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Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals
Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso
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First published January 1, 1978
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June 9, 2019Canadian poet Elizabeth Smart's first book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, was a long lament about being separated from her lover, delivered in page after page of psalm-like sorrowing.
In this follow-up book, the time for indulging in lamentations is over. She is now the mother of her lover's child, and all her energies are trained on making some sort of livable life for the child and herself in the wasteland of blitzed-out London. She has travelled to England to be near the child's English father who still lives with his wife but manages to visit Elizabeth often enough for them to have three more children together.
So there are no high-flowing psalms here. The writing is still striking, but the subject matter has crashed down to earth: I am, after all, just a woman in a fish queue, with her bit of wrapping paper, waiting for her turn. I wouldn’t budge an inch out of line for faith, for hope, or for glory. History is in the fishmonger’s hands, and I will be grateful for the stale allotment he allows.
The book sometimes reads like a dialogue Elizabeth holds with herself as she considers how she endured those years of drudgery: Out of this weary landscape, girding your strengths around you, you are to step through a couple of decades with your children on your back, singing a song to keep them optimistic, and looking to left and right. For the right and not for the left. Left right, Left right. Are you a friend to me, sergeant-major conscience, strictly insisting on keeping in step with the true, the true, the true that you once knew, and not the invented possibilities that reeled in front of your reeling mind when the lightning lit up everything? You expected a bill, and a bill is what you get. This is the bill. Now pay it.
And she pays and pays, moving from one dingy lodging to another, traveling the underground every day to slave for a series of Misters who dictate the rules. At home, when her lover comes, he also dictates the rules, and she bites her lip, wanting above all to be brave, dandified, unobtrusive; to smile like the Spartan boy with the fox gnawing his intestines: saying, ‘It’s nothing! It’s nothing! I don’t feel a thing! Pay no attention!’
Fortunately for us readers, in spite of being crippled by work, children, a spoilt lover, constant poverty, she finds time to log her rebellious thoughts and acute observations about the wasteland of her life. I don't use the word wasteland lightly. There are resemblances here to Eliot's poem. Elizabeth Smart mixes conversations in buses and bar rooms with references to mythology and religion, all in prose that for me reads as much like poetry as her Central Station psalm:
After being knocked out on the battlefield (of love? of passion? –never mind now), I lay a long time like Lazarus waiting for Jesus to come and tell me to get up.
He may have come. Or he may not. Or he may have come and I have moved to another address.
Or maybe he kissed me in a spot where too much local anaesthetic lingered.
Anyway, there has been no resurrection.
It is not as if I hung upon a cross saying, ‘Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?’; for none of my wounds, if any exist, are bleeding.
I sit at a desk in an office, making out shopping lists, adding up my bills.
When Jericho fell, weeping was permitted, and in Babylon it was fashionable to make a memorable moan by the retreating waters. But here you must go to your office, looking sprightly, with a sparkle even if synthetic in your eye.
For who dares to stand up and say ‘We are weary! O Christ but we are weary!’
Is there any need to add how much I enjoyed this?
In this follow-up book, the time for indulging in lamentations is over. She is now the mother of her lover's child, and all her energies are trained on making some sort of livable life for the child and herself in the wasteland of blitzed-out London. She has travelled to England to be near the child's English father who still lives with his wife but manages to visit Elizabeth often enough for them to have three more children together.
So there are no high-flowing psalms here. The writing is still striking, but the subject matter has crashed down to earth: I am, after all, just a woman in a fish queue, with her bit of wrapping paper, waiting for her turn. I wouldn’t budge an inch out of line for faith, for hope, or for glory. History is in the fishmonger’s hands, and I will be grateful for the stale allotment he allows.
The book sometimes reads like a dialogue Elizabeth holds with herself as she considers how she endured those years of drudgery: Out of this weary landscape, girding your strengths around you, you are to step through a couple of decades with your children on your back, singing a song to keep them optimistic, and looking to left and right. For the right and not for the left. Left right, Left right. Are you a friend to me, sergeant-major conscience, strictly insisting on keeping in step with the true, the true, the true that you once knew, and not the invented possibilities that reeled in front of your reeling mind when the lightning lit up everything? You expected a bill, and a bill is what you get. This is the bill. Now pay it.
And she pays and pays, moving from one dingy lodging to another, traveling the underground every day to slave for a series of Misters who dictate the rules. At home, when her lover comes, he also dictates the rules, and she bites her lip, wanting above all to be brave, dandified, unobtrusive; to smile like the Spartan boy with the fox gnawing his intestines: saying, ‘It’s nothing! It’s nothing! I don’t feel a thing! Pay no attention!’
Fortunately for us readers, in spite of being crippled by work, children, a spoilt lover, constant poverty, she finds time to log her rebellious thoughts and acute observations about the wasteland of her life. I don't use the word wasteland lightly. There are resemblances here to Eliot's poem. Elizabeth Smart mixes conversations in buses and bar rooms with references to mythology and religion, all in prose that for me reads as much like poetry as her Central Station psalm:
After being knocked out on the battlefield (of love? of passion? –never mind now), I lay a long time like Lazarus waiting for Jesus to come and tell me to get up.
He may have come. Or he may not. Or he may have come and I have moved to another address.
Or maybe he kissed me in a spot where too much local anaesthetic lingered.
Anyway, there has been no resurrection.
It is not as if I hung upon a cross saying, ‘Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?’; for none of my wounds, if any exist, are bleeding.
I sit at a desk in an office, making out shopping lists, adding up my bills.
When Jericho fell, weeping was permitted, and in Babylon it was fashionable to make a memorable moan by the retreating waters. But here you must go to your office, looking sprightly, with a sparkle even if synthetic in your eye.
For who dares to stand up and say ‘We are weary! O Christ but we are weary!’
Is there any need to add how much I enjoyed this?
October 31, 2016
This book is considered the sequel to her cult classic By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but without the beauty and the power of her poetic prose masterpiece. Rogues and Rascals is a rambling biographical essay of her struggle to make ends meet and raise her four children in a post WWII London. And her off and on again relationship with married British poet George Baker, the father of all four of her illegitimate children.
But this is still a powerful book, especially if you have read By Grand Central Station. It's almost a necessity to read it before Rogues and Rascals. Smart writes, "a pen is a furious weapon, but it needs a rage of will". Well she uses that rage and her pen to great effect in this book. These books are not mainstream, and they're not for everyone. But for me they were fascinating, they struck a chord that was pure and reminded me of why I love to read.
But this is still a powerful book, especially if you have read By Grand Central Station. It's almost a necessity to read it before Rogues and Rascals. Smart writes, "a pen is a furious weapon, but it needs a rage of will". Well she uses that rage and her pen to great effect in this book. These books are not mainstream, and they're not for everyone. But for me they were fascinating, they struck a chord that was pure and reminded me of why I love to read.
November 8, 2022
I bought this on an unplanned visit to one of my favourite secondhand bookshops, and I'm glad I did, as this was a uniquely interesting delve into Smart's work. I found the experience to be rather unusual, read as a stream of rambling for the most part, but the subject matter was fascinating.
I enjoyed the way she talks about difficulties that may come with being female, and the responsibilities that are set before us. She discusses what it is like to be a woman full of hope and ambition for her future.
The language she uses is beautiful, evocative, but also quite grim, and she is about to capture the atmosphere of a typical day in London. This is rather commendable, as I think she does this very well.
This book asks many questions about love, treatment towards others, relationships and survival, and I would certainly be interested in reading more from Smart.
I enjoyed the way she talks about difficulties that may come with being female, and the responsibilities that are set before us. She discusses what it is like to be a woman full of hope and ambition for her future.
The language she uses is beautiful, evocative, but also quite grim, and she is about to capture the atmosphere of a typical day in London. This is rather commendable, as I think she does this very well.
This book asks many questions about love, treatment towards others, relationships and survival, and I would certainly be interested in reading more from Smart.
