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mmmmmm's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racial slurs and Racism
Minor: Eating disorder
montereads's review against another edition
5.0
Tender, aching, gruff—these are all words that a character searches for in his second language in the last part of Sigrid Nunez’s ‘A Feather on the Breath of God,’ and are all words I could use to describe the book itself. We start with a profile of the speaker’s father as through a fish-eye lens—him in distorted focus, the background blurry. But the novel pans out rapidly, picking up in pace and scope to encompass memory, otherness, love, and the remarkable soul of the narrator. Nunez does none of the explicit work of connecting the parts of the book, but she doesn’t have to: the through-lines are clear. This novel feels like examining a bruise; painful, but you can’t help but be captivated by the colours.
jenanneco's review against another edition
4.0
I am immediately drawn to the texture of Nunez's storytelling. It peppers and volleys and changes the rules for its readers, I get emotional between the commas.
This is really more a collection of side by side essays than novel, which makes it read like memory but (and?) caught me off guard at the end. I feel that it leaves on a note shy of all that was put on the table, but nonetheless it builds it builds and was over as quickly as it came. Maybe in this way, it feels as if these essays were written by the same mind but not in the same breath.
"There's consolation in seeing oneself as the victim of love."
It is hard to watch silence turn into its own brand of hatred, the residue of which permeates the story to follow. In a constellation of ways, all characters are, to me, victims of love. They show the angles that we bend ourselves in order to catch glimpses of it, to justify the degree to which they have been revoked, to, as she says, find a way to “look back without anger or bitterness or shame.”pg (69).
and how noble the pursuit.
This is really more a collection of side by side essays than novel, which makes it read like memory but (and?) caught me off guard at the end. I feel that it leaves on a note shy of all that was put on the table, but nonetheless it builds it builds and was over as quickly as it came. Maybe in this way, it feels as if these essays were written by the same mind but not in the same breath.
"There's consolation in seeing oneself as the victim of love."
It is hard to watch silence turn into its own brand of hatred, the residue of which permeates the story to follow. In a constellation of ways, all characters are, to me, victims of love. They show the angles that we bend ourselves in order to catch glimpses of it, to justify the degree to which they have been revoked, to, as she says, find a way to “look back without anger or bitterness or shame.”pg (69).
and how noble the pursuit.
ahsimlibrarian's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this book both times I read it. It's about a Chinese-German young woman who has an affair with a Russian immigrant with a seedy past. She evokes her parents and childhood so poetically. I think it's semi-autobiographical. Sadly, the library where I work doesn't own it anymore, otherwise I would be talking it up!
"One wants a way of looking back without anger or bitterness or shame. One wants to be able to tell everything without blaming or apologizing." (94)
"I want to get down something T. S. Eliot said: Human beings are capable of passions that human experience can never live up to." (118)
"Someone has said: To be a woman is always to be hiding something." (129)
"One wants a way of looking back without anger or bitterness or shame. One wants to be able to tell everything without blaming or apologizing." (94)
"I want to get down something T. S. Eliot said: Human beings are capable of passions that human experience can never live up to." (118)
"Someone has said: To be a woman is always to be hiding something." (129)
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