually curious.
“Somehow their images, the memories of them ... them? The men she cared about, those inevitably unreliable memories – she knows they are unreliable, but that’s all she has – swirl around her mind, sometimes for no more than a split second. Yet, these people remain with her, alive or dead.”
Claire’s voice is one we seldom hear from, that of an elderly woman – “people of her age are not written about; they are written off”; she is also unexpectedly preoccupied with sexual longing. This is a woman who still craves sexual connection and fulfilment. Waiting for a Party is surprising and refreshing in its graphic and detailed descriptions of these past encounters with various men.
Waiting for a Party by Vesna Main review: surprising and refreshing
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“Most older individuals keep their feelings of loneliness to themselves, particularly their yearning for sexual love, simply because they are not expected to have such desires.”
The text is sometimes repetitive, occasionally rambling, yet this style suits the rhythm of the elderly as they retell stories from a smaller world, looking back at their past lives, often sharing their experiences repeatedly with a sort of ruthlessness. Occasionally, this repetition suggests that the manuscript would have benefited from a tighter edit, and Main’s prose is sometimes a little too on the nose.
Nevertheless, Waiting for a Party is absorbing, sometimes startling, in its exploration of a woman’s memories and regrets, and Vesna Main remains a daring, unpredictable writer who has produced a vivid exploration of late female longing and desire.
