pomfret
how does claire keegan write so devastatingly?
her every word is a gut punch. I remember lying on the floor staring at the ceiling for so long after I read small things like this and now I'm feeling the same way, like something walked right through me and kidnapped my entire soul after I just finished 'so late in the day' . she writes like she reads my thoughts and memories and they are so irrevocably sad by their honesty and lack of pretense. it's like holding my shadow at gunpoint and asking why it follows me. she asks questions that have answers but cannot be answered. I'm so overwhelmed by her power over both words and silence.
The first half was really enjoyable, but i think after introducing Kurihara's deductions, it really started going downhill. Also the ending bit was purely ridiculous, and i have a suspicion that they forgot to write about one chapter : nurturing darkness, file 2, because that one really doesn't arrive at any conclusion. i was glued to it, but it got a little worse towards the end. The stories are creepy and very interesting as of themselves and i think would've fared better if they would've been left open ended, but that's just my opinion, of course.
This book is too important for me to review it in a few lines. It is, probably the realest piece of writing I've read in my entire life and I can't hope to critique it in my own unworthy words any more than Woolf thought that the essential prerequisites for writing fiction was having a room of one's own and 500 pounds a year to one's name.
Mediocre as a collection, some are great, some are not, some are mental, a few really funny and satirical. Overall, it felt like a very hastily put together book and I blame the editors more than the author for not giving us a better compilation. Cope is a very thoughtful yet impulsive writer and I do love her style of writing but it really doesn't sit well with me when poetry becomes a string of words rather than making something remotely resembling nuance or sense.
This, for me, transcends even Morrison's Recitatif. Every emotion is so palpable behind her carefully crafted words, it feels like poetry, having just an unfortunate reason to have to write one. “This is not home” really hit a nerve that we had almost successfully numbed down with painkillers. What a melancholic masterpiece. Even if I do not identify with her race, I'm still a woman, and this constant struggle to just “divert a failure” is no stranger to me. I didn't realise how important this book is while going into it, but a part of me deeply believes in its “transcendence” and “assimilation” into a future classic.