March 13, 2024
really good but had to keep going back because maya was talkin
January 30, 2015
Once again an astonishing book by Elizabeth Smart. This one retains much of the glorious writing found in her masterpiece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. But we now find an aging, somewhat jaded Smart, looking back on her life with a certain awe at the intense passions of her youth. Her reflection is tinged, even wholly wrapped in lament, mourning the loss of joy, the raw emotion of youth losing its sharp edge, becoming flat and dull. Life requires acceptance and acceptance means defeat to one once so defiant. It is inevitable. "So between worry and action the faces of women fall away" she writes, just one of many, many sad observations. Her book is filled with brilliantly written truths, but some were so awful to face I once again was happy when this short volume released me.
July 11, 2016
Beautifully poetic. The kind of book you could read over and over and still find something new each time.
Read
September 13, 2025Tek kelimeyle muazzam bir okumaydı. Clarise Lispector'u anımsattı yer yer. Bazı yerlerde de kendi defterlerime ışınlandım sorduğumuz ortak ve benzer yapıda sorularımız çok fazla.
Merhaba yeni dostum Elizabeth..
Merhaba yeni dostum Elizabeth..
November 2, 2023
Less romantic than the prequel. Was looking for some sort of plot, some progression in thought, but it wasn't clear. Smart's writing is beautiful, and I found myself holding my breath through pockets of prose. This is the kind of book that you need to study and reread just to scratch the surface of what the author is saying. Worth it for poetry lovers, but this is far from an easy read. Arguably, more literarily challenging than the prequel.
January 4, 2025
with whatever means necessary I’d like to scoop up these words and smear them on my face and heart and soul
July 23, 2021
"A pen is a furious weapon. But it needs a rage of will. Everything physical dies but you can send a mad look to the end of time. You can manipulate the bright distracting forever-escaping moment."
It is criminal that Elizabeth Smart is not hailed as one of the great literary modernist geniuses of our time. She deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as TS Eliot and Beckett for her rich, allusive, intertextual poetry. It is a testament to the misogyny of the world that her writing remains little known - she writes of the blood, gore and viscera of being female, all those icky things that ladies love to talk about that will never be taken seriously. She writes brilliantly about the tedious struggles of being a mother, of being a lover, of being a woman with ambition and passions.
"But where, woman wailing above your station, is it you want to go to, get to, accomplish, communicate? Can’t you be amply satisfied with such pain, such babies, such balancing?
No. No. There’s a blood-flecked urge to go even a step further....If it is all to be buried, all just lived through, life becomes a warmish sort of bath, or worse."
The language is so rich and soupy and nourishing and bitter... it is also replete with classical, biblical, Freudian and literary references and metaphor whilst still being firmly grounded in the mundanity of a grimy day in 70's London. This is sharp, witty, self-aware, excessive writing of the best sort.
I devoured this slim novel in one heady rush on the train from Manchester to Crewe, barely raising my head, not wanting to breathe until I had inhaled it all. It is, in a small way, a follow on from 'By Grand Central Station..' in that it continues the story of her tumultuous and complicated relationship with the poet George Barker, with whom she had four children. Barker remained married to another woman throughout the relationship, leaving Smart to manage the raising of her brood alone. It reveals the drudgery of motherhood, the difficulty of going it alone - it is a sole rallying cry for herself to just persevere, to draw on those reserves of strength that can be so sapped by circumstances and people that treat you badly.
"I am friendless, covered in mud, cowardly, weak, untrained. But signed up for the duration.
You brought it upon yourself. You have only yourself to blame.
True. True. Perfectly true. Too late to desert. Too late to heave off your crippling kit and head for the hills. The problem now is how to put one foot forward, never mind best, just foot, foot, foot. Forward. On. Just keeping your feet from going numb.”
The urgency and desperation in the narrative voice is electrifying: both ecstatic and enervated, sometimes within a single sentence. There are flashes of descriptions in which the narrator find transcendence and unbearable beauty, quickly followed by the squalid reality of a dingy London street, as she waits in a grey street for a soggy bag of chips to take home.
Rogues and Rascals is desolate and sublime; asking questions about compromise, disappointment, love, survival and motherhood in a great gush of beautiful sentences, rhythmically repeating and circling and never quite settling. Everyone should read this book!
"So between worry and action the faces of women fall away. Can they walk off, leaving behind everything spurious, futile, ignominious, love-lack, over those fields mysterious with mushrooms, over the hill spotted with cows shapeless as slugs in the dusk, and reach at last, that evening, ease in a London pub, where faces glow through the smoke and sometimes through distracted anguish? Even a slight parole?
No. They must stay. They must pray. They must bang their heads. Be beautiful. Wait. Love, try to stop loving. hate. Try to stop hating. Love again. Go on loving. Bustle about. Rush to and fro...The womb’s an unwieldy baggage. Who can stagger uphill with such a noisy weight?"
It is criminal that Elizabeth Smart is not hailed as one of the great literary modernist geniuses of our time. She deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as TS Eliot and Beckett for her rich, allusive, intertextual poetry. It is a testament to the misogyny of the world that her writing remains little known - she writes of the blood, gore and viscera of being female, all those icky things that ladies love to talk about that will never be taken seriously. She writes brilliantly about the tedious struggles of being a mother, of being a lover, of being a woman with ambition and passions.
"But where, woman wailing above your station, is it you want to go to, get to, accomplish, communicate? Can’t you be amply satisfied with such pain, such babies, such balancing?
No. No. There’s a blood-flecked urge to go even a step further....If it is all to be buried, all just lived through, life becomes a warmish sort of bath, or worse."
The language is so rich and soupy and nourishing and bitter... it is also replete with classical, biblical, Freudian and literary references and metaphor whilst still being firmly grounded in the mundanity of a grimy day in 70's London. This is sharp, witty, self-aware, excessive writing of the best sort.
I devoured this slim novel in one heady rush on the train from Manchester to Crewe, barely raising my head, not wanting to breathe until I had inhaled it all. It is, in a small way, a follow on from 'By Grand Central Station..' in that it continues the story of her tumultuous and complicated relationship with the poet George Barker, with whom she had four children. Barker remained married to another woman throughout the relationship, leaving Smart to manage the raising of her brood alone. It reveals the drudgery of motherhood, the difficulty of going it alone - it is a sole rallying cry for herself to just persevere, to draw on those reserves of strength that can be so sapped by circumstances and people that treat you badly.
"I am friendless, covered in mud, cowardly, weak, untrained. But signed up for the duration.
You brought it upon yourself. You have only yourself to blame.
True. True. Perfectly true. Too late to desert. Too late to heave off your crippling kit and head for the hills. The problem now is how to put one foot forward, never mind best, just foot, foot, foot. Forward. On. Just keeping your feet from going numb.”
The urgency and desperation in the narrative voice is electrifying: both ecstatic and enervated, sometimes within a single sentence. There are flashes of descriptions in which the narrator find transcendence and unbearable beauty, quickly followed by the squalid reality of a dingy London street, as she waits in a grey street for a soggy bag of chips to take home.
Rogues and Rascals is desolate and sublime; asking questions about compromise, disappointment, love, survival and motherhood in a great gush of beautiful sentences, rhythmically repeating and circling and never quite settling. Everyone should read this book!
"So between worry and action the faces of women fall away. Can they walk off, leaving behind everything spurious, futile, ignominious, love-lack, over those fields mysterious with mushrooms, over the hill spotted with cows shapeless as slugs in the dusk, and reach at last, that evening, ease in a London pub, where faces glow through the smoke and sometimes through distracted anguish? Even a slight parole?
No. They must stay. They must pray. They must bang their heads. Be beautiful. Wait. Love, try to stop loving. hate. Try to stop hating. Love again. Go on loving. Bustle about. Rush to and fro...The womb’s an unwieldy baggage. Who can stagger uphill with such a noisy weight?"
