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adam_of_the_mountains 's review for:
The Great Believers
by Rebecca Makkai
Read this book.
It is riveting. Honestly, I wasn't prepared for how much I loved this book. Makkai's writing strikes a wonderful balance of intellect and emotional charge; the work travels in between the hackneyed and the unfounded, swaying much closer to the latter.
Given the parallel storylines (Chicago, late 80s-early 90s, AIDS crisis/Paris, 2015, searching for an estranged daughter), the story remains remarkably intact. Some reviews I have read, notably Michael Cunningham's in the New York Times, hint that the reader may desire a stronger purpose for the simultaneously unfolding narrative. For me, the stories connect enough to put them in the same world while, at the same time, different enough that what you learn and experience in one somehow lets you delve deeper in the other.
If I remember Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides because I think the last page of the novel is some of the best prose ever written, I would I say I will always remember The Great Believers because Makkai's description of the onset and experience of death is on a plane that I am not sure I have experienced in a piece of fiction. The characters' embrace, resistance, and acceptance of death is nuanced and particular to each character while maintaining a sense of universality. From the first few pages, we preview death - where it will take place, how it will take place - and yet each experience feels new and ethereal. She writes a death scene like a Polaroid developing in reverse and it is wonderful.
At one point, one of the characters wonders, Where does all the love go, when we lose someone? It bleeds outside of the pages of the novel and into the heart of the reader.
It is riveting. Honestly, I wasn't prepared for how much I loved this book. Makkai's writing strikes a wonderful balance of intellect and emotional charge; the work travels in between the hackneyed and the unfounded, swaying much closer to the latter.
Given the parallel storylines (Chicago, late 80s-early 90s, AIDS crisis/Paris, 2015, searching for an estranged daughter), the story remains remarkably intact. Some reviews I have read, notably Michael Cunningham's in the New York Times, hint that the reader may desire a stronger purpose for the simultaneously unfolding narrative. For me, the stories connect enough to put them in the same world while, at the same time, different enough that what you learn and experience in one somehow lets you delve deeper in the other.
If I remember Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides because I think the last page of the novel is some of the best prose ever written, I would I say I will always remember The Great Believers because Makkai's description of the onset and experience of death is on a plane that I am not sure I have experienced in a piece of fiction. The characters' embrace, resistance, and acceptance of death is nuanced and particular to each character while maintaining a sense of universality. From the first few pages, we preview death - where it will take place, how it will take place - and yet each experience feels new and ethereal. She writes a death scene like a Polaroid developing in reverse and it is wonderful.
At one point, one of the characters wonders, Where does all the love go, when we lose someone? It bleeds outside of the pages of the novel and into the heart of the reader.