In the space of 220 pages, a world is created and populated with sympathetic but damaged souls, and a tale is vividly told.
Let me take a moment to note that this was his first novel, that he was thirty-one when it was published, which likely means he was in his mid to late twenties while writing it. I found it more powerful than the Booker-Prize-winning Last Orders, though.
It was not as well-written as Waterland (though to be fair, neither is anything else I've ever read), but was still a painful gut-punch.
This is the fourth novel I've read by Graham Swift, and the third that has left me deeply changed. In a complex book like this one, a marriage is like two neurons touching inside a brain, a link that branches out in both directions, sending currents forwards, backwards and sideways, and nothing can be truly contained between the two principal actors. In simple books, a marriage is a union of two people. And even when I met her I stood here on the common and thought: enough, everything is in its place, and I in mine. We never moved out of these narrow bounds. And up there, at St Stephens, you were christened, and your grandfather, whom you never saw, was buried, near the plaque to his already dead son. She looked as though she were lingering on some errand. I met her here those first times, Dorry here on the common. The irony is that these people may love their partner with greater-than-usual intensity, given the cost of that love to both of them. For an unfortunate few, though, perhaps due to traumatic incidents in their pasts, the idea of casually touching someone, even one's spouse of many years, causes them to seize up, to panic. For many couples, small physical signs of affection - the eye contact, the hugs, the waist squeezes, the butt pats - come as easily and thoughtlessly as breathing.
0 kommentar(er)
