Dear Thief

by Samantha Harvey

In the middle of a winter’s night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend. In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past both women have preferred to forget.

Without knowing if her friend, Butterfly, is even alive or dead, she writes night after night – a letter of friendship that turns into something more revealing and recriminating. By turns a belated outlet of rage, an act of self-defence, and an offering of forgiveness, the letter revisits a betrayal that happened a decade and a half before, and dissects what is left of a friendship caught between the forces of hatred and love.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery, Novels, British Literature, Book Club

262 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2014

About the author

Samantha Harvey has completed postgraduate courses in philosophy and in Creative Writing. In addition to writing, she has traveled extensively and taught in Japan and has lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She recently co-founded an environmental charity and lives in Bath, England.

Her first novel, The Wilderness, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009, longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the 2009 Betty Trask Prize.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's too late, I think. The days of being desired and being burdened by desire and competing for it, these days are over and now I am what's left.

lovely, recognizable, and mournful right? all of my favorite things. but.

here is a list of authors who are well-regarded by readers, critics, and awards committees alike, whose writing i can objectively recognize is excellent and polished, but who do nothing for me as a reader: Marilynne Robinson, Anne Enright, Siri Hustvedt, Jim Crace, Elizabeth Smart. this book is written in the same general style as those authors, and it left me flat, but if you are a fan of any of the above, i am pretty sure you will like this one.

there is no doubt she can write - some of the passages in this book are breathtaking:

I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes of being alive - knowing oneself intimately and also not at all. You turn to look at your own profile in the mirror and it is gone. It means we can harbour all kinds of illusions about ourselves that others can see through as clear as day. What I mean is that if you had been able to see yourself objectively that afternoon you might have realised that the game was lost, but instead I think you fancied yourself in some little role in some little story in which you were the heroic returner, the one much waited for, the one who would be forgiven by some obscure law of justice that grants immunity to the tragic.

tonally, it is reminiscent of some of my favorite things, like durrell's Justine or some of leonard cohen's gems, like like famous blue raincoat and even more so master song, and it is very preoccupied with intellectualized eroticism and spirituality, but while she can absolutely turn a phrase with admirable eloquence and grace:

…I had stood there in the humid Spanish night as if drugged, convinced that what was happening was somehow an inevitability of your fate, to which we were all silent witnesses and secondary players. But then you were always so convincing, and your fate was always the most pressing.

No, let me make it clear. I was not docile, or passive. I dressed myself up as the forgiving sort, but there is forgiving, and there is also tolerating, which is forgiveness in rags. And then there is something else, which is nothing short of a heartless fascination with somebody's downfall. On our journey back from Spain, looking at you as you slept, I began to realise that if it was your fate you wanted, you could have it - your sad, sordid, wretched fate of self-annihilation.

there just wasn't enough story here to hold my interest. all dressed up and no place to go.

the story is structured as a meandering confessional letter, written over a long period of time, by a woman to her vanished friend, aptly nicknamed "butterfly." butterfly falls under that archetype of mysterious women who drift into the lives of others, leave a lasting mark, but remain themselves inscrutable. years ago, she had an affair with the narrator's husband, bewitched her son with her tattered glamor, and was last seen on a self-destructive path of drugs and sex and wanderings, following the pull of history. the letter itself is nostalgic, oscillating between condemnation and love and forgiveness, but also frequently affectless, loaded with precise and fussy details:

I am at my escritoire at just gone four in the morning with my hand welded to a pen with a split nib, suddenly curious about you after years of an incuriosity you might call callous. It's been a mild and dreary Christmas but suddenly, on Boxing Day night, it has started snowing, and I've had to go and find a blanket from the airing cupboard. As soon as the first flake of snow fell I thought of you, as it landed on the pane in that ludicrous wet collapse that removes all mystery.

it describes the whole of the fractured love triangle,the past and present, the imprint that butterfly left behind, and the complicated pull of emotions butterfly has inspired, with some pointy jabs that make it clear that time and distance have gone a long way towards diminishing butterfly's supposed mystique

To your mind's eye you might have been positively operatic, a woman in her late thirties alone at a station in an ankle-length out-of-fashion dress and a shawl and her hair wrapped up in a green scarf, standing beneath the transom of the waiting-room window where she holds defiantly to the burden of her beauty. Leaves gathering at her suitcase and feet, like the children she never had. Tell me you did not think like this.

You think like this because it is difficult to accept that when we find ourselves most operatic we are usually just farcical. I could cry to think of you now, the way you turned to smile at me when I walked up to you. You had the Devil dull and black in your eye. You were too thin and you were not old enough to look as old as you did, which is not to say you were no longer beautiful - for an overwhelming minority of people, beauty is an affliction they have to bear regardless of what they do to themselves, and which prompts other people to expect too much from them.

while it is no doubt cathartic for the character to have written this letter, there's just nothing particularly compelling in the exercise. it's frustrating for me to be able to acknowledge her writing as unquestionably accomplished, but ultimately not coalescing into what i consider to be a story.

but that's just my own personal hang-up - i know many people are going to love this, which is great, because she's got mad chops. it's just not my kinda thing.

come to my blog!

[Delee · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Rarely do I request books on NetGalley that don't have some kind of "hype" around them. I don't like receiving something for free that I either won't be able to get through...or that I am going to have to give a panning to when I am finished.

