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Disembodied
"I died on the twelfth of September, at the height of happiness. Clothed in the shadow of the chestnut tree outside the house, my body preserved the posture of a living woman hours after my last breath. Whereas at first I struggled with snakes under my tongue, around my ankles and my wrists, snakes clotting the blood under the skin of my lips and rearranging my limbs to fit the encasement of this new reality, I now watch lavender clouds pass by."
Christina Tudor-Sideri's debut novel is a book told in a single breath—a final breath. In the moments following her death, a nameless woman recounts, in fragments and flashes, episodes from a life that seems increasingly alien and distant to her. As her body is slowly erased by wind, water, and the earth beneath it, her voice carries on without ceasing, as if any pause would mean permanent silence. Because these are the very stakes.
Christina Tudor-Sideri's debut novel is a book told in a single breath—a final breath. In the moments following her death, a nameless woman recounts, in fragments and flashes, episodes from a life that seems increasingly alien and distant to her. As her body is slowly erased by wind, water, and the earth beneath it, her voice carries on without ceasing, as if any pause would mean permanent silence. Because these are the very stakes.
- GenresFictionContemporary
152 pages, Paperback
First published July 12, 2022
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248 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 21, 2022
Profound and soaring. The eternal voice over your shoulder that lingers before it is finished.
Christina Tudor-Sideri is unparalleled in her approach to the poetic and philosophical. Read and re-read everything she has written.
Christina Tudor-Sideri is unparalleled in her approach to the poetic and philosophical. Read and re-read everything she has written.
September 9, 2022
Will need a few days to gather my thoughts on this one.
A review is now published on my blog: https://roughghosts.com/2022/09/09/th...
A review is now published on my blog: https://roughghosts.com/2022/09/09/th...
February 19, 2024
So Im probably too dumb to understand this book. It is very difficult to read, and I found myself reading the text without absorbing any of it often. There were parts I liked, mostly the ones where the narrator talked about her life. However, its probably because those were the only parts I understood. I will revisit this book when I'm older. Maybe then I will understand.
November 7, 2022
My review has been published at Heavy Feather Review:
https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2022/1...
https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2022/1...
January 30, 2023
A treatise to life that rides the tide of the expiring breath of a dead woman. 140 pages without plot or dialogue, without protagonist or antagonist. And yet, a clawing back from the dead, a refusal to submit before turning over that final rock and unearthing that nagging question: what is *this* all about, anyway?
Beautiful writing, dense and philosophical, I wish I could have understood more of it, and better. Re-reading and reading out loud helped a lot.
Favorite line: “no—we will not become museum pieces, none of us, no human, no animal, no breathing living being, but we will indeed become something much better, something much richer, much deeper embedded into the tissue of the world, even if—even if consciousness too is a mere craving of the auditorium, and, when bedridden, what crosses the body is nothing but plot, and, whether nursed by calmness or suffering, the plot delivers one where one is meant to fall and rise, and fall again”
Beautiful writing, dense and philosophical, I wish I could have understood more of it, and better. Re-reading and reading out loud helped a lot.
Favorite line: “no—we will not become museum pieces, none of us, no human, no animal, no breathing living being, but we will indeed become something much better, something much richer, much deeper embedded into the tissue of the world, even if—even if consciousness too is a mere craving of the auditorium, and, when bedridden, what crosses the body is nothing but plot, and, whether nursed by calmness or suffering, the plot delivers one where one is meant to fall and rise, and fall again”
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March 7, 2024Really hard to rate. But here’s a nice quote.
“A companion, perhaps a lover, waiting somewhere in a green armchair, waiting for the return of love that was never love, of friendship that was more than friendship, waiting for the return of intimacy, an intimacy that lived not in the world but in our silences and in our cries, in our sleep and on the islands of our primal encounters, for we have met again, year after year, always for the first time; we have walked toward each other-silent, invisible, anonymous-lovers, who were not lovers, bodies, never to adjoin.
We have walked toward each other through the hurt of others, through the pain we inflicted on one another; always for the first time, always entering the house when the other was leaving, always silent, always invisible, always anonymous.”
“A companion, perhaps a lover, waiting somewhere in a green armchair, waiting for the return of love that was never love, of friendship that was more than friendship, waiting for the return of intimacy, an intimacy that lived not in the world but in our silences and in our cries, in our sleep and on the islands of our primal encounters, for we have met again, year after year, always for the first time; we have walked toward each other-silent, invisible, anonymous-lovers, who were not lovers, bodies, never to adjoin.
We have walked toward each other through the hurt of others, through the pain we inflicted on one another; always for the first time, always entering the house when the other was leaving, always silent, always invisible, always anonymous.”
August 9, 2023
‘What is the true unforgivable act: that the mind has invented the soul, or that the body cannot survive without it?’
How a passage of writing, oh! how a sentence, and even how a word itself can make one feel, knowing that language is the subject of a social being in aid of their communication and is not universal, and can heavily vary. That one of my languages consists of the mashups of twenty-six single letters and how profound it all makes me feel.
On that note, I have not read a more cleverly weaved, and quite chaotic philosophical perception into existence and being and death that the one in which you will read if you choose to read my review and then the book.
Read it.
How a passage of writing, oh! how a sentence, and even how a word itself can make one feel, knowing that language is the subject of a social being in aid of their communication and is not universal, and can heavily vary. That one of my languages consists of the mashups of twenty-six single letters and how profound it all makes me feel.
On that note, I have not read a more cleverly weaved, and quite chaotic philosophical perception into existence and being and death that the one in which you will read if you choose to read my review and then the book.
Read it.
February 29, 2024
I think this book would have resonated so much more for me if I were a slightly different type of reader. much of the book's single-paragraph moment-of-death monologue occupied such airy/philosophical/metaphysical territory, and I'm the kind of read who struggles with that stuff if it's not more grounded in character. lots of lovely language but I was having a hard time pinning it down.
September 26, 2022
So much spirit in asking the big questions, in meeting the ineffable. An incredible book that flies in the face of so much present-day didactic fiction. Dostoyevskian, like a large stone that has no past because it has never had a present—more an always.
March 12, 2023
I absolutely love everything Ms. Tudor-Sideris writes. Disembodied is an excellent addition to my shelves, one that I try to share with everyone else.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews