Reviews

All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt

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sebjoe's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

chickenx1000's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful inspiring sad slow-paced

5.0

I had seen this book recommended a dozen times, yet every time I got close to ordering it, I backed out. Something about the summary didn't reach me, seemed too individual, too private and yet, at the same time, too banal -- too close to some of my own experiences.

I don't know what finally convinced me to read it, but when I started it, in audiobook format, hearing the very first lines, my hesitation came back. Hewitt is a poet, and I've never been as good as I wished I were with poetry. But as I listened to the author's elegant, measured and still somewhat shy voice, I got used to the rhythm of his words and the deeply personal meaning of their lyricism sunk in.

This was a very beautiful memoir, mostly, it turns out, due to Hewitt's gorgeous poetic writing. Perhaps the story had seemed banal to me, but Hewitt but words on it, created images out of it that made it so soul-touchingly gorgeous, and nothing but ordinary.

emdtx's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

3.75

serenspace's review

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.25

Content Warnings

mirivii's review against another edition

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emotional sad medium-paced

3.75

Starts slow but then gets you hooked. Painfully beautiful and brutally honest.

Read for UAL book club.

carrotsarenot's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

Memoirs aren’t something I’m usually drawn to. For one thing, I tend to prefer fiction, but I also just don’t feel like I can often relate to or take much away from them. I know that’s probably not always the case and it isn’t always necessary to only read things that you can relate to, but I digress.

I initially picked up (and by that I mean checked out from the library) All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt as a means of research for a story I’m currently working on, so I was going in with more of a fact-finding mindset than I normally do while I’m reading something.

And although I continued to keep an eye out for relevant themes, settings, and feelings, I quickly slipped into reading simply for enjoyment. Well, it’s a bit of a dark book, so maybe enjoyment is the wrong word, but I was intrigued and pulled into the narrative Hewitt was beginning to weave.

He was able to tell his story in such a thoughtful, retrospective, and poetic way that there were many times where I got lost in the pages, feeling like I was reliving Hewitt’s memories myself.

At times, though, reliving those memories felt like a slog. I’m sure that the heavy, dragging pace was somewhat intentional as I got deeper into the story, but it made some parts quite hard to get through. Even towards the beginning, in a lighter part of the story, I found myself just quite bored with his privilege-tinged, escapist descriptions of South America and his travels in general.

Other than that, I genuinely enjoyed this book overall and am strongly considering purchasing it just so I can go through and underline all of my favorite lines and passages.

Here are a few them (in chronological order):

“When they said, ‘I’m just scared that you’ll be unhappy,’ what I really felt they were saying was ‘I am scared that if you continue being yourself, we will make you unhappy.’ A sort of threat, veiled as kindness.”

“Sometimes, in the process, the more I talked, the more I’d end up making it all less and less convincing, even for myself. Words seemed to unravel the spell of life.”

“Marriage, it said, was ‘an expression of our fundamental humanity’. The pronoun ‘our’ did not include me. I am ashamed to say that I only understood the depth of my own collusion in this way of thinking when I saw it turn so starkly against me. Everything contrary to it was ‘disordered’, ‘unnatural’, outside the bounds of grace. I was sure, then, that if anything was intrinsically disordered, it was the Catholic Church. If anything was contrary to nature it was harnessing an idea of nature and weaponising it.”

“After he died, I thought of that often. The garden, the birds — that was his idea of heaven, a man who didn’t believe in God, didn’t know where he was going when he left. Really, that is the only heaven that makes sense to me, too… What was the garden, then, if not heaven, if not a place made up of everything that had been lost to us, if not an afterlife? After that, the whole world could be heaven to me. Still, it seems like the most simple, the most beautiful way I can think of looking at life. Everything, all of it, is mimicry.”

“If I cannot change the structures of the world, if I cannot bend the will of heaven, perhaps I can move the river, perhaps I can move hell. Whose heaven was it anyway?

Content Warnings