What do you think?
Rate this book
Thieving Sun
In this searing debut novel, for readers of Katie Kitamura and Rachel Cusk, the tragic aftermath of a youthful relationship years after its end brings the life of a mourning woman in New York--and the pursuit of art--into stark relief.
Told in short passages through a musical device, this international story follows Julienne and Gaspar to Syria, China, Germany and elsewhere.
Julienne, a student of sculpture, and Gaspar, a young composer, fall in love at a small college and share a home for more than a decade before encountering the fundamental rift that will change their lives. The reverberations of grief force Julienne to confront her painful past including the mystery of her own birth and the fantastical story ascribed to it by her flight attendant mother, so that she can envision, for the first time, a real future.
Ultimately, Thieving Sun is a profound and contemporary meditation on art, grief, debt, suicide loss and the danger of being alive.
Told in short passages through a musical device, this international story follows Julienne and Gaspar to Syria, China, Germany and elsewhere.
Julienne, a student of sculpture, and Gaspar, a young composer, fall in love at a small college and share a home for more than a decade before encountering the fundamental rift that will change their lives. The reverberations of grief force Julienne to confront her painful past including the mystery of her own birth and the fantastical story ascribed to it by her flight attendant mother, so that she can envision, for the first time, a real future.
Ultimately, Thieving Sun is a profound and contemporary meditation on art, grief, debt, suicide loss and the danger of being alive.
- GenresFiction
216 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 26, 2024
4 people are currently reading
300 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 19, 2024
I expected this to be right up my alley but there were too many things that put me off.
It's a story about an American woman looking back at her relationship with a man who committed suicide, in short, non-chronological chapters.
My number one irritant was the constant name-dropping - it was distracting and very tiresome. Characters can never just watch a movie, it has to be an intellectual art house film. When they meet a friend, we are first being informed of the studies the friend excelled at and at which renowned university. When they go to work, we are being told that their boss was meeting a minister. When they travel or go to a restaurant we get all the details demonstrating their good taste. Ok, some of the references have a connection with the story, but many also don't (at least not one I could discern).
I also never connected with the characters; they stayed very cool and distant. Perhaps this was to be expected given the comparisons with Rachel Cusk, but in this book it was more of an issue for me as the story itself was not very engaging and quite fragmentary. And don't ask me about the comparisons with Katie Kitamura who is one of the most engaging authors I know, drawing me in from page 1.
I wished the author had kept the story small and intimate, because she can clearly write and those were convincing sections.
It's a story about an American woman looking back at her relationship with a man who committed suicide, in short, non-chronological chapters.
My number one irritant was the constant name-dropping - it was distracting and very tiresome. Characters can never just watch a movie, it has to be an intellectual art house film. When they meet a friend, we are first being informed of the studies the friend excelled at and at which renowned university. When they go to work, we are being told that their boss was meeting a minister. When they travel or go to a restaurant we get all the details demonstrating their good taste. Ok, some of the references have a connection with the story, but many also don't (at least not one I could discern).
I also never connected with the characters; they stayed very cool and distant. Perhaps this was to be expected given the comparisons with Rachel Cusk, but in this book it was more of an issue for me as the story itself was not very engaging and quite fragmentary. And don't ask me about the comparisons with Katie Kitamura who is one of the most engaging authors I know, drawing me in from page 1.
I wished the author had kept the story small and intimate, because she can clearly write and those were convincing sections.
April 12, 2024
|| THIEVING SUN ||
#gifted @astrahousebooks
✍🏻
Thieving Sun follows Julienne a student of sculpture and Gaspar a young composer. They fall in love in college, live together for a decade before a rift changes their lives forever. Julienne in the aftermath goes on a self actualized journey where she gains an understsnding of Gaspar and her own painful past to be able to see her future.
