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jsc8675309's review against another edition
I'm not really sure how to rate this. The language is beautiful and the observations and inner dialog profoundly moving, but it is also unremitting in its grief and sadness. Structurally, I had an issue with the protagonists isolation. He is living in the small town where he grew up, and the sudden disconnect with his wife seemed too much of a plot device than what would actually happen. It certainly isn't an enjoyable read. Paul Harding did the narration and he was great to listen to.
kristinrob's review against another edition
4.0
This book featured a writing style that was lovely and lyrical, while the story was tragic and tortured. Charlie lost the thing he valued most in life, his daughter. The his life really fell apart.
egoenner's review against another edition
2.0
This book started really strong; I was engrossed immediately. About half-way through, though, I became annoyed with the main character, with his self-indulgence and the endlessness of his self-pitying grief. I suppose Harding did that on purpose, so the tedium of reading echoed the tedium of reading, but it wasn't enough to sustain my interest.
the_resa_p's review against another edition
3.0
Dealing with grief is a difficult task, near impossible for some. For parents who have lost their child that task is even more than impossible. Harding has giving us a disturbing insight into the devastating process through his unnamed narrator in this emotional, but slow moving tale told from the perspective of a grieving father.
“Even if at any given moment it was no more than the hope for the return of hope, a single grain of it still contradicts a universe of despair.”
It’s hard to believe these words come out of the mouth of Harding’s narrator as you start the book. Distraught by the death of his daughter when she is hit by a car while riding her bike our narrator loses himself in his grief. Where his wife turns to her family for support and forces herself to continue living, the narrator turns to anger, drugs, and the dreams his near over-doses induce to stay connected with his daughter Kate.
This is not a “feel-good” or “how to move on” type book. It is real, raw, and sometimes uncomfortable. Our narrator is not a likable character. The further into the book you read the more difficult it is to empathize with him, and yet to not like him makes you feel guilty. His daughter just died. And now you know how it feels to be the people surrounding him during the grieving process. While not all parents become unable to live in the same way our narrator does after the death of Kate, his grieving process feels authentic because it feels individual. No one would grieve for Kate the same way as her father, and the more dependent on drugs he gets the more bizarre ways he pays tribute to his daughter become.
“I pushed deeper into the shade, further toward the border between this life and what lies outside it, and became something closer and closer to a corpse myself My hair was thin, my bones stuck out, and my skin stretched across my skull. I needed to be careful and not step over the boundary, because the thought that her own death caused her father’s suicide would be too awful for my daughter to bear.”
Harding takes us down into the narrator’s depression in a powerful way, and, honestly, sometimes it’s difficult to stay there. Harding has proven his merit as an author with his skill as a writer to capture the emotions of a real, human, person and at times the narration feels so personal it feels intrusive to be a part of it. There are chapters of the book that are hard to get through. The story stops dead any time we’re transported back into a memory of our narrator’s childhood and while it breaks up the disturbing, drug-addled, grief-ridden narration of the present the sudden, jerking stops in narration were hard to plow through.
“Houses retain traces of the people who have lived in them and I feel those traces immediately whenever I step into one”
Just like houses, traces of this book will remain with you even after you’ve finished the book. While not a plot driven novel, the literary merit of Harding’s style and the authentic way he conveys difficult emotions make this book a necessary edition to the literary works of the year.
I received an ARC of this book from the publisher.
jeffdonald's review against another edition
1.0
Self-indulgent and boring. I listened to this on audiobook and the author read it himself. He should not have
elliethebookreader's review against another edition
2.0
Too much description of everything even though i relaize it is supposed to be that way cause it describes in a very detailed manner feelings of a father who lost his only daughter. But i got kinda bored somewhere in the middle. However, образы are very realistic and vivid, and the closeness to nature appealed to me very much
Liked couple of thoughts:
1) The wind is the only thing that allows us to determine the flow of time. Without it nature seems suspended, frozen in time and it is as if time stopped and wothout watches you can't even know how much time is passing
2) about our deams being artfically contructed and doubtful (look up in the book)
Liked couple of thoughts:
1) The wind is the only thing that allows us to determine the flow of time. Without it nature seems suspended, frozen in time and it is as if time stopped and wothout watches you can't even know how much time is passing
2) about our deams being artfically contructed and doubtful (look up in the book)
robk's review against another edition
4.0
When I first started reading Enon, by Paul Harding, I didn't know quite what to think. The narrative seemed fractured, almost schizophrenic, and I found the disjointed narrator frustrating. It felt like each paragraph was a separate vignette in a collage of confused anecdotes. I felt like Harding was trying to do with writing what the impressionists did with painting--and I wasn't liking it.
Then something happened. I don't know exactly what, but I must have just stepped back and let the master do his work. Eventually the narrative began to become discernible amidst the broad rambling strokes of story, and the narrator's tragic life became heartbreakingly plain. The fragmented thoughts built gradually, through the narrator's introspection, into deeply saddening explorations of grief, pain, and violence.
I read Harding's first novel, Tinkers several years ago and loved the poetic musings on mortality and family life, so I expected this book to be a continuation of the theme--especially since this story takes place in the same town, and the narrator is the grandson of the first book's protagonist. Now, maybe I am misremembering Tinkers, but this second book feels like a great thematic departure. Less about love and beauty and more about darkness and violence, though the book is not particularly graphic. Instead, it's about the violence inherent in the human condition and in grief and selfishness.
This was truly a sad book, but one that was beautifully written and powerful. Tragic with just enough hope to pull us through.
Then something happened. I don't know exactly what, but I must have just stepped back and let the master do his work. Eventually the narrative began to become discernible amidst the broad rambling strokes of story, and the narrator's tragic life became heartbreakingly plain. The fragmented thoughts built gradually, through the narrator's introspection, into deeply saddening explorations of grief, pain, and violence.
I read Harding's first novel, Tinkers several years ago and loved the poetic musings on mortality and family life, so I expected this book to be a continuation of the theme--especially since this story takes place in the same town, and the narrator is the grandson of the first book's protagonist. Now, maybe I am misremembering Tinkers, but this second book feels like a great thematic departure. Less about love and beauty and more about darkness and violence, though the book is not particularly graphic. Instead, it's about the violence inherent in the human condition and in grief and selfishness.
This was truly a sad book, but one that was beautifully written and powerful. Tragic with just enough hope to pull us through.
bucket's review against another edition
3.0
"And yet. Wouldn't my sorrows have been the greater if Kate had never been at all? Wouldn't they? Wasn't it the case that her short and happy life was the greatest joy in my own?"
I had high expectations for this book, and I'm sorry to say that I came away a little disappointed. The author's first novel, Tinkers, blew me away with its beauty, whimsy, and ebb-and-flow style. Enon lacks most of the beauty (in part due to it's grief-stricken protagonist whose perspective we never leave) and some of the whimsy (though a memory of visiting a grandfather clock and an orrery, a memory of being outside at night with friends, and memories of feeding birds with Kate have their magic).
The ebb-and-flow style is here, in full force. However, it just doesn't work as well. There are a few potential reasons for this. First, our narrator is living in a drug-induced stupor. Second, we are mired very deeply in his perspective, and his alone. His thoughts and recollections are non-linear, but the "present" of the story IS linear (meaning that we read his thoughts in the order that he thinks them).
This leads to the ebbing-and-flowing being something like stream of consciousness, but not quite there - it feels half-baked. The long sentences and adding-nuance clauses are there, but the ideas presented often border on nonsensical and therefore don't give much illumination. For example:
"The wind on the serrated edge of the hurricane spun for the moment in strict tempo, and I thought that if the storm stopped traveling, and just remained, hung high above the village, spinning in place, and if it were fed the same diet of pressure and water and temperature, at a constant rate, it would be like a great, single-geared clock turning above us in the sky. We could set our watches to it. We might learn to make little hurricanes ourselves, to wear on our wrists to tell time."
The obsession with clocks and gears and time, that made so much sense in Tinkers, makes little here. What is the point of thinking of a hurricane as a clock and imagining little hurricane wrist watches? What does this illuminate?
Enon still has its moments of power.
For example, the moment Charlie realizes his errors: "I realized that what I had been doing since Kate's death was nothing short of violence. It was not grieving or healing or even mourning, but deliberate, enthralled persistence in the violence of her death, a willful preservation of the violence imparted to her and to our family by that car battering her."
And this little gem about time: "Not so much as a leaf on a tree rustled. The yard seemed timeless, and it struck me that the wind moving the trees and the grass and the clouds was what usually gave the sense that time was still moving, that the world was still moving, that the wind was a mechanism something like a clock. Or the trees and the clouds were the clock and the wind the power released from some immense solar springs uncoiling in space."
There is also a recurring idea that below the ground under Enon is everything and everyone that has been part of the area throughout history and prehistory - that all who no longer live are there jumbled up together. In memories, Charlie fears accidentally falling into that world and never climbing out. In the present, he longs for access or at least for his daughter to be able to move between that world and his. I wonder if I would have enjoyed the book more if Harding had let go of the machine/gear/clock obsession and instead focused on this idea of mixed-up time.
Finally, I love this random sentence, as a description of the joy of reading:
"What I loved most was how the contents of each batch of books mixed up with one another in my mind to make ideas and images and thoughts I'd never have imagined possible."
Themes: grief, clocks/machines/gears, time (and it's physical manifestations), addiction
I had high expectations for this book, and I'm sorry to say that I came away a little disappointed. The author's first novel, Tinkers, blew me away with its beauty, whimsy, and ebb-and-flow style. Enon lacks most of the beauty (in part due to it's grief-stricken protagonist whose perspective we never leave) and some of the whimsy (though a memory of visiting a grandfather clock and an orrery, a memory of being outside at night with friends, and memories of feeding birds with Kate have their magic).
The ebb-and-flow style is here, in full force. However, it just doesn't work as well. There are a few potential reasons for this. First, our narrator is living in a drug-induced stupor. Second, we are mired very deeply in his perspective, and his alone. His thoughts and recollections are non-linear, but the "present" of the story IS linear (meaning that we read his thoughts in the order that he thinks them).
This leads to the ebbing-and-flowing being something like stream of consciousness, but not quite there - it feels half-baked. The long sentences and adding-nuance clauses are there, but the ideas presented often border on nonsensical and therefore don't give much illumination. For example:
"The wind on the serrated edge of the hurricane spun for the moment in strict tempo, and I thought that if the storm stopped traveling, and just remained, hung high above the village, spinning in place, and if it were fed the same diet of pressure and water and temperature, at a constant rate, it would be like a great, single-geared clock turning above us in the sky. We could set our watches to it. We might learn to make little hurricanes ourselves, to wear on our wrists to tell time."
The obsession with clocks and gears and time, that made so much sense in Tinkers, makes little here. What is the point of thinking of a hurricane as a clock and imagining little hurricane wrist watches? What does this illuminate?
Enon still has its moments of power.
For example, the moment Charlie realizes his errors: "I realized that what I had been doing since Kate's death was nothing short of violence. It was not grieving or healing or even mourning, but deliberate, enthralled persistence in the violence of her death, a willful preservation of the violence imparted to her and to our family by that car battering her."
And this little gem about time: "Not so much as a leaf on a tree rustled. The yard seemed timeless, and it struck me that the wind moving the trees and the grass and the clouds was what usually gave the sense that time was still moving, that the world was still moving, that the wind was a mechanism something like a clock. Or the trees and the clouds were the clock and the wind the power released from some immense solar springs uncoiling in space."
There is also a recurring idea that below the ground under Enon is everything and everyone that has been part of the area throughout history and prehistory - that all who no longer live are there jumbled up together. In memories, Charlie fears accidentally falling into that world and never climbing out. In the present, he longs for access or at least for his daughter to be able to move between that world and his. I wonder if I would have enjoyed the book more if Harding had let go of the machine/gear/clock obsession and instead focused on this idea of mixed-up time.
Finally, I love this random sentence, as a description of the joy of reading:
"What I loved most was how the contents of each batch of books mixed up with one another in my mind to make ideas and images and thoughts I'd never have imagined possible."
Themes: grief, clocks/machines/gears, time (and it's physical manifestations), addiction
indrabar's review
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5