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The Presence of Absence
“Flows with depth and power....wide-open wonder.”—Washington Post
“Simon Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable....wise, witty and always breathtakingly beautiful.”—San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of the Year
As a writer lies dying, he has one last story to a tale of faith and devotion, a meditation on what lies beyond this life, and a prayer of gratitude that may lead to rebirth. This is Simon Van Booy at his visionary best.
“Language is a map leading to a place not on the map,” announces a young writer lying in a hospital bed at the beginning of The Presence of Absence . As he contemplates his impending physical disappearance and the impact on his beloved wife, he realizes, “Life doesn’t start when you’re born . . . it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to another person.”
Infused with poetic clarity and graced with humor, Simon Van Booy’s innovative novella asks the reader to find beauty—even gratitude—in the cycle of birth and death. Stripped of artifice, The Presence of Absence is a meditation between the writer and the reader, an imaginative work that challenges the deceit of written words and explores our strongest emotions.
Simon Van Booy is not only a master storyteller but a writer whose fiction is rich with philosophical insights into things both mapped and undiscovered. The Presence of Absence parts the darkness to reveal what has been just out of sight all along.
“Simon Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable....wise, witty and always breathtakingly beautiful.”—San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of the Year
As a writer lies dying, he has one last story to a tale of faith and devotion, a meditation on what lies beyond this life, and a prayer of gratitude that may lead to rebirth. This is Simon Van Booy at his visionary best.
“Language is a map leading to a place not on the map,” announces a young writer lying in a hospital bed at the beginning of The Presence of Absence . As he contemplates his impending physical disappearance and the impact on his beloved wife, he realizes, “Life doesn’t start when you’re born . . . it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to another person.”
Infused with poetic clarity and graced with humor, Simon Van Booy’s innovative novella asks the reader to find beauty—even gratitude—in the cycle of birth and death. Stripped of artifice, The Presence of Absence is a meditation between the writer and the reader, an imaginative work that challenges the deceit of written words and explores our strongest emotions.
Simon Van Booy is not only a master storyteller but a writer whose fiction is rich with philosophical insights into things both mapped and undiscovered. The Presence of Absence parts the darkness to reveal what has been just out of sight all along.
121 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 1, 2022
71 people are currently reading
880 people want to read
About the author
Simon Van Booy
63 books1,107 followersSimon Van Booy is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than a dozen books for adults and children, including The Illusion of Separateness and The Presence of Absence. Simon is the editor of three volumes of philosophy and has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, and the BBC. His books have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. Raised in rural North Wales, he currently lives in New York where he is also a book editor and a volunteer E.M.T. crew chief.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
June 24, 2024
I picked this up to sample Van Booy for the first time, and I’m glad I did. He’s a gorgeous writer. This is a strange experiment where he merged his efforts with those of another writer, and that in itself was worth reading about in the intro. I recommend this gem that can be read in a day without giving up any basking in language. I look forward to reading him again soon. Thanks to Lisa for putting him on my radar :)
July 24, 2024
This author was not on my radar until I read a lovely review by Goodreads friend, Jennifer. I was intrigued and felt compelled to seek it out right away. I was delighted to discover that the audiobook was available for checkout from Hoopla, so I was able to begin listening immediately to The Presence of Absence narrated very ably by Philip Battley.
Simon Van Booy's writing is just gorgeous, so much so that it was hard to discern at first that this is a work of fiction, rather than biographical. He writes tenderly and with sensitivity. This story is about a man who discovers that he has a terminal illness and what follows is his look back over his life through new lenses of perspective and a sense of gratitude. I especially leaned in when he wrote about his relationship with his wife and I found myself pausing and re-listening to many phrases that caught my attention. Here are some examples:
"Stories lead us behind the curtain of somebody else's life into the deepest chambers of our own."
"I'm starting to wonder if all hate isn't just the unbearable pain of inexpressible love."
"My wife's hands were resting on the table then. I reached over and closed them. I had known those hands for so long, watched them wrinkle over time like sheets of delicate paper written on by life."
"These rituals of marriage that you learn to accept if you wish the relationship to thrive, I've since realized in extremis, are indicators of an uncommon intimacy."
"Later, twilight sharpens the sky. Breath is worn in veils."
"Laughter spreads like wings beating."
"Like the cups draining on a tea towel, absence has a practical value in how it shapes presence."
"Headlights fill each falling [rain]drop with gold."
"Trailing fragrance like loose ribbon."
"Maxine glances upward through branches of memory, all the way to imagination."
Simon Van Booy's writing is just gorgeous, so much so that it was hard to discern at first that this is a work of fiction, rather than biographical. He writes tenderly and with sensitivity. This story is about a man who discovers that he has a terminal illness and what follows is his look back over his life through new lenses of perspective and a sense of gratitude. I especially leaned in when he wrote about his relationship with his wife and I found myself pausing and re-listening to many phrases that caught my attention. Here are some examples:
"Stories lead us behind the curtain of somebody else's life into the deepest chambers of our own."
"I'm starting to wonder if all hate isn't just the unbearable pain of inexpressible love."
"My wife's hands were resting on the table then. I reached over and closed them. I had known those hands for so long, watched them wrinkle over time like sheets of delicate paper written on by life."
"These rituals of marriage that you learn to accept if you wish the relationship to thrive, I've since realized in extremis, are indicators of an uncommon intimacy."