March 28, 2021
Serseri ve Kopukların Göğe Çıkışları, Elizabeth Smart’ın Merkez İstasyonunda Oturup Ağladım kitabının devamı olarak geçiyor. Şiirsel düzyazı türünde bir kitap olduğu için okunması kolay gibi dursa da eğer bir paragrafı boşlarsanız, metne ihanet ederseniz o bölümün etkisi tamamen sönüyor. Ve bence okuması zor bir kitap. Çünkü Elizabeth Smart’ın beyninin içinde geziyor ve onun iç döküşlerini dinliyorsunuz. Bunu yaparken hem erkek egemen bir dünyaya karşı isyan hem de iş hayatına yöneltilmiş eleştirilerle karşı karşıya kalıyorsunuz. Ev işlerinin deli gömleğini giyen kadınlar, cinsellik üzerine düşünceler, yorgunluk, yaşlanma ve hayata dair her şeyi yerlere saçılmış bir şekilde gösteriyor Smart. Çocuklarını doğurduktan sonraki süreci, çalışma hayatı ve karamsar bakış açısı okurun etkileneceği bir sürü cümle vadediyor. Öfkesi bir yere değil, zincirlerini tutan herkese. Bunu da hayranlık uyandıracak düzeyde kısa ve vurucu cümlelerine dağıtıyor.
Ben Elizabeth Smart’ın yoğunlaşmış öfkesini, karamsarlığını, yıkımların dünyasına karşı düşüncelerini, zihnini açıp içindekileri döke saça ilerlediği cümlelerini okumaktan büyük keyif aldım. Şiirsel düzyazı türüne hakim bir okur değilim. Başlarda bir bağlantı yakalamak için çırpındığım yerler de oldu ama özellikle Bir Yaratıcının Ağıtı kısmında hem kalemine çok alıştım hem de büyük bir hayranlık duymaya başladım. Bu yüzden Merkez İstasyonunda Oturup Ağladım ile devam etmeyi düşünüyorum. Yorumlardan anladığıma göre içerik olarak yazarın farklı dönemlerine ışık tuttuğu için bağlantı kopukluğu yaratmıyor ama eğer böyle bir sorun yaşarsam bu kitabı tekrar okurum. Bu kadar az bilinmesinin nedenini de her okurun zevkine hitap etmemesine ve farklı oluşuna bağlıyorum.
Ben Elizabeth Smart’ın yoğunlaşmış öfkesini, karamsarlığını, yıkımların dünyasına karşı düşüncelerini, zihnini açıp içindekileri döke saça ilerlediği cümlelerini okumaktan büyük keyif aldım. Şiirsel düzyazı türüne hakim bir okur değilim. Başlarda bir bağlantı yakalamak için çırpındığım yerler de oldu ama özellikle Bir Yaratıcının Ağıtı kısmında hem kalemine çok alıştım hem de büyük bir hayranlık duymaya başladım. Bu yüzden Merkez İstasyonunda Oturup Ağladım ile devam etmeyi düşünüyorum. Yorumlardan anladığıma göre içerik olarak yazarın farklı dönemlerine ışık tuttuğu için bağlantı kopukluğu yaratmıyor ama eğer böyle bir sorun yaşarsam bu kitabı tekrar okurum. Bu kadar az bilinmesinin nedenini de her okurun zevkine hitap etmemesine ve farklı oluşuna bağlıyorum.
January 8, 2025
When read back to back with ‘By Grand Central Station I sat Down and Wept’, this is pretty devastating. There was such hope and passion in the first, but now she is listless, broken down by her prolonged imbalanced affair, and depressed.
Searching for meaning with her writing, Smart asks ‘what’s it about? What’s it all for? No story, no characters, no memory of people, places, things.’ Contrasting to her early work, ‘love is not the point. Love is beside the point.’ Here, writing is all she has left, and she seems too close to it to understand that it is certainly more than enough.
Searching for meaning with her writing, Smart asks ‘what’s it about? What’s it all for? No story, no characters, no memory of people, places, things.’ Contrasting to her early work, ‘love is not the point. Love is beside the point.’ Here, writing is all she has left, and she seems too close to it to understand that it is certainly more than enough.
November 15, 2024
“The problem now is to put one foot forward, never mind best, just foot, foot, foot. Forward. On. Just keeping your feet from going numb. Just keeping them functioning. In what direction?”
“Everything you were last year is also equally dead. Everything you are this minute flows away faster than a breeze. It takes pain to burn through time, to turn a spot on the wall into the center of the world, now and hereafter.”
WOWZA. Loved this. Very real and very raw and bleak and just good.
“Everything you were last year is also equally dead. Everything you are this minute flows away faster than a breeze. It takes pain to burn through time, to turn a spot on the wall into the center of the world, now and hereafter.”
WOWZA. Loved this. Very real and very raw and bleak and just good.
Want to read
October 25, 2017baskısı yok.
June 18, 2022
beautiful writing but i honestly had no idea what was happening during this whole book
January 7, 2023
L'assunzione di farabutti e mascalzoni è un libricino scritto da Elizabeth Smart, autrice canadese. Questo è il suo secondo romanzo. Il primo, "Sulle fiumane della Grand Central Station mi sono seduta e ho pianto", narrava della supremazia dell'amore su tutti gli altri sentimenti e su ogni vicissitudine della vita... e nel farlo, la Smart prendeva spunto anche dalla propria storia d'amore col poeta (sposato) George Barker.
Questo libro, invece, come dice la Ginzburg nella quarta di copertina è un libro del disordine. Uno sfogo che non racconta altro che se stesso, un flusso di pensieri in cui dolori e speranze, voglia d'amore, fatiche e paure della vita giornaliera della Smart si affacciano, durante la lettura, per essere colti nella loro seducente fugacità.
Ogni breve capitoletto è come un'istantanea della sua anima e dei suoi grovigli.
E' prosa. Ma è poesia. E mi ricorda molto Sylvia Plath.
Forse questo, in sé e per sé, non è un libro indimenticabile... ma non ha mancato comunque di affascinarmi e mi spinge a cercare altro di questa autrice.
Credo che leggerò il suo primo e più celebre romanzo (che a quanto ho potuto capire una storia la ha ed è più lineare) e, soprattutto, cercherò le sue poesie, perché sì, la Smart era anche poetessa.
Questo libro, invece, come dice la Ginzburg nella quarta di copertina è un libro del disordine. Uno sfogo che non racconta altro che se stesso, un flusso di pensieri in cui dolori e speranze, voglia d'amore, fatiche e paure della vita giornaliera della Smart si affacciano, durante la lettura, per essere colti nella loro seducente fugacità.
Ogni breve capitoletto è come un'istantanea della sua anima e dei suoi grovigli.
E' prosa. Ma è poesia. E mi ricorda molto Sylvia Plath.
Forse questo, in sé e per sé, non è un libro indimenticabile... ma non ha mancato comunque di affascinarmi e mi spinge a cercare altro di questa autrice.
Credo che leggerò il suo primo e più celebre romanzo (che a quanto ho potuto capire una storia la ha ed è più lineare) e, soprattutto, cercherò le sue poesie, perché sì, la Smart era anche poetessa.
February 4, 2020
should i invite a rogueish rascal and his wife to visit me and then bear four of his kids? i'm bored
what an exceptional sequel to all the over-the-top, torrid poetry of By Central Station.
"It's only a simple story: a younger girl usurps the place of the wife. The rascal in his taxi burrs up to the door gives you one wild moment like other people's moments. Then, like a caricature of the sensible being, you will behave with constrained reason and tact...Then, lapping, lowering, devouring like all the wolves in every child's nightmare, will return the moment of aloneness to be borne."
"How can you meet the minute except by continuing to walk down the Tottenham Court Road stuffed with love?"
"Just as it is the unimaginability of God that IS God. Anything I can imagine is me."
"I picked these roses because they looked so disgusting, just waiting there for the bees to come and fuck them."
what an exceptional sequel to all the over-the-top, torrid poetry of By Central Station.
"It's only a simple story: a younger girl usurps the place of the wife. The rascal in his taxi burrs up to the door gives you one wild moment like other people's moments. Then, like a caricature of the sensible being, you will behave with constrained reason and tact...Then, lapping, lowering, devouring like all the wolves in every child's nightmare, will return the moment of aloneness to be borne."
"How can you meet the minute except by continuing to walk down the Tottenham Court Road stuffed with love?"
"Just as it is the unimaginability of God that IS God. Anything I can imagine is me."
"I picked these roses because they looked so disgusting, just waiting there for the bees to come and fuck them."
May 25, 2024
A few years ago I read her famous book, 'By Grand Central Station...' and I didn't get it. Saw this in a charity shop and it is short and thought I would give her another go. I don't get this one either, there are some really well observed paragraphs but they don't appear to follow each other in a coherent narrative. Almost like getting a book of short stories but instead of reading beginning to end read a page and then roll a dice to choose the next page.
October 6, 2024
After reading "By grand central station...", I've ended up reading this sequel. I feel a bit inadequate because although I know she has fascinating things to say and has a sharp and incisive mind I didn't understand half of the points she was making. Her language is beautiful and evocative but too flowery and vague to communicate clearly to me. This could have sat with "A room of one's own" to skewer a woman's life between the wars but misses the mark for me, it's too poetic.
February 22, 2025
elizabeth smart's writing is unlike anything i have ever read. it’s confusing, and at points hard to follow. it makes the reader work for it: you are forced to slow down and fill the gaps yourself. however, it is beautiful. it flows like pure poetry and triggered unprecedented emotions in me.
December 28, 2019
Good to read out of my comfort zone but a little too far out for me
July 21, 2020
Not my style of book.
December 15, 2020
An unexpected joy.
May 14, 2024
The writing remains beautiful, but the subject matter made it far less compelling than By Grand Central Station. 3.5*
July 4, 2024
Beautiful!
May 14, 2025
This book is messy, real, and shows how no one has it all figured out.
June 16, 2014
Entiendo que los delirios literarios de Elizabet Smart entre la introspección y la poesía, metaliterarios, abigarrados de citas y cultismos, siempre al límite, echen para atrás a más de uno.
No es mi caso. Lo mismo que para algunos sus libros supondrán un sinfín de desvaríos hiperbólicos, a mí me encanta sumergirme en sus pensamientos y en la forma que tiene de narrarlos. Cuestión de gustos.
La prosa poetica de Elizabeth Smart —o más bien su poesía prosística— vuelve a hacer gala aquí de todo su poderío, treinta años después de "En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré". Aunque quizá su primera novela sea mejor, más elevada, más pasional, o sencillamente solo más esperanzada, en esta obra también nos deja un montón de momentos para el recuerdo.
Porque lo mismo que con las poesías de Pizarnik o con algunos pasajes de Carson McCullers, asomarse a la mente de Elizabeth Smart supone un intento de acercamiento a la psique femenina. Lo que me parece un loable intento mío como lector: al menos eso, intentarlo.
No es mi caso. Lo mismo que para algunos sus libros supondrán un sinfín de desvaríos hiperbólicos, a mí me encanta sumergirme en sus pensamientos y en la forma que tiene de narrarlos. Cuestión de gustos.
La prosa poetica de Elizabeth Smart —o más bien su poesía prosística— vuelve a hacer gala aquí de todo su poderío, treinta años después de "En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré". Aunque quizá su primera novela sea mejor, más elevada, más pasional, o sencillamente solo más esperanzada, en esta obra también nos deja un montón de momentos para el recuerdo.
Porque lo mismo que con las poesías de Pizarnik o con algunos pasajes de Carson McCullers, asomarse a la mente de Elizabeth Smart supone un intento de acercamiento a la psique femenina. Lo que me parece un loable intento mío como lector: al menos eso, intentarlo.
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