Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
Ratings83
Average rating3.7
Lanny beviel heel goed, The Death of Francis Bacon een stuk minder. Deze maakte dat laatste dan weer goed :-)
Het spelen met taal, de soort van stream of consciousness van niet-mensen die in Lanny enigszins vervreemdend is, en mooi werkt, is hier ook al in een vorm aanwezig. Vader en twee zoons verliezen hun moeder, en Kraai klopt aan om ze door hun rouwproces heen te helpen.
“We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.”
Weten wie Ted Hughes en Sylvia Plath zijn is niet per se nodig, maar helpt wel... (De vader is een Ted Hughes scholar, en is bezig met een boek over de gedichtenbundel Crow van Ted Hughes)
“Eugh ... you sound like a fridge magnet.”
Like if Claire Keegan wrote something a little surreal and not especially great.
What a strange little book. This was not originally on my radar, but I am trying to meet new people in my area, and as such, this was the library's book club pick for October. There were beautiful, poetic lines in it, of course, but I can't say I really “get” the device of the crow. (Maybe it's because I'm not familiar with Ted Hughes' writing at all, which is referenced several times.) But it did capture the moments of initial grief, the long slog of figuring out how to live without the person you've lost, and feeling like you're maybe ready to take a step forward. Maybe it just felt off because it IS so short, and so the act of grieving felt rushed?
Anyway, I don't really know how I feel about it, so I'm looking forward to talking about it.
I read the Dutch version of this book. There are great observations and lovely sentences in it, but overall it didn't live up to the hype for me. I might try one of his other books.
An incredible little novel (is it a novel?) about a family of two boys and father, and a crow. The wife/mother has just died and this is the story of the family's journey through grief, which is helped along by the crow. It's a beautifully written mix of prose and verse, which made me laugh out loud and cry a little (which is not something I do very often while reading). I loved it.
When I'm browsing books at Tattered Cover, this is the sort of book I tell myself I should be reading. I never would have read it without my book club choosing it. I'm glad they did.
I didn't get half the references and found the colloquial British hilarious but I still loved it.
I read books centered on grief in an attempt to deal with my own grief. No real understanding is possible, but perhaps kinship found. A valuable thing.
This was such a beautiful book.
The prose was wonderfully lyrical & going over the passages + reading them aloud was such fun, especially since the writing was brilliant, strange and filled with so much raw emotion —
“I've drawn her unpicked, ribs splayed stretched like a xylophone with the dead birds playing tunes on her bones.”
I honestly didn't get a lot of the poems which were written in Crow's point-of-view