"Later, twilight sharpens the sky. Breath is worn in veils."
"Laughter spreads like wings beating."
"Like the cups draining on a tea towel, absence has a practical value in how it shapes presence."
"Headlights fill each falling [rain]drop with gold."
"Trailing fragrance like loose ribbon."
"Maxine glances upward through branches of memory, all the way to imagination."
January 22, 2023
Max Little is dying and wants to leave behind something of his life. A young writer of novels, novellas, and short stories, Max grew up in Wales, is of Pakistani descent, and now reclines in a New York hospital bed, in full acceptance of his terminal illness.
Not wanting to beg the reader’s pity, Max does what he does best by writing, and begins his straightforward narrative by marveling at the magic between reader and writer: “You do realize that by turning the page you’ve decided to follow a complete stranger down a possibly meaningless path?” he says. “Stories lead us behind the curtain of somebody else’s life into the deepest chambers of our own.” Max considers that by the time the reader puts eyes to his words, he, himself, might be absent. “None of that matters,” he assures, “because our lives are braided here and now by this sentence.” Seemingly delighted to embellish his point, Max continues, “For instance, I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us. I might even be dead. Yet here I am.”
In Simon Van Booy’s extraordinary novel, The Presence of Absence, each well-wrought sentence builds upon the next, taking us deeper into Max Little’s life with staggering lucidity. The first part of the story is constructed in descending numerical chapters that decline with a sense of fatalism as the narrator reconstructs his life’s highpoints interspersed with uncanny, existential observations on the business of life, death, and dying. Max confesses his mind’s innerworkings with adroit ease. “Do people ever walk around their homes, wondering which room they will die in? Whether it will be a Wednesday night or Saturday morning at the table with toast and coffee?” And “What would happen to things like knives and forks once I was gone. Would my wife keep them?”
At the center of Max Little’s concern is his wife, Hadley, and the reader is taken to their first meeting even as Max shares his ruminations on how to best tell Hadley he is dying. Pondering his plight alone on a beach, he arrives at a profound spiritual truth, when he comes to consider himself in the third person. Max posits, “When you nurture the ability to witness your life in the third person, in extremis, or through prayer or meditation, there is an unavoidable shift in consciousness as you realize that who you are is not simply how you feel—but a presence beyond desire of any sort.”
Jeremy Abrams’s mother is dying. He comes into Max’s life through the coincidence of their shared New York therapist. The men bond over the similarities in their life circumstances, and as their friendship grows, it is Jeremy who suggests that Max begin keeping the journal the reader now holds in their hands. Max writes, “You might wonder what dying people look forward to. Being visited, yes, but also being left alone—though that takes a lot of practice, managing thoughts . . . I also look forward to reassuring people it’s okay this is happening.”
In The Presence of Absence, Part Two is theatrically introduced as a quick, black scene change. The section brilliantly holds the subheading, Sotto Voce. The third person story moves forward eight years in time, and fittingly alternates between breathtaking poetry, poignant one-liners, and what miraculously transpires from the connections formed in Max Little’s absence. An insight comes at the hands of one such connection, who stands at a sink washing cups in a basin and thinks, “Like the cups draining on a tea towel, absence has a practical value in how it shapes presence.”
A mind-bending, affecting story that breaks the heart open with startling clarity, this book makes the reader want to take pen in hand to underline The Presence of Absences’ passages. That author Simon Van Booy has taken a universal subject most prefer to shy away from and creatively crafted an accessible work of high art is an unparalleled literary feat. The deft use of language in this tour de force fulfills its own mission when Van Booy summarizes, “Language is a map leading to a place not on the map.”
Not wanting to beg the reader’s pity, Max does what he does best by writing, and begins his straightforward narrative by marveling at the magic between reader and writer: “You do realize that by turning the page you’ve decided to follow a complete stranger down a possibly meaningless path?” he says. “Stories lead us behind the curtain of somebody else’s life into the deepest chambers of our own.” Max considers that by the time the reader puts eyes to his words, he, himself, might be absent. “None of that matters,” he assures, “because our lives are braided here and now by this sentence.” Seemingly delighted to embellish his point, Max continues, “For instance, I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us. I might even be dead. Yet here I am.”
In Simon Van Booy’s extraordinary novel, The Presence of Absence, each well-wrought sentence builds upon the next, taking us deeper into Max Little’s life with staggering lucidity. The first part of the story is constructed in descending numerical chapters that decline with a sense of fatalism as the narrator reconstructs his life’s highpoints interspersed with uncanny, existential observations on the business of life, death, and dying. Max confesses his mind’s innerworkings with adroit ease. “Do people ever walk around their homes, wondering which room they will die in? Whether it will be a Wednesday night or Saturday morning at the table with toast and coffee?” And “What would happen to things like knives and forks once I was gone. Would my wife keep them?”
At the center of Max Little’s concern is his wife, Hadley, and the reader is taken to their first meeting even as Max shares his ruminations on how to best tell Hadley he is dying. Pondering his plight alone on a beach, he arrives at a profound spiritual truth, when he comes to consider himself in the third person. Max posits, “When you nurture the ability to witness your life in the third person, in extremis, or through prayer or meditation, there is an unavoidable shift in consciousness as you realize that who you are is not simply how you feel—but a presence beyond desire of any sort.”
Jeremy Abrams’s mother is dying. He comes into Max’s life through the coincidence of their shared New York therapist. The men bond over the similarities in their life circumstances, and as their friendship grows, it is Jeremy who suggests that Max begin keeping the journal the reader now holds in their hands. Max writes, “You might wonder what dying people look forward to. Being visited, yes, but also being left alone—though that takes a lot of practice, managing thoughts . . . I also look forward to reassuring people it’s okay this is happening.”
In The Presence of Absence, Part Two is theatrically introduced as a quick, black scene change. The section brilliantly holds the subheading, Sotto Voce. The third person story moves forward eight years in time, and fittingly alternates between breathtaking poetry, poignant one-liners, and what miraculously transpires from the connections formed in Max Little’s absence. An insight comes at the hands of one such connection, who stands at a sink washing cups in a basin and thinks, “Like the cups draining on a tea towel, absence has a practical value in how it shapes presence.”
A mind-bending, affecting story that breaks the heart open with startling clarity, this book makes the reader want to take pen in hand to underline The Presence of Absences’ passages. That author Simon Van Booy has taken a universal subject most prefer to shy away from and creatively crafted an accessible work of high art is an unparalleled literary feat. The deft use of language in this tour de force fulfills its own mission when Van Booy summarizes, “Language is a map leading to a place not on the map.”
November 22, 2022
Easily my favorite book of the year - no hyperbole intended. Booy is one of my favorite writers for his elegant, soft and emotional sentence structure and his latest captures the best parts of his writing style in a 160 page bottle.
December 29, 2022
What a book to read as I turn 50!
On request of the family, Van Booy constructs a collection of observations on dying, acceptance, and after-life, from random notes scribbled by a dying author from his hospice bed. It is very philosophical in a light-hearted and almost conversational way. The protagonist both connects to, and engages with, the reader for the duration of the time taken to read the book, knowing that he is deceased while the reader lives, yet both are in their ‘present’: “I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us.”
The protagonist wonders where the reader could be, on a train to Gare du Nord, in a hotel in Beijing, or elsewhere, and instructs the reader to look around and appreciate their surroundings. He observes how two worlds collide when reading: the physical world and the world of the book, showing how the body and mind can travel independently.
There are so many brilliant reflections: “Dying has given me the luxury of time by taking it away.” He captures the hypersensitive sensations humans can experience when faced with death or life-threatening events. “Traumatic events can make you a stranger in your own life” where all the ordinary, banal, and mindless things we do daily suddenly become epic and vital.
There is a brilliant section on memory and afterlife: “Since becoming ill, I have often felt sad that my physical death would be accompanied by the complete loss of memory. All the previous things I had experienced would cease to exist. To think, all those places and people who had brought me such deep joy, gone forever.” I agree with the protagonist that this is the beauty of life, its transiency. He explores how the concept of an afterlife assumes a retention of memory in some form. He explains how people seek confirmation of an after-life or reincarnation as “The idea of living again mitigates the fear of impending nothingness.” I wholly identified with his acceptance that life is to be lived while alive, as an afterlife is unlikely, or at least in a such an unrecognizable form that it bears no connection to its former life.
For a short story contrived from 'scrap' notes, the fullness of the protagonist’s life is distinct and his philosophical musings both bounteous and effective.
On request of the family, Van Booy constructs a collection of observations on dying, acceptance, and after-life, from random notes scribbled by a dying author from his hospice bed. It is very philosophical in a light-hearted and almost conversational way. The protagonist both connects to, and engages with, the reader for the duration of the time taken to read the book, knowing that he is deceased while the reader lives, yet both are in their ‘present’: “I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us.”
The protagonist wonders where the reader could be, on a train to Gare du Nord, in a hotel in Beijing, or elsewhere, and instructs the reader to look around and appreciate their surroundings. He observes how two worlds collide when reading: the physical world and the world of the book, showing how the body and mind can travel independently.
There are so many brilliant reflections: “Dying has given me the luxury of time by taking it away.” He captures the hypersensitive sensations humans can experience when faced with death or life-threatening events. “Traumatic events can make you a stranger in your own life” where all the ordinary, banal, and mindless things we do daily suddenly become epic and vital.
There is a brilliant section on memory and afterlife: “Since becoming ill, I have often felt sad that my physical death would be accompanied by the complete loss of memory. All the previous things I had experienced would cease to exist. To think, all those places and people who had brought me such deep joy, gone forever.” I agree with the protagonist that this is the beauty of life, its transiency. He explores how the concept of an afterlife assumes a retention of memory in some form. He explains how people seek confirmation of an after-life or reincarnation as “The idea of living again mitigates the fear of impending nothingness.” I wholly identified with his acceptance that life is to be lived while alive, as an afterlife is unlikely, or at least in a such an unrecognizable form that it bears no connection to its former life.
For a short story contrived from 'scrap' notes, the fullness of the protagonist’s life is distinct and his philosophical musings both bounteous and effective.
January 7, 2023
So infrequently is a book life-changing. This was just that. My husband and I both read this one back to back. This book gave each of us a new lease on love, life, and mortality. Simon van Booy’s writing style is concise and moving with no frills, which I feel made this book hit home even more. Looking forward to reading more of his work in the future.
December 10, 2022
My review for the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
https://www.startribune.com/review-th...
To call a writer prolific can be to damn them with faint praise, but Simon Van Booy is without a doubt prolific — prolific, though, in the positive sense of being marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity.
The author of 15 books, including 2021's "Night Came With Many Stars," two novels for children, and three anthologies of philosophy, Van Booy was raised in rural Wales and the Oxfordshire countryside, and currently lives in New York, where his latest book is set.
In "The Presence of Absence," his fifth novel for adults, the main character, Max Little, is also an author and also a prolific one, still relatively young, lying in a Manhattan hospital and dying of an incurable disease, realizing painfully that "everything I've written was child's play — actually, not as wise, because children know they're playing."
The book opens with a self-referential prologue in which Van Booy positions himself as the Little fan chosen by the dead writer's widow, Hadley, to help arrange for the posthumous publication of the "small journal of his last days" that was "too fragmented in its original form" to make sense on its own. Instead, says Van Booy's fictional version of himself, he, Hadley, and the late Little's publisher Sipsworth House decided that Van Booy would incorporate those fragments "into a novel that I would write and publish under my own name with an introduction explaining the circumstances of our collaboration."
Brief, formally playful, and fable-esque, the subsequent highly self-aware text is divided into two sections. The first, "In Vivo" takes these fragments from 27 — which opens, "Most readers expect some crisis in a story's first pages" — in reverse order down to 1, at which point the text disintegrates, just as the life of Little has been doing all along: "Wait / I hear something / voices / shuffling / jst byond the dorr // ggadfley vaREN // WES hal // HA ?? ha."
The second, "Ex Vivo," subtitled "Sotto Voce," pushes the ludic possibilities of words and syntax even further, experimenting with white space and the field of the page, as well as point of view.
This unusual and relentlessly self-reflexive approach allows Van Booy to tell not only the story of the doomed Little, but also to tell the bigger story of how stories are told — their inherently incomplete yet collaborative nature. As Little explains, "Through the act of reading this novel, it's actually you telling the story" because "when you see words, what's imagined comes from your experience of life, not mine."
In addition to referring to itself, Little's text also refers to such literary figures as Shakespeare and Ibsen, as well as such pop culture artifacts as "The A-Team" and "Knight Rider," as he reflects on both his literary career and his childhood.
If you don't just like reading, but reading about reading — how "words are communal yet bring material order through spiritual separation" — then this is the book for you.
https://www.startribune.com/review-th...
To call a writer prolific can be to damn them with faint praise, but Simon Van Booy is without a doubt prolific — prolific, though, in the positive sense of being marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity.
The author of 15 books, including 2021's "Night Came With Many Stars," two novels for children, and three anthologies of philosophy, Van Booy was raised in rural Wales and the Oxfordshire countryside, and currently lives in New York, where his latest book is set.
In "The Presence of Absence," his fifth novel for adults, the main character, Max Little, is also an author and also a prolific one, still relatively young, lying in a Manhattan hospital and dying of an incurable disease, realizing painfully that "everything I've written was child's play — actually, not as wise, because children know they're playing."
The book opens with a self-referential prologue in which Van Booy positions himself as the Little fan chosen by the dead writer's widow, Hadley, to help arrange for the posthumous publication of the "small journal of his last days" that was "too fragmented in its original form" to make sense on its own. Instead, says Van Booy's fictional version of himself, he, Hadley, and the late Little's publisher Sipsworth House decided that Van Booy would incorporate those fragments "into a novel that I would write and publish under my own name with an introduction explaining the circumstances of our collaboration."
Brief, formally playful, and fable-esque, the subsequent highly self-aware text is divided into two sections. The first, "In Vivo" takes these fragments from 27 — which opens, "Most readers expect some crisis in a story's first pages" — in reverse order down to 1, at which point the text disintegrates, just as the life of Little has been doing all along: "Wait / I hear something / voices / shuffling / jst byond the dorr // ggadfley vaREN // WES hal // HA ?? ha."
The second, "Ex Vivo," subtitled "Sotto Voce," pushes the ludic possibilities of words and syntax even further, experimenting with white space and the field of the page, as well as point of view.
This unusual and relentlessly self-reflexive approach allows Van Booy to tell not only the story of the doomed Little, but also to tell the bigger story of how stories are told — their inherently incomplete yet collaborative nature. As Little explains, "Through the act of reading this novel, it's actually you telling the story" because "when you see words, what's imagined comes from your experience of life, not mine."
In addition to referring to itself, Little's text also refers to such literary figures as Shakespeare and Ibsen, as well as such pop culture artifacts as "The A-Team" and "Knight Rider," as he reflects on both his literary career and his childhood.
If you don't just like reading, but reading about reading — how "words are communal yet bring material order through spiritual separation" — then this is the book for you.
January 20, 2023
Not so much a review but some reflections. It very well may read like a glorified journal entry, so feel free to skip.
“It was as though I had been a bystander, a voyeur who contributes ideas but who has no real hand in governance… Ironic how the fleeting nature of time compels us to act, yet is indifferent to our chronic inaction”
How much of my life will I spend being a stranger to myself? Moving through this world so passively, living out the fig tree analogy. The difference in the way people behave and feel when they are dying and when they don’t realize that they are always fascinates me. We are all dying, at different rates anyway.
I think about death often. If I die tomorrow, I will be alive still. This version of me at least, the one writing this in the present that will soon, in a matter of seconds, become the past. That person (myself) will live there, here.
I don’t know why I feel like I don’t know why I am here. I am not here for myself. That is something I have known for the majority of this short life I’ve - begrudgingly - lived so far.
“Life doesn’t start when you’re born- it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to a person […] it’s in the eyes. That’s where you can tell. And.. by how- long after they’ve disappeared from your life- you somehow go on. Loving them.”
Our life is perpetuated by connection. Sometimes, I think about my fear of connection being linked to the dread I feel towards living. “When one dies, it is the living that suffer.”
But, it is also the living that keep you alive. In the expiration of your body, you remain with those that have made a home for you in their memory. To those that love you, your absence will make itself known, making its presence known through various acts of remembrance. I think about how my mother is named after her late grandmothers, and how I am named after her. How I know about them, though I’ve never met them. They live in not being forgotten.
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that isolation is a side effect of depression or su*cidal ideation. Isolation is an injurious thing. After all, what is not being known if not just another form of not existing at all?
These reflections must read so bleak, i promise that this book is not that at all. It was beautiful and moving and what I didn’t know I needed until I made my way through it. It’s a book that I will think about often and recommend to anyone and everyone. It made me contemplate how I feel about mortality and grief, connection and intimacy. Maybe I have it all wrong and that wasn’t the takeaway the author intended, but that’s what I got from it. I gave up underlining as I read because i would have underlined the entire book. Simon Van Booy is poetic and thought-provoking. I have yet to identify the specific feeling that this book evoked in me, but I want to feel it again and again. I’m upset I won’t be able to read this book for the first time again.
“It was as though I had been a bystander, a voyeur who contributes ideas but who has no real hand in governance… Ironic how the fleeting nature of time compels us to act, yet is indifferent to our chronic inaction”
How much of my life will I spend being a stranger to myself? Moving through this world so passively, living out the fig tree analogy. The difference in the way people behave and feel when they are dying and when they don’t realize that they are always fascinates me. We are all dying, at different rates anyway.
I think about death often. If I die tomorrow, I will be alive still. This version of me at least, the one writing this in the present that will soon, in a matter of seconds, become the past. That person (myself) will live there, here.
I don’t know why I feel like I don’t know why I am here. I am not here for myself. That is something I have known for the majority of this short life I’ve - begrudgingly - lived so far.
“Life doesn’t start when you’re born- it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to a person […] it’s in the eyes. That’s where you can tell. And.. by how- long after they’ve disappeared from your life- you somehow go on. Loving them.”
Our life is perpetuated by connection. Sometimes, I think about my fear of connection being linked to the dread I feel towards living. “When one dies, it is the living that suffer.”
But, it is also the living that keep you alive. In the expiration of your body, you remain with those that have made a home for you in their memory. To those that love you, your absence will make itself known, making its presence known through various acts of remembrance. I think about how my mother is named after her late grandmothers, and how I am named after her. How I know about them, though I’ve never met them. They live in not being forgotten.
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that isolation is a side effect of depression or su*cidal ideation. Isolation is an injurious thing. After all, what is not being known if not just another form of not existing at all?
These reflections must read so bleak, i promise that this book is not that at all. It was beautiful and moving and what I didn’t know I needed until I made my way through it. It’s a book that I will think about often and recommend to anyone and everyone. It made me contemplate how I feel about mortality and grief, connection and intimacy. Maybe I have it all wrong and that wasn’t the takeaway the author intended, but that’s what I got from it. I gave up underlining as I read because i would have underlined the entire book. Simon Van Booy is poetic and thought-provoking. I have yet to identify the specific feeling that this book evoked in me, but I want to feel it again and again. I’m upset I won’t be able to read this book for the first time again.
December 3, 2024
The operative word here is evocative.
Merriam-Webster defines evocative as “evoking or tending to evoke an especially emotional response.”
Here, as in all his writing, Van Booy sets out to prompt each reader to instinctively create for themselves images, interpretations or recollections triggered by what they’re reading. That response—and therefore the entire experience of reading—is certain to be different in each reader; and yet, each response is valid, because writing and reading are the two components of a transaction, an exchange of ideas.
That is also why watching a film, after having first read the book the film was based on, is often disconcerting or disappointing; the scenes in the film reflect the film maker’s response to the book, and it’s likely to be quite different from each reader’s recollection of their response to what was written.
Simon Van Booy's work is always evocative; some of that is deliberate on his part, achieved through carefully crafted prose. But I’m convinced that he also does it instinctively, by simply pointing the reader’s thoughts in the general direction he intends for them to go, while leaving much unsaid, confident that each reader will take it from there. Van Booy is a writer who trusts his reader. When I read his work, I feel esteemed, knowing that he has entrusted me with the responsibility of interpreting his words in a manner that will satisfy both of us.
All of which is especially relevant here: in this book, Van Booy actually spells it out for us and I’m especially gratified with his explanation of it: ”What a relief it’s only your voice that can be heard as you crawl headfirst through tunnels of sentence. Emotion comes from your relationship to the words. There is less of me here than you think. Maybe none. Maybe only a ghost hovering between each silent resurrection.”
Merriam-Webster defines evocative as “evoking or tending to evoke an especially emotional response.”
Here, as in all his writing, Van Booy sets out to prompt each reader to instinctively create for themselves images, interpretations or recollections triggered by what they’re reading. That response—and therefore the entire experience of reading—is certain to be different in each reader; and yet, each response is valid, because writing and reading are the two components of a transaction, an exchange of ideas.
That is also why watching a film, after having first read the book the film was based on, is often disconcerting or disappointing; the scenes in the film reflect the film maker’s response to the book, and it’s likely to be quite different from each reader’s recollection of their response to what was written.
Simon Van Booy's work is always evocative; some of that is deliberate on his part, achieved through carefully crafted prose. But I’m convinced that he also does it instinctively, by simply pointing the reader’s thoughts in the general direction he intends for them to go, while leaving much unsaid, confident that each reader will take it from there. Van Booy is a writer who trusts his reader. When I read his work, I feel esteemed, knowing that he has entrusted me with the responsibility of interpreting his words in a manner that will satisfy both of us.
All of which is especially relevant here: in this book, Van Booy actually spells it out for us and I’m especially gratified with his explanation of it: ”What a relief it’s only your voice that can be heard as you crawl headfirst through tunnels of sentence. Emotion comes from your relationship to the words. There is less of me here than you think. Maybe none. Maybe only a ghost hovering between each silent resurrection.”
August 28, 2024
3.5*. I found Sipsworth to be far more easily consumed.
This book was also beautifully written and has applicability for you even if you haven't been in a situation at all similar to what the author describes. If you are mourning the loss of something or someone or of some part of yourself or of your life that you once treasured, this book is relevent.
I will quote a few beautiful, thought provoking lines out of context so as to give nothing away.
- Dying has given me the luxury of time by taking it away.
- There was nothing else to do that didn't lead me off a thought-cliff. [Really who hasn't been here on a"thought-cliff?" I know I have!
- If I don't see another dawn, it's because I am a part of it.
- Traumatic events can make you a stranger in your own life.
I did find part of this book a little disjointed otherwise my rating would be a solid 4. That aside, just the premise of the book's origination that someone so respected our author that this someone wanted him to tell their husband's story?! That's just incredible, but after reading Sipsworth, I might have chosen him, too!
Recommend this author. I STILL might read more.
Should it be: The Secret Lives of People in Love or The Sadness of Beautiful Things or something else?
This book was also beautifully written and has applicability for you even if you haven't been in a situation at all similar to what the author describes. If you are mourning the loss of something or someone or of some part of yourself or of your life that you once treasured, this book is relevent.
I will quote a few beautiful, thought provoking lines out of context so as to give nothing away.
- Dying has given me the luxury of time by taking it away.
- There was nothing else to do that didn't lead me off a thought-cliff. [Really who hasn't been here on a"thought-cliff?" I know I have!
- If I don't see another dawn, it's because I am a part of it.
- Traumatic events can make you a stranger in your own life.
I did find part of this book a little disjointed otherwise my rating would be a solid 4. That aside, just the premise of the book's origination that someone so respected our author that this someone wanted him to tell their husband's story?! That's just incredible, but after reading Sipsworth, I might have chosen him, too!
Recommend this author. I STILL might read more.
Should it be: The Secret Lives of People in Love or The Sadness of Beautiful Things or something else?
April 27, 2025
A thought provoking, shared, introspective novel of a writer who was dying. Van Booy is a master of prose, illiciting magical images in his words. This is a book to savor. I highly recommend it. 4.5 stars.
December 28, 2022
wow. I bought this book as a gift and couldn't not stop reading it. Each time I went to wrap it, I read a little more until I finished. Innovative, moving, sparse, and mystical. Some sentences felt like an arrow to the heart. How silly to think you can capture the mystical with mere sentences but he did a damn fine job.
May 29, 2024
A meditation on death and all that we leave behind when it comes for us.
For a subject so bleak, Simon Van Booy does not make it too morose and foreboding, but manages to make it strangely poetic and in some way, calming and reassuring.
The authenticity (and touches of fiction) of the work is established in the introduction, where Van Booy tells the reader how he pieced the story from the last journal of a late author, that the latter’s wife had originally approached him for help to publish posthumously.
What Van Booy delivers is a reconstructed account of Max Little’s (an altered name to protect his wife’s and friends’ privacy) final days after his cancer diagnosis, piecing together his thoughts and reflections into a more cohesive narrative.
There is nothing like the immediacy of impending death that makes one begin to think the afterlife in concrete terms, and to question who we think we are. One of the more interesting ideas in one of the opening chapters (ominously numbered backwards to signify a countdown to Max’s demise) is whose voice is addressing the reader.
Max postulates that “every person is, at the very least, two people simultaneously” and that “the moment you say something that is not truly how you feel”, you develop a second voice “to negotiate your way through the world, while the first voice retreats” but that “if the voice most of us share with the world is not the inner voice, the first voice, then all our adult relationships inevitably begin with deceit.” In a sense, Max appeals to the importance of an honest account, even when addressing difficult issues. Even in Max’s account (reframed in Van Booy’s words), the notion of whose voice is addressing the reader, is yet another dimension that deepens the reading experience.
Coupled with this is the idea that in Max’s pain and suffering, he feels a sense of detachment from himself, as if he is looking at himself objectively from a distance that gives his situation a larger perspective. He says, “What I experienced was the awareness of a deeper presence, like a soul - but different in that it is not another self, but something beyond identity and outside of feeling, like an un-self that was not limited by physical or temporal boundaries, - fragment of some larger whole that was neither living nor dead. It simply was the was the universe is.”
I find that particularly relatable, as a coping mechanism when things get too hard.
This is a quiet and reflective novella that honestly addresses the fears and darkness surrounding death and its impact on loved ones but appeals to an acceptance of death as an integral of life.
For a subject so bleak, Simon Van Booy does not make it too morose and foreboding, but manages to make it strangely poetic and in some way, calming and reassuring.
The authenticity (and touches of fiction) of the work is established in the introduction, where Van Booy tells the reader how he pieced the story from the last journal of a late author, that the latter’s wife had originally approached him for help to publish posthumously.
What Van Booy delivers is a reconstructed account of Max Little’s (an altered name to protect his wife’s and friends’ privacy) final days after his cancer diagnosis, piecing together his thoughts and reflections into a more cohesive narrative.
There is nothing like the immediacy of impending death that makes one begin to think the afterlife in concrete terms, and to question who we think we are. One of the more interesting ideas in one of the opening chapters (ominously numbered backwards to signify a countdown to Max’s demise) is whose voice is addressing the reader.
Max postulates that “every person is, at the very least, two people simultaneously” and that “the moment you say something that is not truly how you feel”, you develop a second voice “to negotiate your way through the world, while the first voice retreats” but that “if the voice most of us share with the world is not the inner voice, the first voice, then all our adult relationships inevitably begin with deceit.” In a sense, Max appeals to the importance of an honest account, even when addressing difficult issues. Even in Max’s account (reframed in Van Booy’s words), the notion of whose voice is addressing the reader, is yet another dimension that deepens the reading experience.
Coupled with this is the idea that in Max’s pain and suffering, he feels a sense of detachment from himself, as if he is looking at himself objectively from a distance that gives his situation a larger perspective. He says, “What I experienced was the awareness of a deeper presence, like a soul - but different in that it is not another self, but something beyond identity and outside of feeling, like an un-self that was not limited by physical or temporal boundaries, - fragment of some larger whole that was neither living nor dead. It simply was the was the universe is.”
I find that particularly relatable, as a coping mechanism when things get too hard.
This is a quiet and reflective novella that honestly addresses the fears and darkness surrounding death and its impact on loved ones but appeals to an acceptance of death as an integral of life.
October 22, 2025
This quiet, creative, and poetic little book beautifully explores the interconnectedness of death, life, and love. I saw it as a heartfelt love letter to the author’s wife—an intimate reflection on mortality and the unknown that follows. What struck me most was the profound tenderness in his thought process—a selfless devotion to ensuring his wife’s well-being even after he’s gone.
The raw vulnerability and deep love in these pages moved me to tears. It made me pause and reflect on my own life, inspiring me to be more intentional with the people I cherish.
Bravo to Simon for crafting something so deeply personal and profoundly meaningful in honor of his dear friend.
Here are some of my very quotes - there were sooo many.
“It's an unexpectedly intimate experience getting to know someone after they have died.”
“And though we may never be together in body, this book will ensure that we never part. That you and I, in this moment, are the universe in soft and difficult pieces.”
“While out there in the world with this book, you are also here, mummified by these sentences in a non-physical universe. The body and the mind can travel independently of each other. Perhaps one day they'll go so far as to be lost.”
“I'm starting to wonder if all hate isn't just the unbearable pain of inexpressible love.”
“You simply must find a way to live with monumental shame and suffering, to let part of yourself die so that other parts may go on living.”
“dying has given me the luxury of time by taking it away.”
“I reached over and enclosed them. I had known those hands for so long. Watched them wrinkle over time like sheets of delicate paper, written on by life.”
“Thinking over the treasure of my life is another pleasure, raking through my best memories and sometimes coming across things I had overlooked or thought unimportant at the time. There are people I think about, too, some I've realized I still love but will never see again.”
“Also, stars are being lit, one by one, to illuminate a path with light both dead and living.”
The raw vulnerability and deep love in these pages moved me to tears. It made me pause and reflect on my own life, inspiring me to be more intentional with the people I cherish.
Bravo to Simon for crafting something so deeply personal and profoundly meaningful in honor of his dear friend.
Here are some of my very quotes - there were sooo many.
“It's an unexpectedly intimate experience getting to know someone after they have died.”
“And though we may never be together in body, this book will ensure that we never part. That you and I, in this moment, are the universe in soft and difficult pieces.”
“While out there in the world with this book, you are also here, mummified by these sentences in a non-physical universe. The body and the mind can travel independently of each other. Perhaps one day they'll go so far as to be lost.”
“I'm starting to wonder if all hate isn't just the unbearable pain of inexpressible love.”
“You simply must find a way to live with monumental shame and suffering, to let part of yourself die so that other parts may go on living.”
“dying has given me the luxury of time by taking it away.”
“I reached over and enclosed them. I had known those hands for so long. Watched them wrinkle over time like sheets of delicate paper, written on by life.”
“Thinking over the treasure of my life is another pleasure, raking through my best memories and sometimes coming across things I had overlooked or thought unimportant at the time. There are people I think about, too, some I've realized I still love but will never see again.”
“Also, stars are being lit, one by one, to illuminate a path with light both dead and living.”
December 23, 2024
This is a thought-provoking tale about life's meaning and how the diagnosis of a life-ending malady alters one's perspective on what is important.
interesting quotes:
"If I don't see another dawn, it's because I'm a part of it. Look for me there."
