>>4374166
After a few days of thinking, I really liked Evening Primrose. It pulls my favorite modernist trick of piling on narrators, having a woman named Shizue narrating the time her friend Oyu narrated a story her mom told her about her childhood. The story is rather mysterious (why does a daughter of a Dutch physician not recognize a priest or a cross?) and it's not immediately obvious why Shizue feels the need to narrate it. While there is yearning and romanticism in it, it explicitly doesn't explain why the mother and then Oyu became seekers and wanderers in life.

I think the point is that Shizue's desperately trying to understand Oyu, and this is the best she's got. She remembers Oyu's story verbatim, while Oyu js obviously paraphrasing her mother's. We don't learn much about Shizue and Oyu's relationship, except that they were best friends at dance school, she misses Oyu terribly and that Oyu gave her a hairpin as a memento until they'd meet again, but it's so potent as an indirect story about yearning. Oyu and her mother yearned for other places, home (as both are stuck between cultures) and maybe spiritual fulfillment, while Shizue yearns for Oyu.

Shizue is also an adult woman, so no outgrowing feelings for other women here either.