The Life-Writer

by David Constantine

The long anticipated novel from the author of the short story 'In Another Country', which inspired the Oscar/Academy Award nominated film, #45Years. Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing together aspects of his life, in particular, a journey he made years before they met – a hitchhike through France that he had tried to tell her about in the last few hours of his life. Picking her way through bundles of letters and postcards from five decades earlier, Katrin begins to uncover a life she knew nothing of, and an expedition that exceeded anything her professional, biographical subjects ever undertook. ‘Think of me then,’ her husband beseeched her, at the roadside, thumb in the air, gaily setting forth, ‘never forget me then.’ David Constantine’s passionate tale of grief and rediscovery marks only the second foray into novel writing for an author whose short fiction has won international acclaim. A great work of literature, he reminds us, is never finished, it is ‘a living and moving thing, alive in all its parts in every fibre’, designed to be inexhaustible and to outlive. As Katrin’s journey proves, the lives of those we love are similarly inexhaustible, they keep on offering up new revelations, possessing the people they leave behind, and forever needing to be re-written. @commapress

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Marriage, Contemporary, Literature, Ebooks

250 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 25, 2015

About the author

Born in 1944, David Constantine worked for thirty years as a university teacher of German language and literature. He has published several volumes of poetry, most recently, Nine Fathom Deep (2009). He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter Than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Goethe's Faust, Part I was published by Penguin in 2005; Part II in April 2009. He is also author of one novel, Davies, and Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. His four short story collections are Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), and The Shieling (Comma, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Constantine's story 'Tea at the Midland' won the BBC National Short Story Award 2010, and won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for the collection (Comma Press, 2012). He lives in Oxford where, for ten years, he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen (until 2011). David's short story 'In Another Country' has been adapted into 45 Years - a major Film4-funded feature film, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay & Charlotte Rampling. This film won two silver bear awards at the Berlinale International Film festival in February 2015. David is also the author of the forthcoming novel, released by Comma Press, The Life-Writer.

Reviews

[Marjorie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book about a literary biographer named Katrin, whose beloved husband, Eric, is dying from cancer. I had to marvel at the author’s ability to so movingly depict those last months they have together. After Eric’s death, Katrin starts reading through his paperwork and old letters and decides to write his life history in the hope that it will help her through her grief. As painful as it is, she begins to reconstruct the time frame when Eric falls passionately in love with Monique when he was a young man. Katrin had been so happy with Eric but now she begins to doubt whether their life together could begin to compare with his love for Monique.

Katrin’s dwelling on Eric’s past became obsessive. There were times when Katrin would want to stop reading the letters and just get on with her life and I wanted to selfishly plead with her to please keep reading since I wanted to know more. This was one of those books that I didn’t want to end and when it did end, I wanted to start from the beginning again and that doesn’t happen often. This book wrapped its words around my heart and just wouldn’t let go. Gorgeous writing that touched me in so many ways.

The only negative thing about the book was that there were times when the French was not translated and I had no idea what was being said. There was one vitally important sentence in a letter from Monique to Eric that wasn’t translated which I found very frustrating. At the end of the book, there was a list of translations with the page numbers, which wasn’t very helpful when reading an e-book. Plus I wasn’t aware those translations were there until the book had ended. Since I was reading an ARC of the book, hopefully that will be rectified in the final edition.

Highly recommended.

This book was given to me by the publisher through Edelweiss in return for an honest review.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for an Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.

Don't get me wrong. The writing is fantastic. I wanted to finish, I enjoyed the characters, I wanted to find out what happens to Katrin. However, I got through 70% and just couldn't take any more. So morbid, that Katrin, clearly loved by her recently deceased husband, would mourn his death by writing the story of his supposed one great love at least forty years in the past. Very well written, it was a bit too heavy for me at the time.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Life Writer" by British author David Constantine covers early widowhood, mourning, the lingering imprints and effects left behind and the need to connect with the past for a better understanding of loved ones. Dr. Katrin Szuba decided to retire from her position at an unnamed University in Surrey after the death of her beloved husband Eric. Eric had passed away before he could complete a story he was telling Katrin, as she would bravely examine his romantic past that included other women.

At Eric's wake his first love Monique was present and weeping like a child claiming Eric had been the grand passionate love of her life she had foolishly betrayed and lost. Katrin decided to explore Eric's early years in 1962-1963, beginning with the love letters Monique had mailed to him from France; recovered from his trunk stored in the attic of their home. Also present during that time was Eric's lifelong best friend Daniel, who shared his version of events and stories of Eric's romances. With a writerly focus and determination to know more, Katrin traveled to Eric's youngest brother Matthew and Shelia's home near Manchester, and learned that Eric's family wasn't ever pleased with young Eric's free-spirited nature, travel to France, and inability to take his studies at Oxford more seriously. They never approved of Monique or Eric's hasty marriage to his first wife. Eric would later become a single father of his only son after the marriage ended in divorce. Katrin would become Eric's second wife in middle age.

Constantine is a gifted writer of highly detailed (scenic) lyrical prose, sometimes the story seemed lost in overwriting; it was challenging to connect emotionally with the matter of fact writing style that defined character development and interaction. An example of this was when Katrin implored Daniel to continue telling his story about Eric over the phone and fell asleep. There were many predictable and typical things that happen in young love that seemed a big deal in the storyline, though wouldn't be the case in real life. The literary references throughout the story lead to one most fascinating: Katrin's muse, Polish poet Marianna Levetzow who lived in the 19th century and performed from memory her works in French, German, and English. The ending of the story was truly sweet as Katrin developed connections with people who knew and loved Eric the most. With thanks to the Seattle Public Library.

[Angela Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd like to give this book 100 stars: it is the most lyrically beautiful, subtly evocative story of love, life, death, the natural world and the way we human beings are that I've read for a long long time. For ever, possibly. If you didn't know David Constantine was a poet (I didn't) you'd know from reading The Life-Writer's prose, but even more importantly what he writes about is what we all need to read to discover how we are when we're in love; to discover how we might be in death or when we're grieving the death of a beloved person; how to be more observant about the astonishing planet we live on, naturally, and how to think about our planet; and, for me at least, to recognise the way marvellous writing can elevate our thinking and our very being.

Here is a (male) writer who understands women emotionally and observes women acutely. For instance, about a pregnant young woman:

In that short interval [she] has lapsed into her familiar remoteness, behind the mask of her pregnancy, not discourteously but as of right withdrawing into the centre of her waiting and attending, where she belongs.

Here is a writer who loves the natural world:

Another thing in him, of course, another premise or the consequences of the premise of atheism, is love of the earth. I had a walk last weekend, hitched into Wales, walked a good long way and slept out on a hill facing Cader Idris. Cold, of course, but such beauty of moon and stars, the owls calling across me, till the hesitant rosy-fingered dawn. I brewed up a coffee, leaned in my bag against a tree, the rabbits came forth, quite close, the ground was silver-dewy, and I read his epigraph again, from Holderlin's Empedokles, you remember, the dedication of oneself to the earth, to love her faithfully, fearlessly, in her sufferings, in her mysteries, with a love that would last till death. And it's that, the love of the beautiful earth and the making of an answering beauty in art and in deed, that I'm most touched by at present. Revolt in jouissance, in the enjoyment and in the making of beauty, so that men and women will live lives fit to be looked at on the beautiful earth. That seems to be a project worth working for in the time allowed.

Here is a writer who knows love:

I saw very clearly what you were like with me when we made love, how at the mercy of it you were, just as I was, both at the mercy of it, equally, and I saw then and I still see now how good that was, such a good thing, given to very few, and it was ours, in us, and in our heart of hearts ... if you woke this morning and looked in the mirror you would see us standing side by side and naked, wide-eyed, astounded, fearful, at the mercy of it, rejoicing, exultant, wholly given up to it in one another ... you ... will always know that it was glorious, being in it, head over heels in it, laughing and crying and whispering and shouting in it, you knew it was good, you knew your life, like mine, would need it for ever, having loved like that, been in love like that.

I left bits out only so I wouldn't give anything away, otherwise I'd have quoted the whole piece. And here is a writer who knows death and grieving:

Rob will grieve as you are grieving, it can't be otherwise, for so much love, so much grief, it is just, your grief is a measure of your love, be glad if you can, rejoice if you can, grieving you love him, in your heart of hearts you would not want it any different.

It reminds me of something I stumbled on the other day:

Grief is love with nowhere to go.

What else can a reader possibly ask of a novel? Please please please read The Life-Writer. You'll be missing a beautiful evocation of the fundamentals of life and some extraordinarily moving scenes written in astonishing language that will carry you directly into the hearts of the people you're reading about if you don't read it.

PS It's thanks to that wonderful publication The Reader http://www.thereader.org.uk/magazine.... that I discovered David Constantine and this book. Thank you.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Constantine is a writer’s writer of short stories, poems, and translations, and now of longer fiction. Constantine has a perfect ear for prose and a calm, highly detailed delivery, with occasional heightened moments (with a minimum of set pieces).

The complexities and originality of this novel are literary rather than linguistic. Constantine does not embrace naturalism in that he allows his characters to have extraordinarily detailed memories, to act in extreme (but quiet) ways, to enter into unlikely relationships, etc. The narration is third-person limited tightly to the title character, which allows the author to keep a tight rein on what the reader sees and hears, without giving a direct voice to the protagonist’s emotions (that is, keeping them at a bit of a distance). The author takes a risk with the uneventfulness of the novel; all events involve the personal relationships of a character who has nearly abandoned them. The result is truly excellent, but sometimes dull and repetitive in an uninteresting way. It is a joy to watch Constantine at work. A 4.5.

[Michellelester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Partly it's taken me this long to finish reading because at times 'The Life-Writer' is so unbearably painful, this story of a woman writing out her grief at the loss of her husband, that I've had to steel myself for those few pages of bedtime reading I can manage at the moment. But it's more than a bereavement tale. Katrin is a biographer and in deciding to write her husband's life story, most particularly the brief but life-affirming, life-changing passion with Monique, questions are posed about how we know those we love; how the past shapes the people we become, and how written versions seek to fix the unfixable essence that is who we are. Finally, it is the most powerful story of everlasting love that I've read in a very long time. Constantine is a beautiful writer. Where has he been all my life?

[Isla McKetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was gorgeous. Like leaving me speechless gorgeous. Though I did not request the review copy that landed in my inbox, I'm so glad I was on the list because it was one of the best books I read this year. I worked on a full review for my site on how The Life-Writer helped me come to grips with grief and appreciate love, but it took me a month to finish the review because I wasn't ready for the book to end.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not get the point of this book. Not only could I not relate to the quest of the bereaved wife, I found her obsession to discover past details of her husband's life, to the detriment of her personal growth and daily living, rather sad. Completing this book was an act of personal discipline. It was a choice of my book club, or I would have discarded it early on.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The descriptions of grief are beautifully rendered and the book is well written throughout. I just had trouble caring about the E and M storyline from 50 years ago. It did not sustain my interest, at all, and therefore the book became a slog.

[Indigo Wayworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gripped onto my heart and still hasn't let go.

Read for ENGL 4811: Is Beauty Just?

[Debbie Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review comes with a warning. Do not read this book if you are even slightly depressed (as much of us are with the pandemic). However if you our going through the grieving process after losing a loved one then this book might be a great comfort. You will have a companion, Katrin, accompanying you and you will find out a lot about yourself, I’m guessing, through her experiences.
“Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing together aspects of his life, in particular a journey he made years before they met - a hitchhike through France that he tried to tell her about in the last few hours of his life.”
The big question is why did I continue with this book when I realised how in depth Constantine would go in evoking Katrin’s grief? Well, I actually couldn’t stop reading because of the marvellous writing and just a bit of me knew that there was something about the journey Katrin needed to find out. And what the hell was it?
“Think of me then, Katrin, never forget me then, that lad gaily assuming the land and its roads and traffic would never be anything but kind to him, he raises his thumb and a truck stops, after that it’s a vicar in a Morris Minor, an elderly couple in a camper van, a fisherman riding a motorbike and sidecar, How far you going, son? It’s a few miles at a time, through the Dales, the limestone so white under the sun it hurt your eyes, the watercourses deep dark green and secret, little by little down the London Road...”
After the funeral: “This running colloquy with him distressed her more than it comforted her. Every other person lapsed, she was inhabited entirely by him. She felt that he had not passed away but had passed on, into her, and there he lived, in her, not jealously, not desiring to confine her further life, but wishing her well, urging her to live, to keep up with old friends, make new ones, get on with her work.”
Soon after Katrin drags out all of Eric’s stuff from the attic. Letters and memorabilia. “They are bundles of years and of many different writers.” Gradually she assembles them all in order and goes through them and begins to read the letters from Monique, Eric’s first love he met in France in September 1962 after he hitchhiked there. What happened to this love affair? Katrin knows some sketchy details but of course the reader doesn’t. Gradually both the reader and Katrin discover the full force of that first love.
This is a strangely rewarding novel, watching Katrin wade through her grief and come to a better understanding of her late husband and herself. There are quite a few hurdles she has to overcome and these are portrayed with a haunting simplicity but it is Eric in France that has stayed with me.
“He was in no hurry. He strolled, observing people and things. The life of the great barges, family life on the water, the gear, the dogs, a sleeping cat, the fishing rods, the geraniums, the ready bicycles, everything delighted him. He waved like a child to all and sundry and felt blessed among mortals when anyone waved back.”

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmmm. In some ways this was a beautiful book. It flows along in dream-like language through the grieving process of Katrin, who lost her husband Eric, from cancer. Eric leaves the story early on and we are left to live with Katrin as she tries to live through and understand her grief. Katrin by career is a writer, particularly about writing biographicals on unique people that she finds interesting-ordinary people who others haven't noticed. In order to fully grieve, she leaves her post at the school to immerse herself in the past love life of her husband-- his first true love whom he met in Paris, while attending Oxford University. Eric as it turns out is much older than Katrin. He had an entire life story before they ever met and he saved letters and photographs and a great deal of memorabilia about his doings. In the story we meet Monique in France, Daniel, Eric's close friend while in Oxford (but remains in touch) and Edna, whom Eric marries and divorces. There are a few other characters that add depth to the story-Eric's brother and sister-in-law, Dr. Gracie who attends to Katrin and Eric's son, Thomas.

For me, it was just too lyrical and there was way too much time spent on the descriptions of the various landscapes. The story was mostly in England and having been in Oxford, I could picture some of these things very well - but overall I found things a bit tedious. I wanted more of the human story and less of the flowery writing. Maybe on a different day, a different week, a different month I might have found it wonderful, beautiful, etc. But towards the end I would hum "yes, and dum de dum de dum, and yes dum, de dum and de dum." Yet even saying this I really do see why some have given this piece five stars. Whenever Mr. Constantine would resume the dialogue among the various characters and you could learn more about them, the book would come alive - only to be lost a few paragraphs later into descriptions. I like the way the book ends, however, it does leave you able to see Katrin off into the world.

There were many wonderful thoughts expressed about people that I enjoyed and I like Constantine's overall sensibility. I wrote this quote down to remember the book by: "Loneliness is an appetite that feeds and feeds and cannot get nourishment."

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't remember where I heard about this, but it wasn't particularly to my taste. It was well-written, but the pace was far too slow and the story not engrossing enough to make up for it. I struggled to finish, and even then, the ending didn't bring me satisfaction. I understand that it is well-regarded, so it may just be that my patience isn't what it used to be.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book is like listening to someone talking on and on and on about something not nearly as interesting as the speaker thinks it is. This widow's husband dated people before her. That's it. I only give one-star reviews to books that are offensively terrible so the best I can say is this didn't offend me.

[Dana]

I just can't deal with authors who don't use quotation marks.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Life-Writer by David Constantine is a novel about a loving marriage, and grief. Also about the way we construct each other through the stories we tell, the stories that emerge in our letters and the stories we construct about each other.

The Life Writer is a brilliant evocation of grief and the story of one woman’s attempt to collect the stories of her late husband's early life in an attempt to keep him alive. About five of my friends have lost their husbands, and this story reminds me so intensely of their own journeys into a mixture of love and grief. One friend told me that the only people she wants to talk with are people who have lost a dear partner to death, since they are the only ones who understand what she is going through.

The story begins as the narrator’s husband is getting sicker. They both know he is going to die. After he does, she begins to gather letters, stories, and with these, reconstructs his childhood, an early love affair, his travels and his friendships, and then writes what she can gather and ultimately imagine as she reconstructs his life before he knew her.

Katrin, this narrator, begins the task, one with which she is familiar. Her job is to write brief lives of minor figures in European Romanticism. In many ways the narrative voice is matter of fact, but Katrin realizes that “soon she will have to attempt a writing for which clear matter-of-factness will not suffice, she will have to say wholeheartedly what love is like, what love and the concomitant grief are life, what it feels like, loving and grieving and not wanting to live and yet hoping somewhere deep down or far at the back of the mind, that it may still be possible to want to live.
“These bits of lives,” her husband’s friend, (and now her closest friend) Daniel says, “ Fifty years later I can still recall faces, phrases, tones of voice,of people I encountered travelling. People reveal themselves. You meet, they show you something…of who they are. Then you go your separate ways, you will never see them again, but bits of their lives will lodge in you forever…and when I tell you about them now, how living they are to me, though very likely dead, and perhaps in you also they will continue living.

Here is advice that seems essential. I need to keep it if I am the one who is left. “But don’t be discouraged,” says Dr Gracie, “When things become worse again. Really, it’s best not to think of it in terms of progress along a line—and certainly not along a straight line. In fact, sequence, progress, degrees, anything linear…these are not helpful concepts for the mending of your life. I mean, you don’t want to discard Eric, do you? You don’t want to think of him as a burden and impediment you must get rid of and move away from, to live. You love him, and he loved you. It is grief devouring you, not love. You have to convert grief back into what it was: an abiding love…And, here’s something else, connected with the unhelpfulness of thinking linearly: Being well and being ill are not opposite or even distinct states. In varying degrees, they partake of one another. You are not setting off from the road of illness to the state of being well. You will always be ill and well, in a continuously shifting mixture. All we want—and it is a big think to want and to attain—is that illness doesn’t become of continue to be so strong that it thwarts you, reduces you and spoils your life. Everyone lives in that struggle, whether they know it or not. And it is better to know it because then you will be watchful. You will always be on the lookout for what will help your life and be wary of what will harm or hinder it.

You understand me, don’t you. You want a life of our own in which grief becomes love again and works for the good of your life. You will always be hauted—why should you not be?—sorrow will always shadow you and some days and nights it will come in very close again. But don’t let it stay close for long. Sleeping and waking with sorrow will leach your strength. You don’t want that, nor would Eric to watch you trying to live like that.

She looks tired suddenly. Katrin thanks her, says, goodbye. The sun streams in, the blackbird sings from the apple tree whose blossom is drifting clear of the shapes of fruit.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a moment of understated poignancy (one among many such) in David Constantine’s novel The Life-Writer when Katrin—struggling through the aftermath of her husband Eric’s death and writing his biography—realizes that his life was much more dramatic and thrilling before she became a part of it, that she only came to know him on the tranquil downside, long after the passions were quenched and the adventures were over. It is typical of the discoveries that Katrin makes, as she sorts through the letters and memories that Eric has left behind. Eric, 68 at the time of his death and many years older than her, lived an entire life before they met, and though Katrin has always understood this, as her research progresses she often finds herself shocked and bruised by the details of this previous life. Katrin, an academic and writer, has focused her professional career on the lives of minor figures of European romanticism: artists, writers and musicians who aspired to greatness but never quite measured up. She is fascinated by their relentless striving and how, in the end, they either accepted their mediocrity or continued to rebel against it. When Eric dies, as both therapy and tribute, she decides she will treat him as one of her subjects, and in the process, finds that her husband loved with reckless abandon, disappointed his family, and let impulsive decisions and wayward behaviour damage his career prospects. The revelation that Eric was human and made mistakes does not surprise her. But the fact that she responds to this discovery by doubting his love for her does. Constantine’s novel fully immerses the reader in Katrin’s consciousness. It is a compelling narrative that as you get deeper into it becomes somewhat suffocating, and readers may find themselves looking for ways to gain a bit of distance from Katrin’s anxious self-criticisms. But it is also a beautiful, wise and compassionate book filled with memorable passages and stunning visuals, written with depthless understanding of the mysteries of the human heart.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written story with a protagonist who frustrated this reader. Katrin cares for her older husband who dies of cancer and then indulges in excessive grief while investigating his life before they met. She discovers that he was unlikable and had disappointed and dismissed a brother, his parents and a good friend. In the process of learning the husband's life story, especially details about his first love whom he met in Paris, she neglects to pursue and live her own story and in the process Katrin becomes passive and dull. Katrin strives for accuracy and fairness in telling her husband's story despite her distress that he had been wildly in love with Monique, but the reader can't be sure how much is real and how much bubbles up from Katrin's imagination and a certitude that her partnership with the man was almost an afterthought or mere convenience.

[John Addiego · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this very moving and extraordinarily poetic in its exploration of grief and old love. There's a writerly conceit that the reader has to accept: that the protagonist, who is a writer of other people's lives, is able to imagine so much into the experiences that aren't hers. Now and then this felt like too much artifice for me, but most of the time it's enthralling. Now and then the depiction of romance and the grieving process also seemed too much, unbelievable, unhealthy, but the writing is so exquisite that I let it be. Youth, hedonism, romance, adventure, the French--against such a sane and proper English boy seems to have little chance.

[Amelie Buckow · Rating 2 out of 5]

Die Geschichte ist eine, über die ich mir zuvor nie Gedanken gemacht habe, sie ist weit entfernt von meinem alltäglichen Leben und hat mir deshalb eine neue Sicht eröffnet.
Was ich allerdings anstrengend fand, war der Schreibstil des Autors. Die fehlenden Gänsefüßchen, wenigen Absätze, langen Kapitel, extrem detaillierte Beschreibung nebensächlicher Dinge hat mich beim Lesen eher Mühe gekostet. Da sind die Geschmäcker wohl einfach verschieden.
Auch viel es mir oft schwer mit der Hauptfigur zu sympathisieren, wobei ich nun, da ich das Buch (endlich) fertig gelesen habe denke, dass das vielleicht wichtig war, um sie am Ende verstehen zu können.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will not be for everyone. It is a very character driven novel about one woman's journey through the grief that follows her husband's death. Just before he dies, Katrin's husband, Eric, begins to tell her the story of how he met Monique, the woman he loved in his early 20s. Katrin decides to write the story of this period in Eric's life. She uses letters between Eric and Monique as well as consulting Eric's close friend to find out more. The story moves slowly and can be quite depressing but we gradually see Katrin moving beyond the early stages of grief and finding her way again.

[Michael Kitchen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting reflection on love and grief. Katrin's husband, Eric, dies, and to deal with her grief, she seeks to know the man she loved before she knew him. He and his first wife, Edna, divorced, but it was his first love, Monique, a Parisian, who shows up at the funeral, and whose letters, most of them unopened, that reveals its impact on his later love for Katrin. The prose flowed, the protagonist's depth carries the reader through a grieving process one would not normally consider taking.

[Elizabeth Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katrin sets out to write a biography of her husband, Eric, after his death from cancer. She delves into letters written in the nineteen sixties from his old love, Monique, and becomes obsessed with the narrative of that old affair. She wonders if perhaps that was his only true love and her grief is augmented by the thought that all the real meaning inher husband's life took place before they met. This is a sorrowful and beautifully written book with an ending that was surprisingly moving.

[Naomi Lane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great study of the decription of inner emotional states one goes through working through grief. You can really feel the slightest change in Katrin's perception as she writes her way from isolation back into the world. I loved her willingness to look at her spouse's past relationships with openness. However, it makes me sad to realize that the excitement of our twenties is a time we will always long to return to.

[Laura Spaulding · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. A beautiful look at grief and love and how are perceptions of things and how they can change. Beautifully written. One suggestion, if you can read it on an ereader to make it easier with the translations (if you can't they are at the back of the book) I received a copy of this book from the publisher.

[Chloë Fowler · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a load of important words to use to describe this book, probably poignant is the one to lead with. I started off engaged in the potency of descriptions of grief and the light air of mystery and then progressed to feeling, dare I say it, a touch bored. I feel guilty about that.

[Joanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was like walking through mud. Just couldn't get into this book at all.

Reading it felt like coercion - much like Erik felt in the first chapter. Stopped and started several times, and finally, just let it go.

Perhaps, I'll reread it at some future time and feel differently.

[Kristine Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely nostalgic writing about grief and past passion.

[Donna · Rating 1 out of 5]

The writing was lovely, but I just couldn't get through it. Didn't really care how it ended.

[Nina · Rating 1 out of 5]

didn't care about anyone. too much of the same heaviness.