"You know you love someone, when, at the sound of tires rolling over the small stones in the driveway, you inflate like a balloon."
"Not everything that is not darkness must be imagined."
interesting quotes:
"If I don't see another dawn, it's because I'm a part of it. Look for me there."
"You know you love someone, when, at the sound of tires rolling over the small stones in the driveway, you inflate like a balloon."
"Not everything that is not darkness must be imagined."
March 7, 2023
what a staggeringly beautiful and moving book to start the year. felt wrong to rate it, so it will remain in its own unrated category.
January 2, 2025
The Presence of Absence is a captivating novel that's a mix of fiction and philosophy. I read this little novel in one day, eager to discover more insights.
Rather than write a synopsis of the story, I'll rewrite a couple of thought provoking lines that I underlined and noted in my book. (Yes! I write in my books when I find worthy quotes and passages to go back to.)
"I have visited places and people as permitted by the drunk librarian of memory, whose random dispatches have not led back into the past, but into the future where there is often clarity-but also helplessness."
"I'm starting to wonder if all hate isn't just the unbearable pain of unexpressed love."
This book is one I'll go back to.
Rather than write a synopsis of the story, I'll rewrite a couple of thought provoking lines that I underlined and noted in my book. (Yes! I write in my books when I find worthy quotes and passages to go back to.)
"I have visited places and people as permitted by the drunk librarian of memory, whose random dispatches have not led back into the past, but into the future where there is often clarity-but also helplessness."
"I'm starting to wonder if all hate isn't just the unbearable pain of unexpressed love."
This book is one I'll go back to.
November 21, 2024
This is an extremely short, thought-provoking, and poetic read on the art of dying. The reader witnesses an author's dying and becomes part of the thought process...a part of the dying itself. Max, the author, tells his therapist and another patient about his diagnosis before telling his wife weeks later. Much of the book is about how he comes to terms with his impending death and how he is going to tell his wife in a way that will leave her with the least amount of suffering. We will also learn his imagined (or is it real?) future for his wife. He hopes in reincarnation in some form. He leaves it up to the reader, whom he is talking to all along, about whether this could really be how the afterlife exists for him and in what form. I really enjoyed this book!
December 30, 2022
What a lovely book! I had no idea it existed and now find it unforgettable.
"Words are communal yet bring material order through spiritual separation."
Thank you for the gifts--life, family, love, this book.
"Words are communal yet bring material order through spiritual separation."
Thank you for the gifts--life, family, love, this book.
November 29, 2022
In his elegant, thought-provoking prose, Simon Van Booy has created a beautiful gift to his fans; a fictional conversation of sorts between the author and his readers. Speaking through the mouth of Max Little, an author who learns that he will die within a year or so. As his terminal disease advances, he ends up spending his last days in a hospital bed, reflecting on his life, his beloved wife, and the future... even beyond his passing. Through it all, he carries on a conversation with the reader, an asynchronous dialog that is happening as he writes it, but also as the reader reads it. The book is sectioned into two parts, "In Vivo" or, within the body, and "Ex Vivo" or, outside the living body. As you might imagine, the first part is told while Max is still alive, and the latter part years later.
This type of story benefits form Van Booy's simultaneously sumptuous and spare writing style . Never using an excess of words, he selects them so carefully that they come together like poetry. Sprinkled with moments of deep emotion and sudden humor, The Presence of Absence is a wonderful addition to this talented writer's bibliogrphay.
This type of story benefits form Van Booy's simultaneously sumptuous and spare writing style . Never using an excess of words, he selects them so carefully that they come together like poetry. Sprinkled with moments of deep emotion and sudden humor, The Presence of Absence is a wonderful addition to this talented writer's bibliogrphay.
April 7, 2023
An incredible look into the meanings of life, pain, and love.
April 19, 2023
I picked this up on a staff recommendation at an independent bookstore. What a beautiful book, I’m grateful i stumbled on it.
September 4, 2024
this one made me very sad in the middle. friendships where your soul feels complete are so important.
February 12, 2025
there’s a version of me that existed before this book and there’s the version that i am now.
December 8, 2022
A beautiful beautiful book on death and love and the places we may go when all is gone.
January 10, 2023
I think this is a perfect title so I pulled this novel off the shelf impulsively. It was hard to get into, though, because the framing device was too gimmicky for me. I’m glad I plowed through because the tender love story and description of how to die well was beautiful.
April 19, 2023
A deeply beautiful little book
December 3, 2024
Hard to describe. Yes, initially a bit manipulative and trying a hand at philosophy, i.e., on pg 33
You can’t change the past, only look for clues in a puzzle in which looking for clues is a clue. But it improved and unfolded with the protagonist’s story of learning about his terminal illness and how he will share the news with his spouse. Some of the writing is beautiful!
You can’t change the past, only look for clues in a puzzle in which looking for clues is a clue. But it improved and unfolded with the protagonist’s story of learning about his terminal illness and how he will share the news with his spouse. Some of the writing is beautiful!
June 1, 2025
I sat down to start this book and then all the sudden I was finished. I thought it was strange at first and then I thought it broke my heart open in all the good ways. Beautiful writing from Simon Van Booy, per ushe!
June 27, 2025
A simply beautiful book, unusual, and wonderfully written.
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