I did, however, decide to take a chance on DEAR THIEF- even though at the time- Nooooo one had it on their to-read lists and there were no reviews to go by. The story line looked really intriguing- A bitter middle-aged woman- deceived by her husband and friend- not being able to ever completely move on from it. It kind of sounded a little....like....meeeeeeee.



A woman sits down at her desk and finally decides to write a letter to her childhood friend- Nina- who betrayed her years ago...



...Selfish, free-spirited Nina- nicknamed Butterfly- flitted in and out of the narrator's life over the years...but the last time she went too far when she had an affair with Nicolas- the narrator's husband. Then without an apology for the devastation she caused...or a goodbye- she disappeared once again- for good.



The letter is written over a loooooooooooong looooooooong period of time- angry ramblings, bittersweet moments- her moods and feelings changing with each entry. The writing is beautiful!!! And that is what I gave an extra .5 for...but there was something missing for me. Without giving anything away- I will just say it left me wanting moooore...I felt exactly the same way I did coming to the end of the novel- The Woman Upstairs. All that female RAGE and HATE!!!!...and then....pffffft. Still well worth the read though!

Maybe...I need to write my own letter to my "Nina/Butterfly"- to work through MY issues- It would be much shorter and to the point:

Dear My Thief-

Thank you for taking "Those We Don't Speak Of" off my hands- If you had only asked I probably would have given him to you willingly. I see that since you left him after only a year of marriage- you realized on your own what a DOUCHE HE IS!! I hate to say this...but...I TOLD YOU SO.

Regards,
Delee

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh yessssssss...I do feel better. ;)

Thank you NetGalley!!

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Thief, Samantha Harvey's third novel, opens with the irresistible image of a woman starting a long letter to an old friend, opening her missive with the words 'In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, I have, yes, seen through what you called the gauze of this life.' Instantly enigmatic and captivating, this beginning sets the tone for a a narrative that doesn't so much twist and turn as double back on itself, reroute and realign, continually reshaping the story. Written over the course of half a year, the unnamed narrator's letter is addressed to Nina, known as 'Butterfly', a figure who - appropriately enough - hovers constantly over the protagonist's life, once almost literally (when she appears in a dream, standing beside the bed), always metaphorically. She was a friend for decades, now estranged, her whereabouts unknown. And as the story unfolds in its fragmented, non-linear way, it becomes clear that 'Butterfly' betrayed the narrator with her husband, Nicolas - now also estranged. You would expect such a betrayal to be at the heart of the book, and in a way it is, but to define it in that way would do this surprising novel a huge disservice. While it's described, in part, as a triangular love story, it is really only the central friendship that matters.

It's impossible to discuss a book like this without invoking the lingering spectre of the Unreliable Narrator. Dear Thief is perhaps doubly unreliable: the narrator's memories of things are blurred, and her account is entirely one-sided, but of course she is also addressing this account to a former friend, an enemy - and even though she hasn't seen this person for years, the narrator's emotional relationship with the memory of 'Butterfly' and her actions remains complicated. Sometimes she seeks to accuse, to lay blame, to provoke guilt; at other times she wistfully speaks of the pair's shared childhood, the closeness of their bond. And since she doesn't know where in the world 'Butterfly' is, or if the woman is even alive, it's questionable how much of this letter is truly a letter and how much is an exercise in self-purging, in forgiving herself.

Dear Thief reminded me a lot of Anna Raverat's criminally underread and underrated Signs of Life, which is a favourite. Raverat's narrator, Rachel, has a similar type of unreliability, conceding that some things in her story only might or could have happened, but insisting that this isn't important. What she remembers, how she remembers it, and how she perceives the effect of this other person on her life are far more important than what actually took place, or didn't:

You were standing at the end of the platform with your head down and your weight off one foot, in the way I've seen wounded wolves stand in films like Once Upon a Time in the West - not that I have seen this film, but this is how I imagine it to be.

This small detail captures the essence of the narrator's habit of redefining facts and memories to fit her story. In one sentence she states unequivocally that she has seen this thing; in the next she refutes that entirely. But it doesn't matter, because this is how she imagines it. She often employs this sort of contradiction, asking her addressee: 'isn't the admittance of a lie more honest, anyway, than a truth arrived at through editing?' The frustration and fascination of Dear Thief lies in the fact that we will never know how many of those lies the narrator doesn't admit, how many things she misremembers, leaves out, or embellishes. In some chapters she paints a cruel picture of an imagined version of the life 'Butterfly' lives as she imagines it now, living alone in a woodland hut, sleeping in 'maximum discomfort'. These parts of the narrative are explicitly invented - a sort of punishment, a psychological prison in which the narrator has confined her memories of her former friend - but they come to be part of the story, just as much as the more obviously factual chapters. What we never discover is how much of a fiction those 'facts' may actually be. The narrator also alludes to the idea that Yannis, a local restaurateur she becomes acquainted with, could have been made up to provide a parallel to her story (he is on the verge of divorce, and the narrator finds herself giving him advice). It's certainly true that Yannis seems to serve as a plot device on more than one occasion, but is this the work of the author of the book, or the author of the letter?

Extending this idea, it is possible to wonder whether 'Butterfly' even really existed. The character, flighty, artistic and sensual, is surely more the realisation of a trope than a believable person: doing what she pleases, skipping from country to country, taking drugs, floating around in an old shawl she's worn since she was a girl. There are points when she seems like a sort of conduit for the narrator's own unspoken desires and dreams of more uninhibited behaviour, and it's as if her remembered actions are more symbolic than real - for example, when she spontaenously kisses a female dinner party guest on the mouth, flustering the narrator's husband, while the narrator scuttles around in the background, pouring drinks, the very picture of domestic obligation. In one of my favourite passages from the novel, the narrator talks about her theory that 'people are wrong to believe that we desire what we cannot have... Instead we desire what we aren't, but can conceivably be'. (I couldn't stop thinking about this for a while - even if not generally accurate, it is certainly true of me.) Is this, then, what 'Butterfly' represents? The person we could become, if not for inhibitions, responsibilities, prudence?

The second chapter of Dear Thief opens with the words 'on the whole I do not think of you any more'; the entirety of the rest of the book sets about disproving this claim in every detail. The narrator's past, her marriage, her life now, her dreams - all are haunted, consumed, by 'Butterfly', and a final scene in which the narrator literally chases her friend's shadow, or ghost, or double only serves to underline that. While reading it I didn't love this book as much as I thought I might, and yet the more time I spend thinking about it, the more fascinated I am. There is so much to pick out of it that I could probably read it again and write a completely different review. Both a portrait of friendship as a love story, and a cautionary tale about the risk involved in friendship of this depth and fragility, Dear Thief, described by no less than A.M. Homes as 'a hypnotic, beautiful and sometimes dark incantation', is haunting and totally unforgettable. I loved it.

(The book is done no justice by its cover, by the way. It's not bad, just a design of a type that's become cliched - a black-and-white photo of a woman, but you can only see part of her face; bright text on a dark background; a typewriter-style font. It says 'standard-template psychological thriller' more than it says 'elegant literary fiction', and it seems destined to result in misinterpretation (I've already read a lukewarm review of Dear Thief which complained that it 'lacks plot', as if that matters).)

[Claire Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, I loved this. Literary and slow, and every line a gem. Not a huge amount happens; it's all about atmosphere and relationships, but all the people were so vivid in my mind. It's inspired by the Leonard Cohen song, Famous Blue Raincoat, which is a song that I love, so it was great to spot the references to that. I'll definitely be reading more Harvey, who apparently had her fourth novel published in March. I'm not sure how I missed this novel (or any of hers) when they were published.

[Clark Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

You must read this book slowly, preferably in several long blocks of time. Nearly every sentence deserves to be reread multiple times. It is beautiful but never soft. It is one one of the most intimate novels I've ever read. I've seen comparisons to Virginia Woolf. Harvey is much more direct and spare, but no less incisive. It doesn't matter what the books is "about." Just go read it.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear Thief is a contemplation, condemnation and reverence all at once to the consequences of time. Time in the story is captured in fractals, and the temporal shifts are so frequent that it gave the narrative a dreamy, almost surreal effect (and sometimes, sharp and biting). The thief here IS time, but it is also the woman who stole affection from the narrator’s husband. Samantha Harvey was inspired by Leonard Cohen’s song, Famous Blue Raincoat, which I recommend listening to, especially for its moody potency. Harvey captures his melancholic longing; the impassioned fallout of a triangulating affair; as well as many of his images. But she creates her own piercing story.

I am trying to put words together to write a review, and I feel stymied by the task—I just want to quote passages in the book, and re-read it! The abstract and the real are bound up in each other, and the strength of the story lies in the prose, and the keen memories both imprisoned and freed by time. You can take any page and meditate on its prowess, its trenchant intelligence, its numinous passages, and Harvey’s ability to cut deeply into enduring questions about life, love, friendship, betrayal, decay, and death. She does this through her narrator (unnamed), who is writing an extended letter to a woman friend that she hasn’t seen in seventeen years.

Nina, aka Butterfly, was the narrator’s friend since childhood. They met while both living close to the Welsh border, in England (the narrator’s origin). Both came from scholarly families. A Lithuanian Jew who later became an avid reader of the Vedic Upanishads, Nina was uprooted early in life (and escaped from the dangers of communism in Lithuania), which shaped her into an unsettled person who flees at the idea of permanence. (In fact, the narrator has endured several disappearances and reappearances of Nina throughout her life).

“…devotion was not a quality you asked of people, commitment neither; you did not give these things and did not ask for them. If you could give and receive moments of happiness and self-escape, that was enough, that was, in fact, everything.”

Butterfly encroached on the narrator’s husband, Nicolas, as we learn early on. This isn’t a plot-centered story, although you are rewarded with a thoughtful, provocative tale that covers the deepest of human emotions. The narrator knew that Nina was a threat, when Nina declaimed:

“…a triangle is the holiest and most elegant of things; with two lines you can only create two lines, but with three you can create a shape. That is why three is a transformative number.”

And that is when the writer knew that she would be betrayed:

“…You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy, and I, pinned like a snared bird to one corner of a triangle, would have to watch it happen.”

But, much of it incites the reader to ponder how the past informs the present--and does so with a dose of nihilism.

“…there is freedom in the past. The self you left behind lives in endless possibility. The older you get, the bigger and wilder the past becomes, a place that can never again be tended and which is therefore prone to that loveliness that happens on wastelands and wildernesses, where grass has grown over scrap metal and wheat has sprung up in cracks between concrete and there is no regular shape for the light to fall flat on, so it vaults and multiplies and you want to go there. You want to go there like you want to go to a lover.”

The unreliable narrator recalls memory after memory, and turns them over and slides her pen through them, her hands, her words, and her relationship with her husband and with her friend, turning them over and around so that time and memory are both fractured and oiled, a freedom and constraint bound up in each other. The narrator begins with a question that Nina once asked her—whether she has ever seen through “the gauze of this life.” The entire book unfolds as if through gauze, also, a kind of meta-fictional play on theme that is captured in structure, an impressionistic portrait that is framed with loss, but not just loss; there is also a sense of wonder that is subtly exciting, spiritual. Throughout the text, the narrator returns to this question, which carries both acute significance and rebellious irony.

“ ‘Have you ever seen through the gauze of this life?’ …perhaps I said something first about how early morning is thinner, less real, how I felt I could pass through the mist, steam, and smoke, through the wet wool, into a reality beyond….And I said, ‘Is there a gauze?’’

The narrator also projects thoughts and feelings onto the mercurial Nina, so that at times they are two people merged. The telling of Nina becomes a journey through past events juxtaposed with speculative ideas of her, peppered with metaphysical descriptions of the world around. Now that the writer works with the elderly at a nursing home, she contemplates death as a kind of landscape, and time as an inviolable threshold.

“You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days.”

It’s this heap of days that both consoles and ravages the narrator. Through this letter, she ruminates on the illusory and enigmatic nature of our relationships with each other, the world, and ourselves.

“I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes…--knowing ourselves intimately and also not at all. You turn to look at your own profile in the mirror and it is gone. It means we can harbor all kinds of illusions about ourselves that others can see through as clear as day.”

I can only touch on a fraction of this seductive story, a book about the ungraspable, the inexplicable.

“All I mean is: aren’t written words strange in this way, so inscrutable, all hurrying together on the paper to cover up reality like a curtain drawn across a stage.”

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does she think it was worth it? I wondered. This is what came to me when I pictured you there. Not: Is she happy, is she free, is she alive? – no. Does she think it was worth it?

Samatha Harvey's Orbital won this year's Booker Prize, a prize devalued by the inexplicable omission of Praiseworthy, which resulted in me boycotting this year's prize. Unable to therefore read Orbital I've reached into the author's back catalogue, from the shelves of my, understocked as it is in London, public library. The one Harvey book they had, Dear Thief, does however seem a serendipitous choice. Interestingly it prompted an article by Gaby Wood in March 2015, Why great novels don't get noticed now:

Last year, when literary fiction seemed to fall either into the category of formal experiment (Ali Smith’s How to Be Both; Will Self’s Shark) or into an essentially 19th-century tradition (Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others; Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North), one book cut through all that by simply being intimate, direct yet oddly mysterious. Last Tuesday, it was longlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, a belated flicker of attention for a novel that deserves far more.

Attention here referred to sales - only 1,000 copies at the point of writing - as well as prize listings. In the article Wood pushes back on the assertion from Harvey's publisher that it is difficult to get attention for 'serious fiction, from a serious-minded publisher', commending the creation of the Goldsmiths Prize. "an award invented in order to give prestige to the sorts of books that were generally ignored by mainstream prizes", and the success of Girl Is a Half Formed Thing, which "then went on to win pretty much everything else", as well as the two books in the quote above.

Wood was, later that year, appointed literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, and 9 years later the prize she manages (while leaving the choice of winner to the judges) has been awarded to Harvey, although from what I've seen of Orbital in a classic Booker right-author-wrong-book.

The epistolary novel, based on a song by Leonard Cohen, "Famous Blue Raincoat", is a series of unsent letters to the eponymous 'thief' and opens:

In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, I have, yes, seen through what you called the gauze of this life.

The 'thief', Nina, or 'Butterfly', is a long-standing friend of the narrator, a woman in her early 50s, who the narrator ultimately blames for the break-up of her marriage. Beginning in December (see below) 2001, the one-sided correspondence continues over 6 months, and the initially friendly correspondence, updating Butterfly on her life and some comic memories of their shared past ...

It is true, you do not eat cheese. I forgot. You came downstairs one morning when you were living with us in Morda and said you had dreamt that a cow was standing before you. You had heard its bell clinking along the lane, then it drew up to the door like the milkman. You shall not drink of me, it said. Its breath crept warmly around its nostrils. So in the morning you made yourself the first of a thousand black teas and dry toast.

But you'll still eat of it? Nicolas said later, over roast beef. You took a piece of meat in your hand and shrugged: Unless I receive further instruction, yes.

... becomes somewhat more bitter as she tells us of Butterfly's drug addiction and an act of betrayal.

Although we are of course reading not about Butterfly, but about a construct created, with hindsight and without recourse, by the narrator, who admits this:

That example makes it sound like I'm talking about coincidences, which wouldn't be true. Not coincidences but manifestations, ideas that resolve into form. I write down our old conversations, fanciful and ill-remembered though they are, as if to pretend that's exactly how they were, almost as a joke to myself, to take a sketchy memory and write it as if fact. But then, somehow, that sketchy memory takes form in the world.

There is fun for the reader in spotting the "Famous Blue Raincoat" links, which aren't exactly subtle: the novel begins, as mentioned, at the end of December; a railway station plays a key role; similarly a lock of hair; the 'famous blue raincoat' itself, torn at the shoulder, is replaced by a white shawl; the song's closing words "Sincerely, a friend"; and, the most forced, the narrator does indeed claim to 'hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert'.

This last particularly anmalous, as the narrator acknowledges, given that Butterfly is of Lithuanian origin (and the many references to Lithuania, not, one suspects, rooted in much research, are perhaps the novel's oddest feature).

But the novel most striking quality is not the plot, but rather the prose - elegaic but forensic at the same time. In a 'hard to unsee it' comparison, James Wood in the New Yorker compares it to Marilynne Robinson (although the comparision breaks down in the religious element, here more mystical vs. Robinson's theological-detailed Calvanism).

Not always entirely successful but distinctive.

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 2 out of 5]

Because of the way the novel is structured (as a letter to another character), the very fine writing only made me frustrated with the narrator. “You are a fabulous writer who exhibits a great deal of self-awareness,” I wanted to say, “so maybe get up and do something with your life instead of spending several months reliving the past?” (True enough, the protagonist says, “On the whole I do not think of you anymore,” but since a two-hundred page letter follows that declaration, it is difficult to believe.) It is perhaps a tribute to Harvey’s skill as a writer that the book evoked such strong feelings of exasperation in me; there were moment when I wanted to reach into the pages and shake some sense into the protagonist. And yet the book left me frustrated: is this the best use of Harvey’s talent? All those beautiful sentences in service of this story?

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first learned of this book on the 2016 Tournament of Books Longlist. It sounded different so I brought it home with me from the library.

Dear Thief is written to a friend from the past, and the long letter in four sections makes up the entirety of the novel. As it goes along you discover the events of a shared childhood and appearances from "Butterfly" later on in life.

I like the difference in style but the entire time I was reminded of Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, which is addressed all to one person but the writing is morebeautiful, more intense. And I kept wishing this would go a little deeper in that regard. Most of it states events, albeit in a creative approach, but other than anger does not express as many emotional nuances as I might have expected.

Book 1 of 2016.

[Annette · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what I would call 'real' writing rather than 'bucket list I think I'd like to be a published author'.

It's an adult book about adults for adults to read (I don't mean it's erotica) I mean it's serious and intelligent. The examination of a love triangle is compellingly accurate and painful. So much that's written nowadays is almost comic book type stuff and the characters seem infant.

This has a deep mysterious quality to it. It needs to be read slowly because there is so much in it that provokes thought. It's a true literary novel so there are going to be dolts who don't get it.

It ought to slip onto the Bailey's short list in April with ease. It ought to be the winner frankly. But I wonder if it will make it in the end. Infuriating that without the lucky break she got being longlisted for the Bailey's prize this book would have gone unnoticed - certainly by me anyway!

Exceptional writing and storytelling. The sort of book that will still be read in a 100 years time.

[endrju · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea who Samantha Harvey is, never heard about her before so I approached the book without any preconceptions whatsoever and I did not know what to expect. The story itself is nothing remarkable although it is laced with rather dark undercurrent which made it interesting enough, but the style, oh the style. It sucked me right into the story, tumbled me all over the place and spew me out at the end. There was something hypnotic about it because of which I could not put the book down. I wish there was more.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

First it must be said that this is heavy and a bit dark in the emotional graffiti it leaves on the reader. At least, it's hard on those of us who have been in relationships and all are too familiar with the pain of jealousy and betrayals not just by lovers but by friends. Nina (Butterfly) is the named Thief in the story, the person the letter is written to and about. Nina has left the couple charged with her feral presence and never truly seemed to leave. As she slowly peels back each moment creeping toward destruction, the reader can't help but wince and yet understand the all to human way she comes to the slaughter of her own heart.
The writing is beautiful and felt like a journey into one's deepest feelings. Dear Thief isn't just exposed scars, it is an opening and infecting of the wounds. But we do that, don't we? Revisit the things that reflected all our broken places.
Here, a sample of the bloodletting via pen.
"Nothing had changed since those days except that everything had degraded and two decades of light had beaten the colors back a shade."

'You'll grow into yourself,' she said, and it was the first sentence she had put together for hours. 'Grow into myself?' I replied. 'Yes- in spite of everything, we've always looked poor, our family, it's the big bones and height and these dirty tans we get, but you're mother became quite beautiful at the end, and so will you.'

"..(sic) but I also know nothing about relationships except for some faint grasp of the multiple ways they can go wrong."

"We want to own one another so that the other cannot outgrow us. You know how Chinese women bind their feet until the feet are deformed? This is what we do to one another's hearts."

I underlined far more sentences than I shared, because otherwise I'd be here as a scribe copying the entire novel. What I will say is Harvey has a way with compassion and emotional violence- as in life, she goes back and forth through love, pain, resentment, fury, and hope. This is, also, a story of how one person can haunt us (especially the living). Particularly poignant are the times she thinks she sees Nina (Butterfly)in strangers years after she is gone. Harvey perfectly captures the slow bleed of all those you love hungering after the very person that obliterated your life. In fact, she takes it a step further and shows the dirty truth that our letter writer herself still can't help but long for Nina too, for what is more painful than wanting so badly to hate someone that you share so much of your past with? I am still feeling the weight of the story. I imagine many younger women will hate Nina as I once would have, but she is hard for me to hate outright being that I am older and more experienced with matters of the heart, note I didn't say wiser because in love- we just seem to get dumber. Nina represents a threat we all face, those who are more interesting in their mystery, more desirable with their detachment and freedom, the sort of woman or man that people always seem to be watching the door for, those veritable wild creatures. What horror in knowing there might exist someone that could mean so much more to those we love than we ever could, and may well be our dearest friends? How do we compete with what we are not? This isn't light nor sweet and yet there is something tender about the telling. I can't wait to see what other's feel when they read it. A beautiful story about the fragility of our hearts and the threat of shifting love and loyalties. I apologize if the review seems all over the place, my heart was left messy from the reading... that is wonderful writing!

[Eva Stachniak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rich, beautiful, thoughtful, beautiful written. Dear Thief is one of these rare novels that absorb me fully and never let go. A story of friendship, love, possessiveness, aging....life itself in its many manifestations. A treasure.

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best Leonard Cohen-inspired novel you'll read this year, and one of the best novels you'll read this year, period.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Samantha Harvey’s third novel, the narrator writes a letter - over several months - to her estranged best friend who had embarked on an affair with her husband. Cue emotional conflicts of interest as the pain of betrayal wrestles with the bonds of friendship; love and hate beautifully intermingled in a confused human triangle. Here the main theme is separation: friend from friend, husband from wife, wives from husbands (even the peripheral characters struggle to stay together). Nothing really happens in a Samantha Harvey novel so don’t expect lots of action; her talent lies in taking slices of humanity in special situations and keenly observing how people think and feel, how they grow to understand their circumstances and their role in them. After all the accolades for her first novel it’s wonderful to realise that she is only just getting into her stride and great to see this in the Telegraph’s top 5 books of 2014. This is the best novel yet but I sense there is even more to come. Beautifully written, intelligent and impossibly mature, this is what poetry would be if it was limited to being prose…

[Preethi · Rating 2 out of 5]

God, how I trudged along this book, which didn't make me care for it or its characters, or with a plot so pointless, hoping all along that it might come through and I might care for the narrator - I do not even know why I continued reading beyond the 20% mark I set for myself, maybe because I had already spent a looooot of time getting to 20%.

[Renita D'Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tough one to review. I loved the writing- it was beautiful and lyrical. But I found it tedious. I wanted it to finish. I think I read it at the wrong time. If I pick it up again when I am in the mood to savor this author's unquestionably stunning prose, I am sure I will enjoy it more.

[Magdelanye · Rating 3 out of 5]

...this absurd notion of Kirekeggaard's, passed on to me once by my grandmother: A woman is not born to toil; if she wants to move towards infinity, she has to travel along the gentle path of the heart and imagination.

I really do not know what kind of blessed lives my grandmother and Kirekegaard had, to make them think the path of the heart and imagination is gentle. It is like walking on nails...having first been set on fire. With your hands tied up your back in forced prayer. And a stake through your throat. A dagger in your back. What I mean to say is this path we are trying to chart is not an easy one and I forgive you simply because I hope to be forgiven....p253/4

But what if you chose the bed of nails and set your own fire? Whoever you allowed to tie your hands would be the one who planted the stake and thrust that dagger. Can we ever forgive ourselves our willing collusion?

Considering how much I loved Samantha Harvey's first book 'The Wilderness', I ordered this one right away. Taking in the enigmatic cover, I was stoked and fully expected to immediately and fully engage.

In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, I have, yes, seen through the guaze of time. p1

It was easy to let myself be pulled in from that enticing opener, and I still admire the writing and the casual asides that seem to give the writing an elegant depth. Yet deep in, I found myself drifting. The strength of a novel cannot consist of casual asides.

I had spent over half my life waiting for the accumulation of happiness and then I realized that it doesn't accumulate at all, it just occurs here and there. p72

This could be an idea worth exploring, but there is not a lot of happiness depicted here at all. Fun and even pleasure can be arranged but joy cannot be manipulated and undercurrents of dissatisfaction surface to distort a clear perspective.

the mind is a bad loser and can never accept it doesn't know best, so what it doesn't know it invents. p162

This brings us into the territory of truth and memory, and it would seem the unknown narrator has some insight she has retained that applies.

Do not cling too hard to your own version of truth, says Buddha, else you could fail to see the real truth when it comes knocking. p3

The world is heavily changed by how we perceive it. p61

Things are rarely seen without being looked for. p27

So she is writing this letter with little hope of sending it, looking for insight, examining unlikely clues and conundrums, trying to extract fragments to piece together her fractured relationships, her splintered life. High drama seems to prevail.

our days on earth are numbered, and the numbers aren't that big. p23

Life is short. Life shoots you a lethal dose of time. Time is a drug that wears off. p191

As my interest in the protagonists wore off, I began to notice the disturbing signals of toxic dysfunction. Our reticent, tactful and self-effacing narrator may not be so innocent nor so reliable, glamorizing the codependent relationships that dominated her life.

The eye looks on others and itself with motives, games and tricks, but the neutral lens leaves a thing to be what it is. p247

3.5 rounded down for GR
5/7

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a recent moment of procrastination, I went through a number of the Guardian’s top ten book lists. I found this novel listed under 'top ten unlikely friendships in fiction'. I am always looking for novels that focus on female friendships, so got it out of the library. The narrative takes the form of a letter being written to an old friend who hasn’t been seen for a decade and whose whereabouts are unknown. The letter writer talks about her life, the past, and gradually explains what came between the two of them. When I started ‘Dear Thief’, I hoped and hoped that the estrangement of the friends was not going to be about a man they both loved. Without giving details, I was both disappointed and relieved. Mostly the former, though. The reason I look for novels about female friendship is because I am tired of fiction dealing with troubled marriages, tumultuous love affairs, etc. So very tired.

