What do you think?
The Girl
A classic . . . beautiful lyricism, poetic passages and evocative descriptions of Goa Deccan Herald On a gloomy November evening in a sleepy village in Goa, it s time for yet another funeral. The Girl is dead and no one in Azul is surprised. But two men who knew and loved her are achingly curious to discover what made her give up her life to the sea. As they turn the pages of her diary, a story unravels of loneliness and abandonment, of memories branded so deep that they return to haunt the soul, and of hope so powerful that it negates reality and opens the doors to a future that is never to be. Richly atmospheric and written with unusual lyricism, The Girl is an outstanding debut a tender and disquieting story about love and its infinite capacity for betrayal.
124 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Sonia Faleiro
12 books184 followersSonia Faleiro is the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars and a novella, The Girl. Her new book, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing will be published in 2021.
The New York Times hailed Beautiful Thing as ‘an intimate and valuable piece of reportage that will break your heart several times over.’ The book was an Observer, Guardian, and Economist Book of the Year, Time Out Subcontinental Book of the Year, CNN Mumbai Book of the Year, and The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2011. It has been published worldwide and translated into several languages.
She is the co-founder of Deca, a global cooperative of award-winning journalists. Her writing has received support from the Pulitzer Centre and The Investigative Fund, and appears in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Harper's, Granta, 1843, The California Sunday Magazine, and MIT Technology Review.
She lives in London and is represented by The Wylie Agency.
The New York Times hailed Beautiful Thing as ‘an intimate and valuable piece of reportage that will break your heart several times over.’ The book was an Observer, Guardian, and Economist Book of the Year, Time Out Subcontinental Book of the Year, CNN Mumbai Book of the Year, and The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2011. It has been published worldwide and translated into several languages.
She is the co-founder of Deca, a global cooperative of award-winning journalists. Her writing has received support from the Pulitzer Centre and The Investigative Fund, and appears in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Harper's, Granta, 1843, The California Sunday Magazine, and MIT Technology Review.
She lives in London and is represented by The Wylie Agency.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 15, 2019
In the small and sleepy Goan village of Azul three men stand by the side of the grave of The Girl who drowned herself in the sea. Nobody in the village seems very surprised because Azul is known to people throughout the area as the 'Village of the Dead' and The Girl is just the latest to give her body to the perpetuation of the village's tragic reputation. It's as if her destruction was written into her DNA, pre-destined from birth to repeat the mistakes and anguish of earlier generations. The three men are tied to her story – the priest who buried her and the two men who each loved her and each of whom she loved in return in her own way.
One man is Simon, owner of the town's shop, a man with ambitions to have a cafe and not just shelves of dull out of date produce. The other is Luke, a traveller passing through, capturing The Girl's heart before moving on again.
Here there and everywhere
The book flips around between past and present and between narrators. We know from the very first page that she is dead and how she died - so there's no spoiler in that - but the only question is why she did it. In the second half of this small volume, the two men find The Girl's diary, hidden away where she knew only Simon would know to look for it. The diary reveals her story and helps the men to unpeel the layers of her past and her reason to kill herself.
I bought and read 'The Girl' when I was in India and I read most of it almost 'in situ' - not far from the place in which it was set. I like to read books in their location whenever I can but I wasn't able to reconcile Faleiro's Goa with the one I could see. I bought it because I had so loved her non-fiction book 'Beautiful Thing' about the Mumbai dance bar girls that I was hunting for her only work of fiction.
I interviewed Faleiro for the now defunct website www.curiousbookfans.co.uk a few weeks before reviewing The Girl and I asked her if she planned to return to fiction. She said that she didn't, that she was committed to non-fiction. After reading The Girl, I think she's made the right decision. As a writer of non-fiction, she's outstanding; she writes fact so richly that fiction pales into insignificance and as a writer of fiction she seemed to struggle to find the fluency she has when writing fact.
I couldn't help feeling when I was reading that the style was a little contrived – as if she was writing in the style of someone else, someone I don't know because it's not a style I enjoy or would seek out. It's very definitely not at all an Indian style of writing – you could be forgiven for thinking it's set in South or Central America rather than the sub-continent. 'The Girl' is written in what felt to me like a self-consciously over-wordy and rather contrived style that didn't seem to come naturally – like a novel created in a creative writing class to illustrate someone else's way of writing rather than a novel delivered from the heart.
Some sentences are almost painful to read because they're just too 'full'. Here's one picked at random to show you what I mean;
"Later, as the sun reaches its peak, there is the ice-cream man with paper tubs of frozen chocolate that melt as we stand eating by the gate, and right before lunch Joao's enterprising boy Felipe stops by with his van of all-sorts – tight knots of green twine, discarded oil drums to store water in, knobbly sticks of candles impossible to live without during the monsoon when electric wires somersault nimbly off their poles and lie dormant for days.”
Wow – heavy or what? If you're the type of person who only inhales at the end of a sentence you'll probably have passed out on the floor somewhere about two-thirds of the way through.
The pictures Faleiro paints of the village and its people sometimes felt to me like they were just too detailed. In places they were perfect – the descriptions shimmering off the page with the Indian heat or the people leaping off the page with believability and vibrancy. But when the same over-the-top treatment is given to every place, person and minor event, the power diminishes very quickly. I read somewhere that one way to tell when people are lying is that they use too many verbs. I suspect when a writer is uncomfortable with their work they use too many adjectives and too much detail. You might imagine given this wordiness that the book is a big one, something you'll need to develop muscles to carry around but you'd be wrong. The Girl is only 124 pages long but sadly it 'felt' a lot longer.
Had this book not been written by a writer I admire and respect I would have given up within the first fifty pages but I slogged on through, occasionally enjoying the colourful local characters but never really feeling that I understood any of the key characters, particularly The Girl herself. Once I learned of why she killed herself, I couldn't help thinking it was a really silly reason to take your life. Knowing WHY didn't actually help me to really understand.
Sonia Faleiro is a wonderful writer and I fully intend to buy anything and everything that she writes in future but this isn't a wonderful book. I think every author should be forgiven for a bad first novel and 'The Girl' won't put me off wanting to read her again. It's a little like when we reviewers look back on our first few online reviews and realise just how rubbish we were when we started. Though of course, she was never THAT bad.
One man is Simon, owner of the town's shop, a man with ambitions to have a cafe and not just shelves of dull out of date produce. The other is Luke, a traveller passing through, capturing The Girl's heart before moving on again.
Here there and everywhere
The book flips around between past and present and between narrators. We know from the very first page that she is dead and how she died - so there's no spoiler in that - but the only question is why she did it. In the second half of this small volume, the two men find The Girl's diary, hidden away where she knew only Simon would know to look for it. The diary reveals her story and helps the men to unpeel the layers of her past and her reason to kill herself.
I bought and read 'The Girl' when I was in India and I read most of it almost 'in situ' - not far from the place in which it was set. I like to read books in their location whenever I can but I wasn't able to reconcile Faleiro's Goa with the one I could see. I bought it because I had so loved her non-fiction book 'Beautiful Thing' about the Mumbai dance bar girls that I was hunting for her only work of fiction.
I interviewed Faleiro for the now defunct website www.curiousbookfans.co.uk a few weeks before reviewing The Girl and I asked her if she planned to return to fiction. She said that she didn't, that she was committed to non-fiction. After reading The Girl, I think she's made the right decision. As a writer of non-fiction, she's outstanding; she writes fact so richly that fiction pales into insignificance and as a writer of fiction she seemed to struggle to find the fluency she has when writing fact.
I couldn't help feeling when I was reading that the style was a little contrived – as if she was writing in the style of someone else, someone I don't know because it's not a style I enjoy or would seek out. It's very definitely not at all an Indian style of writing – you could be forgiven for thinking it's set in South or Central America rather than the sub-continent. 'The Girl' is written in what felt to me like a self-consciously over-wordy and rather contrived style that didn't seem to come naturally – like a novel created in a creative writing class to illustrate someone else's way of writing rather than a novel delivered from the heart.
Some sentences are almost painful to read because they're just too 'full'. Here's one picked at random to show you what I mean;
"Later, as the sun reaches its peak, there is the ice-cream man with paper tubs of frozen chocolate that melt as we stand eating by the gate, and right before lunch Joao's enterprising boy Felipe stops by with his van of all-sorts – tight knots of green twine, discarded oil drums to store water in, knobbly sticks of candles impossible to live without during the monsoon when electric wires somersault nimbly off their poles and lie dormant for days.”
Wow – heavy or what? If you're the type of person who only inhales at the end of a sentence you'll probably have passed out on the floor somewhere about two-thirds of the way through.
The pictures Faleiro paints of the village and its people sometimes felt to me like they were just too detailed. In places they were perfect – the descriptions shimmering off the page with the Indian heat or the people leaping off the page with believability and vibrancy. But when the same over-the-top treatment is given to every place, person and minor event, the power diminishes very quickly. I read somewhere that one way to tell when people are lying is that they use too many verbs. I suspect when a writer is uncomfortable with their work they use too many adjectives and too much detail. You might imagine given this wordiness that the book is a big one, something you'll need to develop muscles to carry around but you'd be wrong. The Girl is only 124 pages long but sadly it 'felt' a lot longer.
Had this book not been written by a writer I admire and respect I would have given up within the first fifty pages but I slogged on through, occasionally enjoying the colourful local characters but never really feeling that I understood any of the key characters, particularly The Girl herself. Once I learned of why she killed herself, I couldn't help thinking it was a really silly reason to take your life. Knowing WHY didn't actually help me to really understand.
Sonia Faleiro is a wonderful writer and I fully intend to buy anything and everything that she writes in future but this isn't a wonderful book. I think every author should be forgiven for a bad first novel and 'The Girl' won't put me off wanting to read her again. It's a little like when we reviewers look back on our first few online reviews and realise just how rubbish we were when we started. Though of course, she was never THAT bad.
October 21, 2012
I really wish there wasn't an overdose of imagery in this book. I was waiting to find out more about the Girl than most of what her surroundings were described to be. However amidst all the description there are sections that are written really well - mostly about lost love and solitude.
January 31, 2022
I am sorry for the low ratings, but I didn't get this book. It seems like it was written in bits and pieces, and I truly wanted to find out why that girl committed suicide.
It kept on rolling in the circles. I kind of lost my focus while reading it.
It kept on rolling in the circles. I kind of lost my focus while reading it.
July 30, 2011
A failed attempt at literary prose, it does have some powerful scenes and imagery at times. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be magical realism. Too many adverbs, mostly redundant, that slowed down the pace of the whole book. The style didn't appeal to me and the voice often wavered. The most interesting scene was the image of The Girl's mother in an accident - the graphic imagery ot that scene still remains with me, much the same way the ending of Garcia Marquez's 'Chronicle of the Death Foretold' does.
August 13, 2011
The language is indeed lyrical. Even though it is GOan setting, you don't really learn much about Goa - except for Kadamba buses, names of villages, slow life, foreigners, and drifters who make it there.
It is story of The Girl who is going through trying times and her relationship with with two men, Simon and Luke. Too small a story it is but it has interesting descriptions and language.
It is story of The Girl who is going through trying times and her relationship with with two men, Simon and Luke. Too small a story it is but it has interesting descriptions and language.
Want to Read
May 25, 2012Another one in the Favorite Book of 2011 Roundabout
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews