5/24/2023 0 Comments Grief has feathers![]() ![]() ![]() There should be horrible levels of noise, completely foreign and inappropriate for our cosy London flat." Instead, they wear their pajamas all day and "people visited and gave us stuff."Īnd then there is Crow. ![]() "There should be men in helmets speaking a new and dramatic language of crisis. The Boys (differentiated only as older and younger) are stunned that normal life goes on at all after such loss. The Dad can't accept his wife is dead: "We were smack bang in the middle, years from the finish, taking nothing for granted." For him, their house "becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers," where everything - a cheeky note, a novel she was in the middle of, a strand of her hair - is unbearably sad. But its shifting forms, its beak-by-jowl juxtapositions of the quotidian and the hallucinatory, render perfectly the bafflement of extreme grief, which can never be anticipated, only survived. It's told in short chapters in three alternating voices: the Dad, the Boys and Crow. Parts of it are poetry, others read like the script of a play or a grim fairy tale. Its jacket calls it a novel, but at just over 100 small-format pages it feels more like a novella or long short story. ![]()
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