I can’t quite decide whether I like the writing either. At times the imagery is really beautiful, however for the most part I found the style rather too mannered. Especially as the ostensible form is a letter written by someone with no apparent interest in writing fiction. The most effective parts, for me, were the evocations of an imaginary hermitage in which her vanished friend lived. These sections seemed to give more substance to her view of her friend, whereas many of the anecdotes from her past and present seemed immaterial and at times twee. Also, the man Nicholas came off to me like rather an insensitive wastrel, with no apparent charms. I always feel like I lack emotional sensitivity when I read literary fiction like this and remain wholly unmoved by it. Maybe I do, or perhaps novelists could stand to focus on something other than marriage for once. At the end of 'Dear Thief' I felt like I knew more about the narrator's relationship with her husband than about her friendship with the woman she was writing to, which was the opposite of what I'd anticipated.

[cate · Rating 2 out of 5]

a lot of words were used. not all of them made sense. not all of them actually said something

[Purdeyblackcat · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointing book.

A woman sits down to write a long letter to an estranged friend; that is the premise for this novel- one woman talking to another, reminiscing about their shared history in the form of a letter, yet there is something completely phoney about the first-person narrator's 'voice'. It feels like the character has got caught up with the writer - by which I mean that instead of writing in the character's voice, the author has been too self-consciously using a writer's voice. Real people don't talk like this. Also, as the protagonist is writing to her friend and describing/remembering past events that involve the two of them, some of the passages come across as very clunky exposition, for example, the narrator 'telling' Nina about her own family history. You get the impression that the protagonist is telling the story for the reader's sake, which makes the whole letter-writing process a bit redundant. It was a very frustrating read, as Samantha Harvey can clearly write very well, the trouble is that her protagonist shouldn't be as good a writer as she is. Compare it to Graham Swift's Last Orders, where multiple first-person narrators have distinctive, non-literary voices. Swift gets it right; Dear Thief fails miserably. It's a shame as the premise was a really good one.

[Lisa McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the risk of sounding like a database, if you enjoyed Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, you are likely to adore this novel, too. Here, too, are lyrical rants from a middle aged woman, "pinned like a snared bird to one corner of a triangle."
As in The Woman Upstairs, the man in the triangle barely matters. It's the Other Woman who spurs the obsession, perhaps because she is unrepentant..."You cannot forgive somebody who does not ask to be forgiven."
The narrator, deprived of the option to forgive, strains, instead, to understand. And fails. She can't even understand herself. "I think I slept in the car on the way home while you and Nicolas played Twenty Questions. Or did I pretend to sleep? I honestly can’t recall."
Having ceded control in the affair, she sets about writing a letter to her "thief," recreating her as a fictional character, one she can still address, "I forgive you simply because I hope to be forgiven; I know it is not your way, but if I were you I would take forgiveness, even if it is only mine, even if it belittles you."

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story kept upending my expectations. Just when I thought I knew what was going to happen, the narrative would undermine itself, and I wouldn't be sure any longer how much of the story was made up in the narrator's head, and how much of it was as 'true' as any book of social realism. I became aware too of how much of the story, like any story, was happening in my own head, in the way I imagined its characters and scenes. Harvey allows all of these realities to exist simultaneously.

The writing wavers between "exquisite" and "overwritten." Some scenes are breathtaking. Others are too overladen with loveliness for my tastes. The experience of reading the novel reminded me a great deal of my experience with reading 2005 Booker winner The Sea by John Banville--like Banville's novel, "Dear Thief" is graceful, and complex, and a little too meandering.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a kind of a strange book. It's a long letter written to a long-time friend who became involved with her husband. It's an inward book, a self-evaluation of the writer's perceptions, rightfully or wrongfully, as she sorts through the betrayal and memories both real and imagined. It meanders through many years and she comes to recognize that some of her beliefs were not reality, but rather her conceptions of it. This self-analysis is taken to the nth degree, even to the point of not being healthy. At one point, it is mentioned that she had a breakdown of some sort.

The writing was mesmerizing, and as it meanders through thoughts, recollections, images and time. It makes the reader wonder about what goes through their head when wronged. It's the next day and the book is still with me and I love that. So I'm changing my rating from a 3 to a 4.

[Poko13 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully-written novel, in the form of a long letter written to a childhood friend who has intermittently dropped in-and-out of the narrator's life, with always intriguing consequences. The novel/letter moves between the present and the past in an attempt to process some of life's larger questions (that "seeing through the gauze of life" with which she begins her letter) as well as some of the smaller, more personal ones, especially love, relationship, betrayal... Always the language is beautiful! A strange but most enjoyable read!

[latner3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspired by the Leonard Cohen song "Famous Blue Raincoat." Beautiful book.
"Not all our memories are the memories we remember". Good read.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really really wanted to love this novel; I wanted to give it five stars, sing its praises from rooftops, the whole nine yards, but I couldn't do it. This is not because Samantha Harvey can't write; she can, and almost any random passage will contain some moment of stylistic and metaphorical brilliance. The novel reads almost more like a giant prose poem than it does like a typical work of fiction. Here is a brief excerpt:

Petras is up to his jaw in sand, and the sand keeps falling away from his face because he is laughing at you laughing. Your parents scoop it back up but it flows away. Then you feel a breeze--maybe it picks up, or maybe you've turned your head into it--and you become quiet at the feel of it over your skin. Grains of sand rush across the surface of the dunes like lunatics, like drunks. Of course you do not think of it in terms of drunks and lunatics at the time, but you think it as you remember.

The work is musical and flowing, one quality I usually prize most in a novel. By the same token, the structure--as a sort of letter/diary added to at haphazard intervals and with minimal connection between sections--is very successful. We are inside the narrator's head as she writes to Nina and about Nina's fictionalized current whereabouts and the jumps from idea to idea are natural in their disjointedness, each section feels as though it arose from the events it describes, or from a thought with an unspoken trigger and not as a current account of anything or something that maintains the ability to create the events. In other words, it really does feel like a letter, if a long one. I like how much the narrator puts of herself into the letter, how memories slowly unfold themselves and the reasons for their appearance may or may not ever be revealed. The other characters are often missing something--Yannis, Nicolas, Ruth, Gene, and all the others seem to flit in and out of the narrator's thoughts and only as much is told as she deems absolutely necessary. This is especially true of Nicolas,the narrator's ex-husband, whom Nina knew (and had an affair with--this is not a spoiler), where it is assumed that Nina will know what is going on when he is discussed. Again, the letter form makes use of this fragmentary characterization and it is not the problem it could have been had the novel been told differently. I think the choice to give all characters except the narrator a name is effective--it makes the narrator a conduit for a story rather than so much a person, and makes sense in context; Nina knows who the narrator is, why should she name herself? The nameless voice of the novel permits all the internal commentary on life, on herself, on her writing, on Nina, on Nicolas, on the nursing home in which the narrator works, seem at once human and distant. There is a vague air of philosophical dication of wisdom, without the sense of artifice that usually accompanies it.

Why then did I not love this beautiful, intelligent novel? There isn't anything to hang my hat on, both as an explanation and an excuse for the lack of one. At times, the narrator does drift too far into omniscience and mystery and loses her role as a participant in her own life. At other times, she is all too human, but refuses or neglects to share any sort of motivation or explanation. I don't mind the unanswered questions that close the book, but I do mind the fairly regular reiterations of answers and non-answers to some while totally ignoring others. For example, the narrator is very fond of saying that Nina's indifference is what drew people to her, but never even approaches the subject of why their relationship worked in the strange and dance-like way it is revealed to have done (The game of Chair described in the final section or next to final section is a perfect illustration of the what, but for a novel so concerned with "why" there should have been some greater effort at understanding.) I suppose that I couldn't reach beyond my ambivalence--my confusion with the minor but frequent shifts in tone, my joy in and annoyance with the amount of information we--as Nina--are assumed to already have, the forays into omniscience and imagination and then back out--to appreciate this novel the way it, perhaps, should be appreciated.

[Natalie Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Samantha Harvey’s third novel, Dear Thief, is an intensely sensual story written in the form of a long letter, with the author adopting the voice of a middle-aged woman contemplating her marriage.

The narrator is writing to an old friend, Nina, or Butterfly as she is later referred to; a woman whose refusal to conform to a perceived normality results in a hell-bent desire to self-destruct.

The novel, which is currently on the shortlist for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was published by Jonathan Cape, within the Random House Group, as a contemporary women’s fiction book.

This is a captivating tale about love, passion, friendship, betrayal and aging, with a powerful description of the path of heart and imagination being used within the story:

“It is like walking on nails having first been set on fire. With your hands tied up your back in forced prayer. And a stake through your throat. A dagger in your back.”

It initially appears as though the narrator is reminiscing, attempting to move on from the past and her friend-turned-foe’s actions. However, by the end of the novel it becomes apparent that her reason for writing is also to trap her disloyal friend in a lonely world through the power of imagination as she creates, in the letter, a place for Butterfly to live, providing her with only the necessities to survive.

Despite the letter format being difficult to use in a novel, Harvey enables the narrator to talk directly to Butterfly while also telling the full story to the reader. The beautifully descriptive writing paints every detail of this love triangle on a canvas, immersing the reader in the story.

Dear Thief is a captivating and thought-provoking novel with an emotive message for the reader which perfectly demonstrates Harvey’s writing abilities.

[Konstantin R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

[rating = A]
One of my: Best Books of the Year (for 2016)
This novel is about a woman (the narrator, unnamed) who is writing her old friend who disappeared twenty-some years ago. Although in the form of letters, they are not "Dear so-and-so", they read like a stream-of-conscious narrative: very daring and powerful. This woman tells her life-story, about how she met her husband, how her grandma died, about Butterfly (the woman to whom these letters are addressed), and other such experiences that the narrator seems Butterfly will benefit from. Written in scorching prose, beautiful and elegant and thoughtful, the novel flows along the winding river of jealousy and hatred and love and forgiveness. The whole point of the novel is whether to forgive Butterfly for her deed. This deed is quite predictable (a triangle of sorts, if you get my drift), but it is not fully disclosed in any vulgar way. Harvey allows the narrator's thoughts to keep the novel moving; and at the end we wonder if this is not all inside her own head. The woman admits herself, I may be making him up; though she is taking about her friend (conveniently materialized for reflection) the author may be pointing to the overall unreliability of the narrator. The end ends with a last letter where, the woman beilives she has seen her friend, and chases after. But we are left with only an image of who this mysterious person is, and the word of a rambling woman neglected by time. And this illusion of the wandering friend "Butterfly" is a parallel for the image that the novel gives us: a woman wondering what to do with her life after a trdgedy that can nevr be remunderated/fixed.

[Marilyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like it. I didn't like it. It's a very sad and tragic diatribe against a protagonist. But is the protagonist really Butterfly the friend whom this letter is written to? Or is the letter writer herself?
I didn't like it because I felt my own sense of anguish at how the main character allowed her own story to devolve and yet has so much passion for the actions and events of Butterfly. This was however, well written and the way it was written definitely kept me compelled to keep reading to the end. I wish I could've known the writer of the letters, though, to shake her out of this bitterness and to let go and love life.