Primo amore

by Gwendoline Riley

Neve è un'aspirante scrittrice. È sposata con Edwyn, molto più grande di lei. C'è qualcosa di strano, di inquietante nel loro legame, una tensione perenne, una dissonanza che le cortesie dei riti quotidiani non riescono a dissimulare. Perché Neve, brillante e dotata di singolare acume, resta legata a un uomo difficile, scomodo, alla fine odioso? Perché quando ci impigliamo in certe relazioni non riusciamo a liberarcene? La risposta forse è nel passato, nel come e perché siamo arrivati fin lì e non riusciamo ad andare oltre. Per Neve il passato è un padre aggressivo, una madre svagata e assente, altre storie inconcludenti, difficoltà di comprendere e mettere in valore i propri talenti.
Un romanzo breve e tagliente che ruba il titolo al classico di Turgenev e lo sfida a distanza, mettendo in discussione due desideri opposti, quello di libertà e quello di intimità, e cerca di comprendere che cosa può voler dire avere una relazione oggi.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Romance, Literature, British Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 21, 2017

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

SOTTOMISSIONE VOLONTARIA


Francesca Woodman: Untitled, 1978.

C’è un padre che definire bullo è eufemistico: aggressivo, prevaricatore, violento.
C’è una madre distratta, che gioca ancora a fare la ragazza nonostante abbia più di sessant’anni, sembra sempre rimirante il suo ombelico, parla solo di se stessa, se fa una domanda non ascolta la risposta.
C’è una figlia vegana che per proteine mangia semi, e fa la scrittrice. È l’io narrante, e protagonista.
C’è anche un fratello che ogni tanto emerge dai discorsi dei primi tre, ma non è mai davvero presente, del quale si direbbe che ha dovuto subire tanto ed è riuscito a sistemare e risolvere poco.


Francesca Woodman

Nessuno dei quattro sembra avere problemi economici.
Tutti e quattro si spostano in varie parti del Regno Unito, cambiano città, vanno a vivere altrove: da Liverpool a Manchester, Glasgow, a Leeds, Londra…
Sembra un mondo fatto di persone a specchio deformante: nessuno offre altro che il riflesso dell’angoscia altrui. Un mondo popolato di gente sintonizzata su diversa frequenza.
Abitazioni lerce, sporcizia più o meno ovunque. Appartamenti e case e vite fatte soprattutto di spigoli, angoli, anfratti, spazi angusti, un parcheggio appare come una pianura sconfinata.
C’è molta gente che “scopre i denti”, o li mostra l’un l’altro: succede così spesso che ho cominciato a chiedermi se il traduttore, Tommaso Pincio, avesse per caso preso un granchio, capito fischi per fiaschi (anche in un altro paio di episodi il traduttore mi lascia perplesso).


Francesca Woodman: Untitled, New York, 1979-80.

Gwendoline Riley sembra costruire il suo puzzle con tessere all’apparenza impossibili da far combaciare, e incastrare l’una con l’altra. Oppure, come se con coni, cilindri, cubi e altri solidi geometrici volesse a ogni costo costruire una torre.
Eppure, ci riesce: il suo libro è bello, e avvincente.
Riesce a parlare di questa gente molto british che mi pare più aliena di un marziano e farmela sentire familiare, prossima.


Francesca Woodman: Self-deceit #1, Rome, Italy, 1978.

In questa storia l’amore s’identifica con la sottomissione, volontaria, con l’umiliazione autoinflitta. Neve ha subito talmente tanto, probabilmente anche qualche attenzione di troppo da parte di quel padre, perché da adulta possa concepire, e vivere, l’amore in altro modo.


Francesca Woodman: House #4, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976.

Suo marito ha parecchi anni più di lei, è malato di una grave cardiopatia. L’uomo non riesce a guardare oltre il suo male, è ossessivo, perfino violento, maniacale, odioso, direi anche cattivo.
Eppure vivono insieme, eppure lei non lo lascia.
Non ha bisogno del suo denaro, potrebbe avere una vita sua. Ma Neve non se ne va, neppure quando sembra che il limite sia stato superato (bello, molto bello il finale). Le è mancato l’affetto così tanto da piccola da non riuscire a liberarsi da questa trappola di matrimonio?

Ed è bello anche l’inizio, lo scambio di tenerezze fin troppo formale che lascia intuire qualcosa d’inquietante come lo stridore di un gesso sulla lavagna.

E vissero infelici e scontenti.


Francesca Woodman: From Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976.

[Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Click here to watch a video review of this book on my channel, From Beginning to Bookend.

Thirty-three-year-old Neve is trapped in a toxic marriage. As she recounts the corrosive relationships of her past - with her neurotic and self-centered mother, her short-tempered father, and a fickle ex-lover - the reasons for her inability to leave her husband, Edwyn, manifest in the form of distressing revelations about herself.

Considering one's life requires a horribly delicate determination, doesn't it? To get to the truth, to the heart of the trouble. You wake and your dreams disband, in a mid-brain void. At the sink, in the street, other shadows crowd in: dim thugs (they are everywhere) who'd like you never to work anything out.

First Love is crafted with a minimalist narrative that is efficient at setting a scene with few words.

We walked up to the shops, into the throat of the wind. People were moving slowly, obstructively, in both directions: only these little tiptoe scutters when a gust caught them: arms lifted, bags.

Still, at midnight, a taxi. A slow ride through bouncing rain, the yellow light swimming before us. Then an off-licence near King's Cross, whose hot-pink sign said OOZE.

The author excels at portraying the claustrophobic confines of Neve's abusive relationship with her husband. Edwyn - with his foul language, passive aggressive tendencies, and raging temper that turns on a dime - is one of the most psychologically manipulative characters to grace the pages of a literary work. He routinely projects his own self-loathing onto Neve and is adept at twisting her words.

Edwyn said,
'Disappointed cunt. Resentful bitch.
'What's that?'
'Men get older, and their cunt wives are "disappointed" and they're treated like dirt. Evil shallow fucking bitches. Oh, he isn't the man I married. Stupid shallow cunt. Disappointed cunt, drinking in disappointment with the air you fucking breathe.'

'My tone is ugly? Hm. OK. Well. My tone is ugly, honey. Were you in the dark about that? Are you saying I deceived you about that? Are you saying I - what? - misled you in some way? I can assure you that I didn't. My tone is ugly. That's how I am. Because how I am, now, is an arsehole and a fucking cunt. OK? I didn't used to be an arsehole and a fucking cunt but it's how I've ended up, OK?'
He stood up, took his plate, then put it down again, flexed his fingers.
'And isn't it just too fucking sad,' he said.

This book is a sterling example of five-star dialogue. All of the dialogue has a natural, conversational feel. It's quick and easy to read with minimal use of dialogue tags, which are not needed in this case as the author demonstrates masterful skill at composing discourse between characters.

For all its strengths, First Love is not without flaws. Neve jumps forward and backwards through time, recounting stories from her past and allowing readers to observe her present. Readers are dropped into the past or present without notification; the timeline can be difficult to follow as readers must regularly reorient themselves. Further, the book feels incomplete; the groundwork is laid for a compelling narrative, but there's no character development or story arc.

Neve's moments of self-reflection are profound and provocative, but even those are not enough to make up for the brevity of the book.

Finding out what you already know. Repeatingly. That's not sane, is it? And while he might have said that this was how he was, for me it continued to be frightening, panic-making, to hear the low, pleading sounds I'd started making whenever he was sharp with me.

First Love is well-crafted and definitively literary but feels fragmentary at just 166 pages.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because it has been shortlisted for this year's Goldsmiths Prize, and it is my first experience of reading Riley. I enjoyed it, but it is not an easy book to review.

The narrator Neve, a writer, tells the story of her dysfunctional marriage to Edwyn, a manipulative and hypochondriac older man. Much of the book relates their many arguments. There are also interludes describing Neve's earlier life and her meetings with her needy mother, and her relationship with her abusive father, now dead. Without the humour this would be quite a bleak read, and although the book is short it feels a bit relentless. It is well written, and the characters are nuanced and convincing.

My only concern is that since the Goldsmiths is a prize for experimental writing, this one may not be sufficiently experimental.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Fiction

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

Aubade by Philip Larkin

Gwendoline Riley's First Love was shortlisted for the 2017 Bailey's Prize for Women's Fiction (and in my view should have won) and a worthy inclusion on the Goldsmiths Prize shortlist, as well as being shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Now (December 2018) First Love has been awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Fiction for novelists under 40 - that the two immediately previously winners are Sara Baume and Eimear McBride speaks to the quality of both this award and the novel.

-----
It tells the story of Neve, a mid-30s author, whose life and particularly relationships are struggling to "climb clear of its wrong beginnings", as in the Larkin poem.

At the time the novel is set she is married to Edwyn, an older man (seemingly in his late 40s), a relationship that is, at best, toxic to both parties and, at worst, abusive.

Lately it’s the round of coughing in the hallway that lets me know he’s home. I go out and meet him, we have a cuddle, and then I look at the Standard while he gets changed. We don’t talk much in the evenings, but we’re very affectionate. When we cuddle on the landing, and later in the kitchen, I make little noises – little comfort noises – at the back of my throat, as does he. When we cuddle in bed at night, he says, ‘I love you so much!’ or ‘You’re such a lovely little person!’ There are pet names, too. I’m ‘little smelly puss’ before a bath, and ‘little cleany puss’ in my towel on the landing after one; in my dungarees I’m ‘you little Herbert!’ and when I first wake up and breathe on him I’m his ‘little compost heap’ or ‘little cabbage’. Edwyn kisses me repeatingly, and with great emphasis, in the morning.

There have been other names, of course.

‘Just so you know,’ he told me last year, ‘I have no plans to spend my life with a shrew. Just so you know that. A fishwife shrew with a face like a fucking arsehole that’s had…green acid shoved up it.’

‘You can always just get out if you find me so contemptible,’ he went on, feet apart, fists clenched, glaring at me over on the settee. ‘You have to get behind the project, Neve, or get out.’

‘What?’

‘Get…behind…the project…or…get out!’

‘What’s “the project”?’

‘The project is not winding me up. The project is not trying to get in my head and make me feel like shit all the time!’

Neve partly excuses Edywn's behaviour "back then" (although back then is only a year ago, and it is unclear he is much more affectionate now) by his physical condition:

The difference between us, which I did try to keep in mind, was that he really did feel himself under threat back then. He’d had serious heart trouble. An operation. He’d had to lose a lot of weight, stop smoking. Things had settled down by the time we met, but he told me he couldn’t feel safe. Not ever again. He was also starting to suffer terribly with his joints. Fibromyalgia, as we later found out. ‘I’m paying for something,’ he’d snarl, cornered. Or sometimes he’d just sit and sob, and look up at me with frightened eyes when I sat next to him.

In the novel, Neve looks back over the last 15 years of her life, and in particular to her troubled "first love" with an itinerant musician, and her own wandering from Liverpool, to Manchester, then Glasgow and London. But Edwyn (with some justification) points even further back, to Neve's relationship with her father.

I’m not your father. He’s the one you belittled you, all right? That’s what I’m saying. I don’t exist, you don’t hear what I say, what you hear is your father.
…
You read constantly don’t you? Has none of this ever made you consider, or allow, or admit, that people can represent something other than an opponent to you? That people can operate from motives other than wanting to harm you or laugh at you or belittle you.

At the time the novel is set, Neve's father has just died from a heart attack, induced by binge eating, and Neve, in Riley's prose, creates a memorable portrait of both her bully of a father and her rather comically fussy, eager-to-please yet also capricious mother:

I’m very glad my mother left my father, of course, but as I got older it did get harder to valorize that flight. This cover-seeking – desparate, adrenalized – had constituted her whole life as far as I could see. In avoidance of any reflection, thought. In which case her leaving him was a result of the same impulse that had her hook up with him in the first place. Not to think, not to connect: marry an insane bully. Simper at him. Not to be killed: get away from him. And her children? Her issue? How did they fit into her scheme? As sandbags? Decoys?

The last part of this quote refers to how her mother coerced Neve and her brother to stay in touch with their father, a relationship described by Neve as "encouraged by my mother again, that mad old pimp."

For fifteen years, every Saturday, my brother and I were laid on to service him. To listen to him. To be frightened by him, should he feel like it. As a child with his toys, he exercised a capricious rule, and as with any little imperator, his rage was hellish were his schemes not reverenced.

Where Part of the novel's strength is that the reader is left to make up their own mind as to how much of the fault in the relationship relies purely with the rather self-pitying Edwyn ("I'm convinced half of this pain is psychosomatic, and I'm looking at the cause"), and how much is caused by Neve's own insecurities magnified by Edwyn's own genuine medical issues. One of his most frequent complaints, prompted by an incident, to which he repeatedly harks back, where Neve got spectacularly drunk, is that he didn't sign up to be her carer. But the implicit suggestion is that he rather hoped she had signed up to be his.

This also isn't a novel rich in plot. Indeed that is rather antithetical to Riley's approach. It is both a difficulty with but also a strength of the novel, that it is quite hard to piece together Neve's life, house moves and relationships, but that it also doesn't really matter.

Towards the novel's end Neve reflects on how she is repeating her parent's mistakes:

I thought of my mother on the move. The energy for each flight, as for all her lashing out, surely generated by the cowering cringe she lived in. Was I like that? Would I be? I'd hardly been unprone to impulsive moves. Dashes. Surges. The impetus seemed different, but perhaps it amounted to a similar insufficiency.

My father's sprees were both a reaction to and the cause of his confinement. It was his debts which meant he could t move from that house, even when the stairs got to be a daily torture. Was I too stupid - I couldn't be - to take a lesson from that? Could I trust myself? Not to make my life a lair.

Overall - a real discovery for me from the Bailey's shortlist, the book I wish had won, and an author who I will revisit.

Two helpful interviews with the author:

http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchive...

http://tankmagazine.com/issue-71/talk...

[Eric Anderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s not often that I loathe a novel. Even if I don’t jell with a book I’ll most often quietly put it aside thinking someone else might get something out of it. But reading Gwendoline Riley’s novel “First Love” made me angry. You may think this strong emotional reaction would mean it’s worth seeking it out for yourself. You’re by all means free to do so, but I think you’d be wasting your time because I don’t think this novel has anything to say. The reason it stirs such malice within me is because I think it’s a terrible missed opportunity. It portrays the life of a writer named Neve, her marriage to an older man Edwyn, the difficult people on the fringes of their lives and their vicious arguments. The central concern of this book is: why are the people we love horrible to us sometimes? It’s an aching concern that almost all of us will experience to varying degrees throughout our lives. But this novel offers no answers. It is instead a claustrophobic tedious story which purposely withholds letting you know the central characters, but still flaunts all the violent machinations of their egos leaving the reader feeling like they’ve been emotionally vomited over.

Read my full review of First Love by Gwendoline Riley on LonesomeReader

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental writing, "First Love" is a rather short novel that will nevertheless haunt its reader long after closing the book. The story is told from the perspective of 35-year-old Neve who examines her relationship to the three most important men in her life as well as to her mother:

- There's her choleric and (physically as well as emotionally) abusive father who has always indulged in playing self-righteous power games;

- Then there's Michael, an indecisive, manipulative musician whose will to please rivals that of a Labrador (or doesn't it?) - Neve has an affair with him that involves lots and lots of booze;

- And of course there's Neve's husband, Edwyn, who declares he wants to marry the unemeployed writer in order to "take care" of her - and then panicks that he might not live up to his own idea of him being "a provider";

- Lastly there is Neve's needy mother who seems to go to some lengths to not confront her shortcomings - will Neve end up like her?

These are just outlines that barely scratch the surface of this text that puts the complex psychological patterns and dynamics, pathologies and (co-)dependencies between its characters at its narrative centre. All of the relationships Neve discusses do of course also reflect and influence her own behaviour and her self-image.

Neve herself is an unreliable narrator, but not only in the sense that she might intentionally leave out parts that would shed a bad light on her in the eyes of the reader (she also includes some episodes that obviously make her look bad), she also reflects distortions of her own memory, things she might have forgotten or pushed to the back of her mind in order to be able to create a self-image that is more agreeable or bearable for her.

So with all these gaps and ambivalences, what is really going on here? The core strength of the text is that the interpretation will differ depending on the background and experiences of the reader - this turns the book into a work of art that also prompts discussion. Don't get me wrong: There is no question that Riley portrays physical and emotional abuse, this becomes absolutely clear, but the individual motivations and actions as well as the dynamics between the characters are highly complex. Again: Riley does not excuse or explain away violence, but she cuts paths into discussing it.

What remains quite unclear to me is whether this really qualifies as experimental fiction - Riley does certainly not choose a "classic" narrative format, but it also isn't very extravagant, so I would be surprised if this won the Goldsmiths (I am rooting for H(A)PPY, btw).

Although this is a dire, challenging text, I highly enjoyed reading it, because it is so well done. Thanks to the people at "The Mookse & the Gripes" forum for bringing this book to my attention, and to Tim & Julia who were so kind to lent this book to me (and to mail it through half the country! :-)).

[Peter Boyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a happy book. If you're in the mood for sunshine and rainbows I suggest looking elsewhere. In her Baileys Prize shortlisted novel, Gwendoline Riley examines the tangle of toxic relationships and the reasons why people remain in them.

Neve, a writer in her thirties, lives in London with her husband Edwyn, an older man. The marriage is not going well and they row constantly. Edwyn suffers from various physical ailments including a heart condition. He supports Neve financially and seems to resent her massively for this. The story also covers Neve's sour relationship with her father and her mother's efforts to move on after leaving him.

The men in this book are monsters, without exception. Edwyn is almost cartoonishly evil: callous, completely unreasonable, self-absorbed. Why Neve has attached herself to this creep is beyond me. Is it because she's tired of being alone, or is it an act of self-sabotage? She seems deeply influenced by the lack of affection from her cruel father - maybe this is the only kind of love she knows. Edwyn certainly thinks so: "That’s the only relationship you understand. A man being horrible to you and you being vicious back."

On the evidence presented, there is very little love in their marriage. Even Edwyn's rare endearments toward Neve contain an undercurrent of malice: "little cabbage", little compost heap." She vomits in their flat after a heavy night out and he continually uses it as a stick to beat her with, calling her "sewer scum" among other things. Surely singledom would be more agreeable than this kind of abuse? Perhaps Neve has never known real love and doesn't realise what she's missing out on. Michael, a previous boyfriend, also treated her like dirt but she couldn't stop herself from crawling back to him.

I don't really understand what this novel is trying to be. One review describes it as "a hilarious send-up of chick lit." The book's title definitely fits in with this theory, but the story is far from hilarious. Disturbing, tragic, brutal - these are more like the adjectives I would use. There must have been at least some happy moments between Neve and Edwyn for their marriage to exist, but we aren't shown anywhere near enough of them. I needed to see more of these to believe that she would be attracted to such a man in the first place. Gwendoline Riley's writing is sharp and she certainly has an eye for the darker side of relationships. But this novel is too unbalanced for me to fully recommend it.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a one-sitting read but I'm puzzling over contents vs. blurb. The husband seems to have mental issues and is abusive and I would not describe that as a couple who is "ill-suited." Told in fragments of different relationships in the woman's life. On the shortlist for the Bailey's Prize.

[Bee · Rating 1 out of 5]

oooo no. If this is love I want no part in it. no ma'am.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up. Although also nominated for the Bailey's Prize, I didn't become aware of this till it was also nominated for the Goldsmiths. A quick, involving read, it is also for the most part, rather unpleasant, in its depiction of an abusive, dysfunctional marriage. Not quite sure what makes this Goldsmiths material, as it doesn't seem particularly innovative, nor advance the possibilities for the novel format, but I did get a lot out of it, and was fascinated how - if I am reading this correctly - we somewhat come to the point where Edwyn's despicable behavior seems to be almost justified by a late-blooming realization that much of what he says about Neve's needs and psychology ring true (or perhaps that it is at least more symbiotic than at first supposed). And though it also reads like thinly veiled autobiography (Neve, like Riley is a young author), I'm hoping for the author's sake it isn't!

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now shortlisted for the Goldsmith to match its earlier shortlisting by the Bailey's prize - I have now re-read the book, but have little to add to my original review.

I thought of my mother, on the move. The energy for each flight, as for all of her lashing out, surely generated by the cowering cringe she lived in. Was I like that? Would I be? I’d hardly been unprone to impulsive moves. Dashes. Surges. The impetus seemed different, but perhaps it amounted to a similar insufficiency.

My father’s sprees were both a reaction to and the cause of his confinement. It was his debts which meant he couldn’t move from that house, even when the stairs got to be a daily torture. Was I too stupid – I couldn’t be – to take a lesson from that? Could I trust myself? Not to make my life a lair?

Too often that wretchedness came into me. A torpor. A trance. . And any idea I could do something about it was lost. It’s hard to account for …. but I just felt I had to abide .. Suffer

Neve, the first party narrator, is a writer and teacher, married to an older man Edwyn who subjects her to mental abuse by his passive-aggressive behaviour, and psychological dissections of her behaviour (he continually brings up an episode when she became very drunk after a part) and character (claiming that her attitude towards him is caused by her reaction to her father). She also reflects on her bullying father, his physical abuse of her mother and mental abuse of others, her own itinerant past including a previous relationship with an American musician characterised by verbal rows and her mother’s own desperate neediness.

Overall a fragmentary novella which does however give a striking view of dysfunctional relationships, the helplessness of those trapped within them (both abuser and abused). The prose itself can feel sparse but is simultaneously powerful and insightful, conveying the different ways in which relationships can descend into toxicity.

A modern take perhaps on Tolstoy Leo’s famous quote “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the second novel by Gwendoline Riley that I've read, after My Phantoms, and I went back to read my review of that one (because I'd forgotten the details) and realized that that review could basically serve as a review for this one.

Riley writes dysfunction. It's done here mostly in dialogue, between the first person narrator Neve and her verbally abusive father, Neve and her delusional mother, Neve and her even more verbally abusive husband.

The conversations with father and mother served well to portray their characters (though oddly not Neve's). The conversations with husband portray him as well. He's older, sick, obsessive, controlling, disparaging, abusive. Neve, who used to drink a lot, quit drinking except for one night during her marriage when she got extremely sick and blacked out. Her husband had to clean up the vomit and now brings it up in threatening tones, over and over and over. It's raised inexorably in every chat they have. It got tiresome. And I had to wonder why she would marry someone so horrible and irremediable. I wondered too at the title. Was this Neve's first love?

It didn't take long to read.

[Eylül Görmüş · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beni çok fena vurdu bu kitap, beklemediğim şekilde hem de. İngiliz yazar Gwendoline Riley'nin minik romanı İlk Aşk'a başlarken bu kadar derinlikli iç görülerle karşılaşacağımı hiç düşünmemiştim açıkçası, şaşkınım, çok.

Zorba bir baba ile son derece bencil bir annenin mutsuz evliliğine doğmuş bir genç kadın olan Neve'in hikayesini dinliyoruz kendisinden. Kendisinden yaşça büyük bir adam olan Edwyn ile evleniyor, başta ziyadesiyle sevgi dolu gözüken bir ilişki bu ancak eskidikçe can acıtan bir hale bürünüyor, toksikleşiyor.

Yazar epeyce parçalı bir şekilde anlatıyor öyküsünü, anlatıcımız Neve'in çocukluğuyla bugünü arasında salınıp duruyoruz. Neve'in kocası Edwyn, günümüzde gaslighting diye adını koyduğumuz şeyin büyük bir üstadı. Kendi özgüvensizliklerini, yaralarını, korkularını öğütüp öfke ve zehir olarak Neve'in üstüne kusmakta son derece mahir. Neve ise hiçbir zaman doğru şekilde sevilmeyi öğrenemediği için buradaki yanlışlığı görmekte çok zorlanıyor.

Söylemeden edemeyeceğim: bu nasıl bir diyalog yazmaktır ya? Müthiş. Neve'in annesi ve kocasıyla diyalogları o kadar, o kadar iyi yazılmış ki, okurken bazen gerçekçiliklerinden ötürü tüylerim diken diken oldu. Ve tabii gerçekçilik: bence kitabı ürkütücü biçimde güzel yapan şey bu zaten. Kendiniz bu denli toksik bir ilişki içinde bulunmadıysanız bile kimi diyalogların, kimi tepkilerin size çok tanıdık geleceğine eminim. Ya çevrenizdeki ilişkilerde gözlemlemişsinizdir ya da kendi ilişkilerinizde düşük dozlu biçimde benzerlerine maruz kalmışsınızdır diye düşünüyorum. Ha bu kitapta anlatılanlar size aşırı tuhaf ve yabancı geliyorsa çok şanslısınız, ne diyeyim.

Biraz baktığımda bu kitabı sevmeyenin de çok olduğunu gördüm ama ben çok, çok sevdim. Kısacık cümleleri ve son derece yalın anlatımıyla müthiş bir düşünce malzemesi sunduğunu düşünüyorum ilişkilere dair. Aşk sandığımız şeylere, çaresizliğe, zayıflığın düşmanlığa dönüşebilme hızına, şefkatin biçimine dair - bir sürü şey. Belki bir gün kitap kulübünde konuşuruz hatta, o kadar zengin olduğunu düşünüyorum bu metnin; açmak, soymak lazım kendisini.

Begüm Kovulmaz'ın çevirisi de ayrıca çok çok iyi, onu da ekleyip bitireyim.

[Yaprak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gwendoline Riley'nin daha önce Hayaletlerim romanını okumuş, sevmiştim. Sorunlu ilişkileri işlemeyi sevdiğini düşündüğüm Riley'nin İlk Aşk romanına başlarken bu kadar sert bir şeyle karşılacağımı tahmin etmiyordum açıkçası.

Anlatıcımız Neve otuzlarında bir yazar. Kendisinden yaşça büyük korkunç manipülatif, toksik biri olan Edwyn ile evli. Bu incecik kitabı okurken inanılmaz zorlanmamın nedeni Edwyn karakteri oldu. Kadın düşmanı, gaslighting uzmanı bu rezil adam çoğu kadının hayatında bir kez karşısına çıkan o tanıdık bildik karakterlerden. Ben şanslı azınlıktanım, hiç böyle birine denk gelmedim. Ama Riley karakteri öyle gerçekçi yaratmış, diyalogları öylesine ustalıkla kaleme almış ki onun karşısına böyle birinin çıktığını düşünüyorum. Neve'in hayatındaki toksik tek erkek Edwyn de değil işin kötüsü. Babası da rezalet birisi. Annesi de keza oldukça bencil ve sorunlu bir figür.

Gwendoline Riley'in romanlarının kendi hayatından bir şeyler barındırdığını düşünmeden edemiyorum. Toksik aile bireylerini oldukça gerçekçi ve objektif bir şekilde kaleme alıyor. Ya iyi bir gözlemci ya da kendi deneyimlerinin izleri var satırlarında.

Neve'e kocaman sarılmak, her şey daha iyi olacak demek ve onu korkunç kocasından ayırmak istedim. Sert, gerçekçi ve oldukça iyi bir metin bu. Dilerim kadınlar yalnız olmamak adına korkunç erkekleri hayatlarına almaz, aldıklarını fark ettikleri ilk anda kurtulmayı başarırlar.

[Antoinette · Rating 3 out of 5]

" Considering one's life requires a horribly delicate determination, doesn't it? To get to the truth, to the heart of the trouble. You wake and your dreams disband, in a mid-brain void. At the sink, in the street, other shadows crowd in: dim thugs (they are everywhere) who'd like you never to work anything out"
A toxic marriage- Neve, our main character is thinking back to what led her to this marriage. Her childhood memories are of a father she loathed and was frightened of; her mother, a self involved woman whose main focus was always herself; her relationships and friendships over the years, including a musician who was in and out of her life.
What I liked about this novel was the spot on dialogue; I really liked how well emotional abuse was described, with all its subtleties; I loved the scenes with her mother, who I thought was hilarious.
What I didn't like was the flitting back and forth- it was disorienting. I also didn't like how the author threw in these obscure words that did not add anything. Just annoyed me actually. Example of words: fuliginous, proscenium.
First Love- I think there should be a comma after first- so not First Love, but First, Love. So consider love and all that it means and ask yourself, is this love after all? It would make for an interesting discussion, but this book will definitely not appeal to everyone.

[Emmeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, quietly experimental depiction of an abusive relationship that is strong on voice but for me, ultimately a little disappointing (perhaps just because I enjoyed the earlier bits so much).

This was my second Gwendoline Riley in a month, after My Phantoms. Not something I planned, but they are deceptively short and compelling, easy to slide into, and then you’ve read half and might as well continue. Still, reading them close together, I was struck by just how similar they are: the mumbling protagonist who leaves silences where words should be, the despicable father, the garrulous but maddening mother, the deep strains of disappointment, upset, annihilated self-esteem. This differed from My Phantoms only in the protagonist’s job (novelist rather than academic) and the focus on her relationship with her husband Edwyn (which is verbally and occasionally physically abusive).

The relationship bits were the best (maybe because it was new material). Pages of unwinnable arguments, watching the situation go south, heart-sinking stuff. And the book’s structure really played a role in making the most of the material – it isn’t linear but jumps around in time, dropping out of the relationship to dive into the past, perhaps providing explanations, and then diving into what might be the future. The narrative shifts are slippery; I felt like I should keep a timeline, and that doing so might lead to an epiphany of what went wrong and why. This feeling of anxiety it provoked in me, of needing to figure it out, echoed the narrator’s own need to understand what, ultimately, anyone can understand at a glance: that it’s just a terrible relationship. The jumps also kept me guessing as to who the First Love of the title was. Is it the narrator’s father? An early lover who rejected her? This disastrous starter-marriage?

Really my only complaint is that Riley is a bit of a “trails off” sort of writer. She isn’t given to what might be called a final scene, a reckoning, an epiphany or a denouement (or well, maybe you get the denouement without the climax). This is an artistic choice, and I’m not saying it’s the wrong one. But reading it in tandem with Mavis Gallant I kept thinking that Gallant would do something surprising even with a lack of drama at the ending, and Riley never quite elevates it to that level of sparkle.

“Not as sparkly as Mavis Gallant” isn’t much of a criticism though. Riley is a clever writer with her own clear style. Just… not 100% for me.

[Jennifer (Insert Lit Pun) · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a strange, depressing little book. My thoughts are scrambled on this one. I can't tell if it's the kind of book that becomes brilliant on a second reading, or if it tricks readers into thinking it's saying something profound just by being so sparse. Its messages are relentlessly peripheral. But I thought the dialogue was great, and I also appreciated how much of a departure this was from the books I usually read. So pick it up if you're curious about it, and if you're not, skip it - it'll probably just frustrate you.

[Ashley Stokes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first novel by Gwendoline Riley I've read. It's a short book, more a novella, and in some ways it seems unfinished, which I'm sure is intentional and in some ways quite a successful narrative ploy. There's no story arc or real plot to First Love; it merely asks a number of 'whys?' of the reader. This maybe the point for some and the problem for others.

Neve is a writer in her mid-thirties. For fifteen or so years she's lived in a kind of limbo many writers will be familiar with: penury; dour accommodation; frequent changes of address or city; a tendency to attract difficult or fleeting partners; heavy drinking that often shames her. She's attained some stability and focus by marrying Edwyn, an older man who seems to do something in the arts. The problem is that Edwin is a monster: verbally aggressive, passive-aggressive, anal, joyless, unforgiving, unloving in both the physical and emotional sense; judgmental and bullying (he reminded me of Jimmy Porter but he's proper social snob, too, and has a morbid obsession with filth and bodily fluids that he often directs at Neve). We go over and over other key relationships in Neve's life that shed some light on how she entered this second Limbo, particularly her obnoxious father and irritating mother. In this second Edwyn Limbo, Neve can't seem to find a resolution to the problem he poses. Any strategy Neve takes only makes matters worse. Should she stay or should she go? is not the running base-line. She thinks more about managing Edwyn than leaving him throughout.

Riley writes snappishly beautiful and melancholy-tinged prose, summons a brooding mood always, describes weather and cities with photographic precision, and her dialogue is terrific and frequently very funny. This is a curiously structured narrative, too, and it does amount to a brutal and vivid portrait of a mesalliance.

The problem, ultimately, is that we don't believe that Edwyn deserves anything other than to be left to stew in his own boorish juice. Riley omits any account of how they met, why they married or how Neve saw Edwyn initially or before they cohabited. When Neve describes Edwyn (to him) as 'my nice Edwyn' we have nothing to gauge this by. We only see Edwyn as ill and needy, or a massive arse, and we know that Neve isn't trying to provoke or belittle him as we're eavesdropping on her thoughts. He's introduced as a bully very early in the novel. We don't see this relationship gradually unravel. Scenes of discord are not mirrored by gentler scenes. Though we don't disbelieve that someone might end up in this situation, and although we know that the heart wants what the heart wants, and we know that Neve does want love from Edwyn, not just protection or money, it's hard to really feel for Neve.

There is a possibility that a third act is implied by the ending, though only by a suggestive last line. What we might want to feel comforted by might be coming, and maybe in life that's all we can really expect. Maybe the novel is unflinching, honest, where it could veer towards the neat and sentimental, and that's refreshing in the end. However, overall, that Edwyn is a monolith and develops in no way throughout the story makes this a novel I admired more than liked. Maybe I can cope with feeling sorry for Neve - and I do - but not with pitying her.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

In First Love we follow Neve, a writer, across Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow to live in London with Edwyn. He, Edwyn, is crippled by anxiety and pain in his limbs. Neve and Edwyn marry. As the novel progresses Neve tells us about her past: an abusive and controlling father, whom she dreads visiting on weekends. Her self-involved mother who has just left her second abusive husband. Her brief romantic relationship with a selfish musician she saw no more than once or twice a year. Neve is nothing but a product of their needs.

The main focus of First Love is on the marriage between Neve and Edwyn. He is emotionally abusive towards her. In fits of rage he twists every argument of hers to his favour while hammering his fist on the table during their evening meals together. He constantly belittles her. He hates women, whom he views as unclean and controlling. He accuses her of being selfish and not caring enough about him. During their arguments, Edwyn frequently brings up a story where Neve got drunk with her friends. When she woke unable to remember the night before, he accuses her of throwing up in every room of the flat which he then had to clean up all night. Edwyn uses the story again and again – even two years after it supposedly happened – to establish his control and to shame her. His memory seems exaggerated to Neve, yet she drowns in his anger. He accuses her of forcing him into the role of abuser, claiming: “That’s the only relationship you understand. A man being horrible to you and you being vicious back.”

The restrained narrative voice contrasts with the violent and merciless tone of his abuse. The dialogue – a true masterclass in my view – is honest and raw, while the narration is searching and fluid. And also in a story-telling sense, the tender and beautiful moments of love between Neve and Edwyn contrast with the brutal side of emotional abuse when Edwyn is triggered.

Ultimately Neve begins to stand up and express herself, pushing Edwyn back. The novel does not end with her leaving. Neve has no one to turn to, and is afraid to end up like her mother. Yet, perhaps it ends with hope of a better future.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This slender novel is notable for the author’s striking portrayals of the many unhealthy relationships in protagonist Neve’s life, starting with her brutal alcoholic father and maddening self-absorbed mother. I think my skin may actually have crawled at the depiction of her marriage, in which her husband hisses the most hateful, vicious things at her whenever something sets him off—and it doesn’t take much. Shudder.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize

Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction Longlisted novel 4/16

I have to admit that books about domestic violence intrigue me, obviously I am totally against domestic violence but what puzzles me is the psychology of the abused and the abuser. At first I used to think that books about domestic abuse - Emma Donoghue's Room and Roddy Doyle's , The Woman who Walked into Doors, just to name two examples were grotesque exaggerations but as my social worker sister has told me, abusers do have larger than life characteristics, mainly to compensate for the limited emotional range that they have.

Which brings us to First Love.

This short novel is about domestic abuse. Neve is a victim and throughout the book we discover that her mother was a victim as well. Despite my simplistic explanation, First Love deals with the intricacies of the abused and the abuser. Neve's is psychologically bullied by her husband and yet she still stays with him AND is angry at her mother for not leaving her abusive father sooner. This just one aspect that Riley tackles. Other issues involve the internal conflict of the abused, the psychological roots of the abuser and the warning signs.

That is a lot for a novel that just under 170 pages. Not only that but the book is told in bits and pieces so the reader gets a sort of complete picture towards the end plus the narrative is dialogue heavy and at times it's just a little bit difficult to follow a conversation but the story will definitely provoke the mind long after it is finished. Despite the deceivingly scrappy plot, First Love is a satisfying read.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considering one's life requires a horribly delicate determination, doesn't it? To get to the truth, to the heart of the trouble. You wake and your dreams disband, in a mid-brain void. At the sink, in the street, other shadows crowd in: dim thugs (they are everywhere) who'd like you never to work anything out.

Author Gwendoline Riley conjures some neat tricks in the Bailey's Prize nominated First Love: When we first meet our narrator Neve (a thirty-something, not-quite-successful novelist), she seems trapped in a suffocating relationship with her older husband, Edwyn – a peevish and needy man she may or may not stay with for the financial security – and I had to wonder at what forces keep this couple together; squirmed as Edwyn bullied and twisted Neve's words to use against her. But as the book progressed, Riley's deftly shifting timeline poses and then solves the small mysteries of such relationships in a series of satisfying clicks. I loved Neve's nearly clinical voice – as though the in-story novelist is creating character sketches as she tries to sort out her life – and while there isn't a traditional three act story arc, the action seems to happen in reverse: as though, here we are and this is how we got here. Everything about Riley's voice and technique worked for me (the dialogue is particularly natural and engaging), and while the overall effect wasn't as obvious as these extensive quotes might seem to demonstrate (it doesn't hit you over the head with, “Neve has Daddy issues so she married a controlling older man”), the keys to unlocking a life are all here. What else is fiction for? Spoilers ahead.

Ah, Edwyn. With his constant accusations and his disgust at being kissed on the mouth, you have to wonder why he stays with Neve; what could possibly be in it for him?

He'd wonder, haltingly, amazedly, at how he'd boxed himself in (ending up with me in his life, he meant), and when he did address me, it was abstractly, with strange conjectures, ruminations, about what I thought, who I was. “I know you hate anyone who didn't grow up on benefits,” he'd say, and if I objected, he'd take no notice, or didn't notice, he only continued, talking over me with mounting scorn: “I know you loathe anyone who didn't grow up in filth, on benefits.” I used to leave my body, in a way, while this went on. It was so incessant, his phrases so concatenated: there was no way in. These were thick, curtain walls. Edwyn has said since that he feels it's me trying to annihilate him. Strange business, isn't it?

And Neve: she seems intelligent and attractive; why does she debase herself in order to stay?

It continued to be frightening, panic-making, to hear the low pleading sounds I'd started making, whenever he was sharp with me. This wasn't how I spoke. (Except it was.) This wasn't me, this crawling, cautious creature. (Except it was.) I defaulted to it very easily. And he let me. Why? I wonder how much he even noticed, hopped up as he was. No, I don't believe he did notice. That was the lesson, I think. That none of this was personal.

We learn that Neve's father was physically abusive to her mother, and eventually, she escaped with the kids – yet, in order to keep some kind of peace, Neve and her brother were sent to him for weekend visits. While the father may not have been physical with his children, he did engage in a kind of passive-aggressive abuse with them:

It was his whetted look, I found, that I remembered most vividly. His stout expectation. How had that endured: life, knocks? But it had. He was “Just a big kid, really,” Christine said. Well, quite. Somehow he was. A greedy child. A tyrant child. And for fifteen years, every Saturday, my brother and I were laid on service to him. To listen to him. To be frightened by him, should he feel like it. As a child with his toys, he exercised a capricious rule, and as with any little imperator, his rage was hellish when his schemes were not reverenced. One wrong word unlatched a sort of chaos. The look in his eyes then! Licensed hatred. The keenest hunger.

And Neve's mother: eventually married to another uncaring man (an artist who belittles her opinions), Neve doesn't seem to recognise herself in her mother's pitiable life:

My mother wasn't quite sitting with them, though, but on a low stool a few feet behind Rodger. She wore a familiar expression: too eager, half-sly, while no one spoke to her, or looked at her. She held her empty half-pint glass up by her chin, and grinned hopelessly...It must be a dreadful cross: this hot desire to join in with people who don't want you. The need to burrow in.

So while it seems like you can draw a straight line between Neve's family influences and the life that she eventually lives, later information is revealed that refocusses what we've learned: just why does Neve stay with a man who accuses her of “filthiness”?

Was anybody clean back then? When I think of my friends' houses, they weren't any less filled with shit. Here were cold, cluttered bedrooms, greased sheets. The kitchens were a horror show: ceilings bejewelled with pus-coloured animal fat, washing-up sitting in water which was spangled like phlegm. Our neighbour's house, where we went after school, was an airlocked chamber smelling of bins that hadn't been put out. There was a long skid-mark, I remember, on one of the towels in their bathroom. It was there for three years. So – I did grow up in shit. It was no slander. Shit, filth, stupidity, dishonesty. (Mother looking up slyly from a crying jag.)

And why is Edwyn – literally disgusted by his wife and refusing to be her “carer” – sticking around? Turns out he has some family issues of his own:

Old ladies do just stop bothering, I'm afraid. No husband anymore, no kids, they just decide to live in filth. Stop cleaning the house, stop keeping themselves clean. Or feeding themselves properly. My mother was the same. She'd just eat white bread and jam, unless I went round and cooked for her. So she held that over me. And she started drinking, of course. She could get out to go to the pub all right, with her mad neighbour. Christ, I hated him. Always appearing over the fence. I mean, she made me hate her, really. She made me despise her. Isn't that dreadful? What did she want, really? A bit of attention.

First Love ends on a pleasant domestic scene – just an ordinary couple walking together through the park on the way to work – and it makes you realise that while Neve is concentrating on the negatives in her ruminations (and they are terrible negatives), there must have been many such pleasant scenes along the way (it is notable that nothing is said of Edwyn and Neve's early courtship days; they must have canoodled at some point) and it all just clicks together. Much heftier than its brevity might suggest, I loved what Riley created here.

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

First Love, by Gwendoline Riley, introduces the reader to Neve, a writer in her thirties married to the older Edwyn who is preoccupied with his health following a myocardial infarction suffered before they met. Written in the first person the narrative explores Neve’s life and varied relationships with razor sharp insight. This is a story of the inherent need humans have to interact with others, and the hurt this creates.

“People we’ve loved, or tried to: how to characterize the forms they assume?”

As soon as she was able Neve distanced herself from her parents who divorced when she was a child. She found them both demanding and needy, forever trying to find in her something she was not. Through her alcohol fuelled twenties she sought love and acceptance from friends and sexual partners, yet spent much of her time alone. Occasionally she glimpsed the way she was seen by others but could only ever be herself however much she attempted to act out their visions of her.

“You are the girl that never came true.”

Close relationships burned themselves out as time passed yet were often difficult to relinquish. In moments of weakness Neve would attempt to get back in touch, despising herself when she realised what she had done and how insecure she appeared. She longed to be strong, to be satisfied when alone, yet still sought something indefinable in others.

“It is strange what we expect from people, isn’t it? Deep inside ourselves.”

After years spent living in an acquaintance’s spare room or in tiny rented spaces she was offered a grant that took her to France. Here she had time to reflect before returning to her life which continued much as before.

“being abroad, at least, being out of it somehow, I found it was possible to feel less implicated. Less accounted for.”

Neve’s mother appears to be the antithesis of her daughter with her constant socialising and desperation for support. From time to time she seeks solace in her daughter. Their rare visits, although accepted, leave Neve eager to reinstate distance.

Apparently born of love, Neve’s marriage is not always a happy one. Edwyn is controlling and unforgiving, introspective and quick to anger. He resents that he is not always the centre of Neve’s life yet often rebuffs the form of affection she tries to offer. He bullies her until she capitulates, demanding that she agree with his interpretation of her behaviour.

“sitting there with that bright, bland expression on my face, trying to fence with this nonsense. Or had I been that naive? Was this what life was like, really, and everyone knew it but me?”

The dialogues throughout are painful in their honesty bringing to the fore the thoughts many try to suppress in their attempts to convince themselves that relationships are balanced and healthy. Humans may be social animals but we each exist within the shadows and complexities of feelings that can only be fully known to ourselves.

This is beautiful writing, raw yet sublime. Recommended to any who wish to better understand the human condition.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Granta.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 3 out of 5]

First Love is Neves story. Neve is an uncomplicated girl who makes the best of what life serves up. However any real intimacy is in short supply. Instinctive hugs, or cuddles, don't come naturally between family, friends or lovers in First Love.

It's Edwyn, Neve's husband, who is this (too short) book's most memorable character study.

Vile, vain, verbally vicious, utterly self absorbed, but, alas, all too plausible. It's not unreasonable for the reader to conclude that Edwyn is a bully and emotional abuser. He's that, but also a pathetic, pitiful, weak man who is defined by abject self pity, fuelled by hypochondria.
It's an extreme portrayal, and Gwendoline Riley captures exactly the essence of a man too small to make anything of his life.

Poor Neve, a life lived alone is the worst form of existence. Better to co- habit even if emotional cruelty is ever present, perpetually about to ignite with a word, a look, or a silence.

Is there more to Gwendoline Riley?
A quick review of her body of work over the last fifteen years would seem to indicate that many of the themes in First Love are recurring ones.
For that reason I suspect it won't be sufficiently original to win this year's Bailey's Prize for Women.

[Irmak Zileli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Otuzlarında bir kadının ilişki içinde yaşadığı psikolojik şiddeti, kadının aile hikayesine de küçük değiniler eşliğinde anlatan bir roman. Buralarda fazla derinleşmiyor, geçmiş hikayeler metne düz bir anlatımla giriyor. Edebi beklentiyi yüksek tutmamak lazım. Ama akıcı mı? Akıcı. Çoksatarlarda gördüğümüz bir “yalınlık” var.
Öte yandan bu kitap ilişki içindeki şiddeti son derece gerçekçi resmediyor ve hatta deşifre ediyor. Pek çok insan bu halin içindeyken, o şiddete maruz kalırken manipülasyona uğrar ve gerçeklik algısını yitirir, kendini suçlar. Bu romanın sevdiğim tarafı şiddeti iki kişi arasında geçen diyalogları, failin akıl oyunlarını, psikolojik şiddet mekanizmalarını açık ederek vermesi. Çok benzer hikayeler, çok benzer konuşmalar, çok benzer suçlamalar.. ortada bir şiddet tekniği olmasa böyle aynı tornadan çıkmış gibi olmaz dedirtiyor. Kitabı bu yüzden öneriyorum. Hayatta kalanlara bir hatırlatma olsun, şu an böylesi bir şiddete maruz kalıp gerçekliği gasp edilenlere kuvvet versin diye.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are pet names, too. I’m ‘little smelly puss’ before a bath, and ‘little cleany puss’ in my towel on the landing after one; in my dungarees I’m ‘you little Herbert!’ and when I first wake up and breathe on him I’m his ‘little compost heap’ or ‘little cabbage’. Edwyn kisses me repeatingly, and with great emphasis, in the morning.

There have been other names, of course.

‘Just so you know,’ he told me last year, ‘I have no plans to spend my life with a shrew. Just so you know that. A fishwife shrew with a face like a fucking arsehole that’s had…green acid shoved up it.’

‘You can always just get out if you find me so contemptible,’ he went on, feet apart, fists clenched, glaring at me over on the settee. ‘You have to get behind the project, Neve, or get out.’

‘What?’

‘Get…behind…the project…or…get out!’

‘What’s “the project”?’

‘The project is not winding me up. The project is not trying to get in my head and make me feel like shit all the time!’

Neve is a thirty-something author married to Edwyn. The conversation quoted above is typical of their relationship and is our first warning, very early in the book, that Edwyn has some serious issues. The more we learn about Edwyn, the more we ask ourselves why a relatively normal, sane person like Neve would stay with him. And this is the question that drives the novel, because it causes Neve to look back over her life and examine the key relationships that have made her what she is. In particular, there is her father, her mother and her “first love” (a touring musician who is absent more than he is present, but influential).

Perhaps the strength of the book is that is leaves the readers to evaluate these relationships and decide for themselves where the fault line in the dysfunctional relationship lies.

There’s some confusion in the time line of the book, but I think that is deliberate and reflects Neve’s confusion about how her relationship with Edwyn ended up like it is.

This is a compelling look at a toxic relationship. It is not a happy book, but Riley manages to inject a humorous element into it on several occasions. For such a dark story, I was surprised at how often I laughed out loud.

‘Don’t be squalid, Mum. That was a beautiful work of art.’
She pulled a face now. An indignant face: mouth gaping. She put a hand to her chest. ‘Squalid, moi?’

Or

What followed was a struggle. There was nowhere he wasn’t, suddenly, and his efforts only drew strength from each refusal. It was like trying to deny an excited octopus.

I’m not 100% sure what it is that makes this a Goldsmiths book, but I am glad it is because it means I got to read it which I may not have done otherwise.

[jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

This started off as a three star read but in retrospect it really was just 'ok'. I didn't get anything out of this, and even though I only read it mere days ago, I'm struggling to remember quite how it left off.

I got the feeling I was meant to be feeling sorry for someone, but for the life of me I couldn't work out who. None of the characters were likeable for me. I've also heard it said more than once that Riley writes very natural dialogue. If she does usually, this wasn't such a good example in my opinion. I sometimes felt like her characters were more caricatures of who she wanted them to be. That being said, I guess it's hard to nuance a character and warm to them if you only get 200 pages to do so. At least, it wasn't possible in this one.

I don't want to sound like a victim blamer by any means, and abusive relationships are never ok, and are never the fault of the one being abused. But having said that, I just got annoyed at the protagonist with how she reacted to being spoken to so disgustingly. Which was, she kind of didn't react at all, she seemed blasé, nonchalant more than anything else. It just had me questioning her motives for being in this relationship. On the surface, I feel that the writer was pushing a quite obvious 'daddy issues' archetype onto the character, but it just felt too obvious, very forced.

I also quite struggled with the timeline, and in which point in Neve's life are we hearing her speak from. For instance when the novel first opens, I thought she was estranged from the abusive Edwyn, but then maybe it could of been a snapshot of her life before she met him, before she moved in with him... I honestly couldn't tell. Maybe I should go back and read certain parts but I shouldn't have been this confused with such a lack of active plot.

Didn't get the point of this one.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neve tells us about her testy marriage with Edwyn, a Jekyll and Hyde type who sometimes earns our sympathy for his health problems and other times seems like a verbally abusive misogynist. But she also tells us about her past: her excess drinking, her unpleasant father, her moves between various cities in the north of England and Scotland, a previous relationship that broke down, her mother’s failed marriages, and so on. There’s a lot of very good dialogue in this book – I was reminded of Conversations with Friends in places – and Neve’s needy mum is a great character, but I wasn’t sure what this all amounted to. As best I could make out, we are meant to question Neve’s self-destructive habits, with Edwyn being just the latest example of a poor, masochistic decision. And then every once in a while you get Riley waxing lyrical in a way that suggests she’s a really great author who got stuck with a grim, limited subject: “Outside the sunset abetted one last queer revival of light, so the outlook was torched; wet bus stop, wet shutters, all deep-dyed.”

Other favorite lines:

“An illusion of freedom: snap-twist getaways with no plans: nothing real. I’d gven my freedom away. Time and again. As if I had contempt for it. Or was it hopelessness I felt, that I was so negligent? Or did it hardly matter, in fact?”

“Could I trust myself? Not to make my life a lair.”

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really hoping to connect with this one as strongly as I did with My Phantoms, but I didn't find "First Love" to be as focused and well-crafted. That being said, "First Love" does contain a fraught mother-daughter relationship that seems very much like an early iteration of the one that is the primary focus in "My Phantoms," though it's only one of several dysfunctional relationships examined. Maybe I prefer concentrated bleakness over scattered bleakness? In any case, following the catastrophes that are Neve's relationships in "First Love" is so depressing that it turns comical (which I think isn't always the easiest thing to convey). The conversations between Neve and Edwyn take that same tone and route, a complete train wreck that you can't look away from. I can't say that I found the ending to be all that effective, but I'm still glad to have read this. 3.4 rounded down I think.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a slight book - elliptical in tone, structure and plot line. Despite its brevity, though, it has the emotional impact of a punch to the stomach. I found it a very discomfiting read, even as I admired the author's close observations and undeniable way with words.

The narrator is Neve -mid-30s, a writer - who is married to the much older Edwyn. Edwyn has already suffered from a mild heart attack and he struggles with pain, particularly in his hands; at one point, the narrator mentions that this pain will later be diagnosed as fibromyalgia. Physical and emotional pain go hand and hand in this book. The storyline dips in and out of Neve's past, sometimes alighting on other brief, dysfunctional relationships with men, but more often revealing moments with her divorced parents. Neve's father is portrayed as a 'greedy child, a tyrant child' who terrorises his wife and two children with his sudden rages and 'capricious rule'. He eats himself to death, walling himself up inside a shabby house filled with luxurious food. His rants are mysognistic, but more frightening because of the occasional sharp jabs of intelligence - or perhaps just cunning. His ex-wife is placating, alternating between a kind of dumb-show of being a submissive wife and passive-aggressive resistance. Finally, she just runs away - and then repeats the whole dynamic with another tyrranical husband. The astonishing thing about this book is how much Riley conveys with so little plot and virtually no 'explanation'. Gradually, the reader begins to realise how much the narrator's marriage resembles the dynamic of her parents' marriage - that first example of 'love' at work.

And yet the narrator is not unaware of her own emotional processes or behaviours. At one point, she makes a list for herself: guidelines for thinking and behaving. "This is your time and your energy. Don't try and 'manage' him. Be natural and let him be natural. That's what love it. No more cramped feelings on either side." She does realise how much energy she expends trying to 'manage' Edwyn - trying to keep him distracted and preoccupied, trying to keep him from entering the vortex of unreasonable anger. Their relationship - their arguments - really are like a lopsided ellipsis that circles round and round.

This ill-assorted pair are alike in one way: they share a loneliness that will sometimes be eased by moments of closeness. In a way, those moments of intimacy and affection are just as disturbing as their more typical dynamic of emotional bullying followed by an alternation of cowering, defiant and reasonable response. You will, of course, conclude that Riley describes an unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship; but the unsettling thing is that I couldn't help but feel that she had captured some pretty unpalatable truths, and I wonder how many readers will recognise something of themselves, of their own relationships, in her excorciating portrait of a marriage.

I saw Gwendoline Riley speak and read from this book at an evening to celebrate this year's Bailey's Prize short-list. There was an interesting discussion about her forensic eye, about her willingness to look closely and carefully at ugly things and then to describe them. I certainly found that to be true in this book.