Scan barcode
A review by jenanneco
A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
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They show the angles that we bend ourselves in order to catch glimpses of it, to justify the degree to which they have been revoked, to, as she says, find a way to “look back without anger or bitterness or shame.”pg (69).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They show the angles that we bend ourselves in order to catch glimpses of it, to justify the degree to which they have been revoked, to, as she says, find a way to “look back without anger or bitterness or shame.”pg (69).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.