I went into this book completely blind, and I found it an absolute delight! It's emotional and whimsical as it explores grief, love, art, loss, being alive and time. That last one is very prominent as it's skillfully weaved into the structure of the book. An inventive, non linear style, the story is told through a series of microtonal music scales that jump back and forth through time. Incredibly clever, you can tell everything was done with purpose. Prose meticulously written, main characters flawed, realistic. I loved how its set around music, this was so facinating. This one's compared to the likes of Cusk which I can see but more it reminded me of Renata Adler's style particularly Speed Boat. I will be thinking on this one for some time. I haven't seen a lot of coverage on this book yet as it is a new release, I hope to see more people's thoughts on it in the future.
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
#gifted @astrahousebooks
✍🏻
Thieving Sun follows Julienne a student of sculpture and Gaspar a young composer. They fall in love in college, live together for a decade before a rift changes their lives forever. Julienne in the aftermath goes on a self actualized journey where she gains an understsnding of Gaspar and her own painful past to be able to see her future.
I went into this book completely blind, and I found it an absolute delight! It's emotional and whimsical as it explores grief, love, art, loss, being alive and time. That last one is very prominent as it's skillfully weaved into the structure of the book. An inventive, non linear style, the story is told through a series of microtonal music scales that jump back and forth through time. Incredibly clever, you can tell everything was done with purpose. Prose meticulously written, main characters flawed, realistic. I loved how its set around music, this was so facinating. This one's compared to the likes of Cusk which I can see but more it reminded me of Renata Adler's style particularly Speed Boat. I will be thinking on this one for some time. I haven't seen a lot of coverage on this book yet as it is a new release, I hope to see more people's thoughts on it in the future.
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
March 26, 2024
In Your Brain is a Time Machine, Dean Buonamano takes on that age-old mystery, time, examining the way time has been understood in vastly different, seemingly incompatible ways by physicist and neuroscientists. He breaks down the prevailing theories in physics, labeled as presentism and eternalism; presentism, as I understand his explanation, is the idea that the present, past, and future exist as three separate realms, whereas eternalism argues that these categories are illusory and that past, present, and future exist all at once. This notion long predates physics, though, going back to at least Parmenides.
I bring this up here and now (or perhaps in the past in which I wrote this or the future in which you read this, which might all be one and the same) because Monica Datta’s Thieving Sun, is a book about, among other things, our lived experience of time. The book traces, brilliantly to my mind, the life of its protagonist, Julienne, from childhood ballet lessons in the 70s through the election of 2016, with particular focus on her complicated relationship with a composer named Gaspar, which becomes a defining helix of her life and the centerpiece of the novel. But rather than treating past, present, and future as different dimensions, Datta's novel braids them so that they are so intricately intertwined that we can no longer see them as separate and distinct.
Or maybe "see" is wrong; the novel is steeped in music. Indeed, it opens not with a "Table of Contents" but of "Accidents," sheet music whose staves announce the ascent of notes that will comprise each of the book's sections. Immediately, we are flung into Gaspar's auditory and conceptual frame of mind, wherein he describes working in Damascus and how he wishes he could record the copper workers, "playing the material as instrument, etching and scuffing and stretching and brazing...each sound...so supple[.]" This blurring of the boundaries between the non-musical and music itself becomes not only a thematic strand running through it, but defines the medium of the book itself, which is unerringly musical on the level of the word and phrase, along with the scales that provide its formal architecture.
In short bursts of passages reminiscent of Renata Adler's Speedboat, we are introduced to a cast of characters who spiral around Julienne--Gaspar's friends Leila and Axel, Gaspar's parents, another Gaspar, and eventually Bob, the man she winds up in a tepid relationship; the noodles on his beard as they are dining mirroring an emotional sloppiness and lack of self-awareness. But it's Julienne and Gaspar on whom we are mainly focused, even when we know his fate (early on, we learn of his sudden and unexpected death), and even once Julienne has at last taken dramatic action in her own life, taking up sculpture, for instance, we cannot help but sense the ways in which he continues to, in her words, "live deep in the marrow." As with Adler's scenes, Datta's often cut away sharply, but unlike Speedboat, which revels (or resigns itself to) irony, Thieving Sun is suffused by a sometimes-raw, always-candid emotional engagement, an unabashed willingness to examine and explore vulnerability.
SPOILER HERE. If I had a single gripe it would be that the book's organizational logic, "based loosely on the Arabic structure known as the maqam," is only revealed in a note to the reader at the end; each note corresponds to a different period in Julienne's life, with one note reserved for "direct address" of Gaspar. To me, knowing this structure only enhances the way one experiences the book, because it is precisely through its leaps forward and backward in time, and in the ensuing juxtapositions, that the book's ingenuity arises. One moment we are watching Julienne finally embracing sculpture on the scale of Serra who she has long admired; the next we are seeing her arrive in Berlin for her study abroad in college, and in the next moment we see her at a dull paralegal job buying an eraser that becomes her favorite object for the way it can be "reshaped again and again." Indeed, this is a novel that reshapes itself again and again--through multiple relationships, art forms, incidents, and stages of life--grief and self-losing and rediscovering. If you're anything like me, you'll gladly cast aside the comforts of simple chronology and order for these other, richer resonances, the music that, if anything, life seems to play upon us.
Thanks to Astra House Press and NetGalley for an e-ARC of this book.
I bring this up here and now (or perhaps in the past in which I wrote this or the future in which you read this, which might all be one and the same) because Monica Datta’s Thieving Sun, is a book about, among other things, our lived experience of time. The book traces, brilliantly to my mind, the life of its protagonist, Julienne, from childhood ballet lessons in the 70s through the election of 2016, with particular focus on her complicated relationship with a composer named Gaspar, which becomes a defining helix of her life and the centerpiece of the novel. But rather than treating past, present, and future as different dimensions, Datta's novel braids them so that they are so intricately intertwined that we can no longer see them as separate and distinct.
Or maybe "see" is wrong; the novel is steeped in music. Indeed, it opens not with a "Table of Contents" but of "Accidents," sheet music whose staves announce the ascent of notes that will comprise each of the book's sections. Immediately, we are flung into Gaspar's auditory and conceptual frame of mind, wherein he describes working in Damascus and how he wishes he could record the copper workers, "playing the material as instrument, etching and scuffing and stretching and brazing...each sound...so supple[.]" This blurring of the boundaries between the non-musical and music itself becomes not only a thematic strand running through it, but defines the medium of the book itself, which is unerringly musical on the level of the word and phrase, along with the scales that provide its formal architecture.
In short bursts of passages reminiscent of Renata Adler's Speedboat, we are introduced to a cast of characters who spiral around Julienne--Gaspar's friends Leila and Axel, Gaspar's parents, another Gaspar, and eventually Bob, the man she winds up in a tepid relationship; the noodles on his beard as they are dining mirroring an emotional sloppiness and lack of self-awareness. But it's Julienne and Gaspar on whom we are mainly focused, even when we know his fate (early on, we learn of his sudden and unexpected death), and even once Julienne has at last taken dramatic action in her own life, taking up sculpture, for instance, we cannot help but sense the ways in which he continues to, in her words, "live deep in the marrow." As with Adler's scenes, Datta's often cut away sharply, but unlike Speedboat, which revels (or resigns itself to) irony, Thieving Sun is suffused by a sometimes-raw, always-candid emotional engagement, an unabashed willingness to examine and explore vulnerability.
SPOILER HERE. If I had a single gripe it would be that the book's organizational logic, "based loosely on the Arabic structure known as the maqam," is only revealed in a note to the reader at the end; each note corresponds to a different period in Julienne's life, with one note reserved for "direct address" of Gaspar. To me, knowing this structure only enhances the way one experiences the book, because it is precisely through its leaps forward and backward in time, and in the ensuing juxtapositions, that the book's ingenuity arises. One moment we are watching Julienne finally embracing sculpture on the scale of Serra who she has long admired; the next we are seeing her arrive in Berlin for her study abroad in college, and in the next moment we see her at a dull paralegal job buying an eraser that becomes her favorite object for the way it can be "reshaped again and again." Indeed, this is a novel that reshapes itself again and again--through multiple relationships, art forms, incidents, and stages of life--grief and self-losing and rediscovering. If you're anything like me, you'll gladly cast aside the comforts of simple chronology and order for these other, richer resonances, the music that, if anything, life seems to play upon us.
Thanks to Astra House Press and NetGalley for an e-ARC of this book.
December 8, 2024
I am a Monica Datta stan after reading this book.
Through fragmented, non-chronological vignettes, we follow Julienne, a sculpture student, before, during, and in the aftermath of her decade-long relationship with Gaspar, a musician/composer she met while in college. Both inextricably linked and conversely discordant, the two never seem to be speaking the same language. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Table of Accidents (Contents) where their mediums collide and form the score for what's ahead. Here, Datta plays both composer and sculptor.
This book is puzzling and poetic. It explores life and death, and even more-so life and living. It grapples with grief and mental health. Place and time. Past and present. Family and relationships. Sun and moon. Nature and artifice. Bird and frog. What you know and don’t know. What you think you know. The turbulence of pursuing art. And meaning.
I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time.
Through fragmented, non-chronological vignettes, we follow Julienne, a sculpture student, before, during, and in the aftermath of her decade-long relationship with Gaspar, a musician/composer she met while in college. Both inextricably linked and conversely discordant, the two never seem to be speaking the same language. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Table of Accidents (Contents) where their mediums collide and form the score for what's ahead. Here, Datta plays both composer and sculptor.
This book is puzzling and poetic. It explores life and death, and even more-so life and living. It grapples with grief and mental health. Place and time. Past and present. Family and relationships. Sun and moon. Nature and artifice. Bird and frog. What you know and don’t know. What you think you know. The turbulence of pursuing art. And meaning.
I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time.
January 6, 2024
4.5
great novel! i loved the scales too :D as a musician that was a great touch. thanks for the arc.
great novel! i loved the scales too :D as a musician that was a great touch. thanks for the arc.
November 27, 2024
Audiobook
December 15, 2025
This novel deserves a higher rating and more reviews. It's brilliant, moving, propulsive. I'm excited to see what Datta writes next.
July 31, 2024
This book is VERY experimental, so be prepared for that. This might sound weird but it was like a spiderweb, crystal-like and with a logic that is at the same time very raw and very cerebral with the musical scales and the story plotted around them like a puzzle or a riddle. The writing style is beautiful, like poets' novels. It's also a great book about depression that isn't depressing. Despite everything that life threw at Julienne, I really wanted her to be happy.
P.S. After finding a (gorgeous) hard copy in a Little Free Library, I can say that it's not really a novel but more like a puzzle, or a book of prose poems, and literally a musical composition. The references are really well done (there is an index of them at the end), and the mystery is about what makes up a person's mind, which isn't something we expect from "sad girl" novels. (As for the characters' jobs...I liked that part and found it funny, it reminds me that the worlds of Vanity Fair and social climbing aren't limited to the past. :D)
Thank you to NetGalley and Astra House for the ARC!
P.S. After finding a (gorgeous) hard copy in a Little Free Library, I can say that it's not really a novel but more like a puzzle, or a book of prose poems, and literally a musical composition. The references are really well done (there is an index of them at the end), and the mystery is about what makes up a person's mind, which isn't something we expect from "sad girl" novels. (As for the characters' jobs...I liked that part and found it funny, it reminds me that the worlds of Vanity Fair and social climbing aren't limited to the past. :D)
Thank you to NetGalley and Astra House for the ARC!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews