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Faithless
‘Faithless is a remarkable story about love, literature, family, mortality and that which survives mortality, among other profound human experiences.’
Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prizewinner for The Hours
‘Sometimes, Max, I imagine that I see you in her. Not in the sense of any physical inheritance, but a fleeting essence. Something wary and remote. Haunted, you might say. Though her ghosts are not yours.’
Set between India and England, Faithless is the story of Cressida, a writer and translator, and her consuming love for Max, an enigmatic older writer – and married man.
Cressida’s passion for Max engulfs her from the first giddy rush of sensation when she is eighteen and meets him in the mountains of southern India. It is a desire so potent it delivers great stunning blows to her heart. And yet she can share it with almost no one.
Then Cressida meets Leo, and she is forced to choose: between a life of passion or a desire for some peace of mind; between her romantic idealism and the possibility of a steadier, attainable happiness.
As the years unfold with both these men, a fragile young child, Flora, also finds her way into Cressida’s life and heart, and it is Flora who forces Cressida to confront her own capacity for love and deception, and to accept the compromises life forces on us; the lies we tell in service of those things we cannot live without.
Faithless is a passionate love story and a profound reflection on the nuances of attachment, the nature of desire, the different connections and relationships that sustain us, and the ways that we deceive ourselves and others in the hope that, finally, we can reach stumblingly towards one another.
Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prizewinner for The Hours
‘Sometimes, Max, I imagine that I see you in her. Not in the sense of any physical inheritance, but a fleeting essence. Something wary and remote. Haunted, you might say. Though her ghosts are not yours.’
Set between India and England, Faithless is the story of Cressida, a writer and translator, and her consuming love for Max, an enigmatic older writer – and married man.
Cressida’s passion for Max engulfs her from the first giddy rush of sensation when she is eighteen and meets him in the mountains of southern India. It is a desire so potent it delivers great stunning blows to her heart. And yet she can share it with almost no one.
Then Cressida meets Leo, and she is forced to choose: between a life of passion or a desire for some peace of mind; between her romantic idealism and the possibility of a steadier, attainable happiness.
As the years unfold with both these men, a fragile young child, Flora, also finds her way into Cressida’s life and heart, and it is Flora who forces Cressida to confront her own capacity for love and deception, and to accept the compromises life forces on us; the lies we tell in service of those things we cannot live without.
Faithless is a passionate love story and a profound reflection on the nuances of attachment, the nature of desire, the different connections and relationships that sustain us, and the ways that we deceive ourselves and others in the hope that, finally, we can reach stumblingly towards one another.
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Published August 16, 2022
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About the author
Alice Nelson
8 books34 followersAlice Nelson is an Australian writer. Her first novel, The Last Sky, was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, won the T.A.G. Hungerford Award and was shortlisted for the Australian Society of Authors’ Barbara Jefferis Award. She was named Best Young Australian Novelist of 2009 in the Sydney Morning Herald’s national awards program. Alice's new novel, The Children's House, will be published by Knopf Australia on 1 October 2018.
Awards
Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist of the Year (Winner 2009)
Barbara Jefferis Award for Literature (Shortlisted 2009)
T.A.G. Hungerford Award (Winner 2006)
The Australian / Vogel Literary Award (Shortlisted 2004)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
October 23, 2022
I don’t know what I was expecting when I sat down to start Faithless, but this wasn’t exactly it. I guess the cover led me to think it would be a more wry, satirical take on the literary-girl-affair-with-an-older-man idea (which, let’s face it, is a bit tired). But the prose is wistful and takes itself very seriously.
It's a challenging and clever read, but it didn’t exactly light a fire under me. It had plenty of redeeming qualities, and I’m sure many readers will be captured by it – unfortunately, I just wasn’t one of them.
My full review of Faithless is up now on Keeping Up With The Penguins.
It's a challenging and clever read, but it didn’t exactly light a fire under me. It had plenty of redeeming qualities, and I’m sure many readers will be captured by it – unfortunately, I just wasn’t one of them.
My full review of Faithless is up now on Keeping Up With The Penguins.
August 11, 2022
It’s such a marvellous thing to get lost within the pages of a beautiful novel. Four years ago, I read The Children’s House by Alice Nelson, such an exquisite novel that I absolutely adored. Here now, is her latest release, Faithless, one that I actually bought based on the cover and only realised once I got home that it had been written by THAT Alice Nelson, the one whose work I adore, and it bypassed the tbr shelf and went straight to the table beside my reading chair. I am disappointed though that this novel has not received much pre-release (or post-release) publicity. Until I saw it on the shelves at Big W, I hadn’t even heard a whisper about it, nor have I seen anything since. The cover is of course attention grabbing, with the trend of the fed-up woman depicted, but this story is very different to what we’ve come to expect from the novels these covers grace. There is no humour, this is character driven literary fiction, a cascade of introspection that meanders through the decades in a reflective and non-linear fashion. My favourite sort of literary fiction.
“I had always conceived myself as vastly different to my mother, but I began to wonder whether we were so far apart, after all. Stupefied by a hope that would never be realised. How easily I too had accepted a lesser life. All these women waiting. My mother, wasting so many years of her life believing my father would leave Delia. Delia herself, waiting for my father to reform himself and give up my mother.”
Cressida is the child of a relationship that was a long-term affair, and from the age of eighteen, she too becomes ‘the other woman’. I’m generally not a fan of stories about women who have affairs with married men, and yet, I found myself completely drawn into Cressida’s story, and also drawn to her. The narrative is written in the style where Cressida is telling her story to Max, her lover, who has recently passed away. She has fled to the coastal village where he lived with his wife and daughter, grieving, reminiscing, accompanied by a seven year old girl named Flora, who is traumatised and connected to Cressida in a way that we become privy to only as the story progresses. This is Cressida’s second loss inside a year, with her husband Leo passing after a long battle with illness twelve months previous. In between the reminiscing, we witness Cressida’s struggles with Flora, a child who has suffered significantly in unknown ways. These sections are raw and heartfelt, you can feel Cressida’s love for Flora, her attempts to put the little girl at ease and offer her comfort, while swallowing down immense guilt for abandoning her and not knowing what she has been subjected to in the intervening years.
“We forgive everything of a lover, Michael Ondaatje writes. We forgive selfishness, desire, guile – as long as we are the motive for it. But can we forgive these things of ourselves? Deceit, disloyalty, slyness. How fluently I learned to lie, Max, how easily lie after lie spilled out of my lips as if I had mastered a foreign language, or a complicated piano concerto. How easily, in the end, we let go of the things we once held as truths about ourselves. But perhaps we never move past who we essentially are. It’s a kind of wishfulness to imagine that somehow at our cores we are better people than those we turn out to be. That we are merely bent sideways by the burden of our circumstances. Perhaps our childhoods bred us for duplicity, for secrets, perhaps it is something that trickled down to our very essences.”
As much as this is a love story, it is also a story about literature, writing it, reading it, quoting it, living by it. A book about books, if you like. I’m always drawn in by that. Cressida is a writer, so too is Max, this forms the basis of their initial attraction. But they are also readers and that forms a basis of connection between them as well, a shared basis of communication whereby they speak and write to each other in poetry and passages from novels. Even with Flora, there is a literary connection between her and Cressida, a story book she remembers from her early childhood that Cressida used to read to her, and this shared literary memory becomes a building block for their tentative relationship. Indeed, by the end of the novel, we see that the greatest love story of Cressida’s life is still to come, that between her and Flora.
I fell in love with Alice Nelson’s writing in The Children’s House and my adoration bears no abating with Faithless. She is one of my favourite authors, a writer of such piercingly beautiful prose with a depth of honesty and raw feeling that is all too rare. If you are looking for a novel to get lost in, then Faithless needs to go onto your reading pile. Highly recommended for lovers of literature, love stories, and literary fiction.
Book 12 in my 22 in 2022 challenge.
“I had always conceived myself as vastly different to my mother, but I began to wonder whether we were so far apart, after all. Stupefied by a hope that would never be realised. How easily I too had accepted a lesser life. All these women waiting. My mother, wasting so many years of her life believing my father would leave Delia. Delia herself, waiting for my father to reform himself and give up my mother.”
Cressida is the child of a relationship that was a long-term affair, and from the age of eighteen, she too becomes ‘the other woman’. I’m generally not a fan of stories about women who have affairs with married men, and yet, I found myself completely drawn into Cressida’s story, and also drawn to her. The narrative is written in the style where Cressida is telling her story to Max, her lover, who has recently passed away. She has fled to the coastal village where he lived with his wife and daughter, grieving, reminiscing, accompanied by a seven year old girl named Flora, who is traumatised and connected to Cressida in a way that we become privy to only as the story progresses. This is Cressida’s second loss inside a year, with her husband Leo passing after a long battle with illness twelve months previous. In between the reminiscing, we witness Cressida’s struggles with Flora, a child who has suffered significantly in unknown ways. These sections are raw and heartfelt, you can feel Cressida’s love for Flora, her attempts to put the little girl at ease and offer her comfort, while swallowing down immense guilt for abandoning her and not knowing what she has been subjected to in the intervening years.
“We forgive everything of a lover, Michael Ondaatje writes. We forgive selfishness, desire, guile – as long as we are the motive for it. But can we forgive these things of ourselves? Deceit, disloyalty, slyness. How fluently I learned to lie, Max, how easily lie after lie spilled out of my lips as if I had mastered a foreign language, or a complicated piano concerto. How easily, in the end, we let go of the things we once held as truths about ourselves. But perhaps we never move past who we essentially are. It’s a kind of wishfulness to imagine that somehow at our cores we are better people than those we turn out to be. That we are merely bent sideways by the burden of our circumstances. Perhaps our childhoods bred us for duplicity, for secrets, perhaps it is something that trickled down to our very essences.”
As much as this is a love story, it is also a story about literature, writing it, reading it, quoting it, living by it. A book about books, if you like. I’m always drawn in by that. Cressida is a writer, so too is Max, this forms the basis of their initial attraction. But they are also readers and that forms a basis of connection between them as well, a shared basis of communication whereby they speak and write to each other in poetry and passages from novels. Even with Flora, there is a literary connection between her and Cressida, a story book she remembers from her early childhood that Cressida used to read to her, and this shared literary memory becomes a building block for their tentative relationship. Indeed, by the end of the novel, we see that the greatest love story of Cressida’s life is still to come, that between her and Flora.
I fell in love with Alice Nelson’s writing in The Children’s House and my adoration bears no abating with Faithless. She is one of my favourite authors, a writer of such piercingly beautiful prose with a depth of honesty and raw feeling that is all too rare. If you are looking for a novel to get lost in, then Faithless needs to go onto your reading pile. Highly recommended for lovers of literature, love stories, and literary fiction.
Book 12 in my 22 in 2022 challenge.
August 27, 2022
I recently read this book as part of a Tandem Collective readalong, which I was excited to be a part of as it was my very first one.
Faithless is set between India and England and follows Cressida, a woman grieving the death of her great love, Max, and reflecting on her life and what could have been. At the same time, Cressida is navigating suddenly needing to care for a little girl, Flora, who could be instrumental in healing her grief.
The prose itself was beautiful and the writing was strong. There was excellent character development, and I found the descriptions of different places to be transportive. Hands down, my favourite part of the story was Cressida’s relationship with Flora and slowly learning their history. I could have easily read a whole book just on that.
Unfortunately I just didn’t connect with this book in the way that I hoped. I found it to be repetitive and was a bit too meandering for my personal taste. I also really struggled to feel empathy for Cressida, who seemed to make very self-serving choices with little remorse or insight, and despite learning her backstory I couldn’t connect to her as a protagonist.
I should note here that heavily character-driven novels with very little plot are not usually my jam, and most of my readalong buddies really enjoyed this book, so if it sounds like your kinda thing, give it a whirl.
Thank you to Tandem Collective Global and Penguin Books for including me in this readalong.
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Faithless is set between India and England and follows Cressida, a woman grieving the death of her great love, Max, and reflecting on her life and what could have been. At the same time, Cressida is navigating suddenly needing to care for a little girl, Flora, who could be instrumental in healing her grief.
The prose itself was beautiful and the writing was strong. There was excellent character development, and I found the descriptions of different places to be transportive. Hands down, my favourite part of the story was Cressida’s relationship with Flora and slowly learning their history. I could have easily read a whole book just on that.
Unfortunately I just didn’t connect with this book in the way that I hoped. I found it to be repetitive and was a bit too meandering for my personal taste. I also really struggled to feel empathy for Cressida, who seemed to make very self-serving choices with little remorse or insight, and despite learning her backstory I couldn’t connect to her as a protagonist.
I should note here that heavily character-driven novels with very little plot are not usually my jam, and most of my readalong buddies really enjoyed this book, so if it sounds like your kinda thing, give it a whirl.
Thank you to Tandem Collective Global and Penguin Books for including me in this readalong.
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March 27, 2023
I have enjoyed Alice Nelson's previous novels (and her one non-fiction work) and this was no exception.
Told in the first person through the eyes of Cressida the novel is set in India, England and France. The story evolves basically in a chronological fashion giving it a 'coming of age' feel, while occasional flashbacks highlight the similarities between Cressida and her mothers lives and loves, a sense of history repeating. There is a strong sense of art and literature through Cressida the novelist and the man she loves above all else.
I really don't want to say too much as this is a story that needs to slowly unfold, one that has an extra dimension, a real life influence, which became obvious to me about two-thirds through as I had entered into the novel with no previous knowledge or discussion. What must be said and admired is Nelson's prose. Like her other novels the writing is beautiful.
Told in the first person through the eyes of Cressida the novel is set in India, England and France. The story evolves basically in a chronological fashion giving it a 'coming of age' feel, while occasional flashbacks highlight the similarities between Cressida and her mothers lives and loves, a sense of history repeating. There is a strong sense of art and literature through Cressida the novelist and the man she loves above all else.
I really don't want to say too much as this is a story that needs to slowly unfold, one that has an extra dimension, a real life influence, which became obvious to me about two-thirds through as I had entered into the novel with no previous knowledge or discussion. What must be said and admired is Nelson's prose. Like her other novels the writing is beautiful.
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October 6, 2022I made it to page 182. So very slowly. A bit like the picture on the cover to be honest, that's how the book affected me. The writing itself is good, so good that the characters frustrate me, and not in a good way. It was just so MISERABLE. Which is why I feel I can't give it a rating. A woman who has a decades long affair that sucks the life out of her, and she doesn't let go of, even though she marries someone else. All she things of is this man, Max. God. It's EXHAUSTING. He doesn't seem like a particularly nice man either.
There is a vague allusion to a time - it's the vagueness that was frustrating too. Cressida, the protagonist stays quiet about her affair. Lives in India (??) Her mother also had a long term affair.
I was frustrated with Cressida, with the whole novel. Again, it wasn't the writing that was the issue it was the story itself, hence no rating, as I don't feel I can rate a book where I just despise the characters. All of them. In a way, Nelson has done a good job - if that was her intention!
There is a vague allusion to a time - it's the vagueness that was frustrating too. Cressida, the protagonist stays quiet about her affair. Lives in India (??) Her mother also had a long term affair.
I was frustrated with Cressida, with the whole novel. Again, it wasn't the writing that was the issue it was the story itself, hence no rating, as I don't feel I can rate a book where I just despise the characters. All of them. In a way, Nelson has done a good job - if that was her intention!
December 19, 2025
2.75* I think the blurb is a little misleading in the sense that it the plot is more a woman looking back on her life and choices about her relationships after the passing of them. Nearly DNF’d, enjoyed maybe the last 30% the most. I think if it was marketed differently my expectations would’ve adjusted slightly before going into it.
June 2, 2024
4.5 stars
May 28, 2023
I usually inhale books, rushing through them in my haste to read the next. But instead, I savored this story.
The characters felt so close that I continue to think about them long after I put the book down. In fact, I didn't want it to end; the beautiful language, the haunting imagery, and the heart-breaking narrative had me captivated throughout.
This is an arresting work of literature.
The characters felt so close that I continue to think about them long after I put the book down. In fact, I didn't want it to end; the beautiful language, the haunting imagery, and the heart-breaking narrative had me captivated throughout.
This is an arresting work of literature.
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September 19, 2022Faithless tells the story of Cressida, a young writer and translator, and her affair with a married man. The object of her affection, Max, is a German-born writer of some acclaim. As the novel opens, we learn that Max has died, and that Cressida is in Suffolk, where Max spent his final years, along with a seven-year-old girl, Flora, for whom she is caring.
It is not long before it becomes apparent that Max is not simply a fictional character, but someone based upon a very real figure: Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, better known as W G Sebald, the famed German writer and the author of a series of books that deftly combined history, memoir, fiction and biography.
Alice Nelson does not hew slavishly to W G Sebald’s biography in crafting the character of Max. Comparable to other novels that animate the life of a real life personage – often while admitting only the barest deference to fictional disguise – Nelson’s narrative decision recalls Saul Bellow depicting philosopher Allan Bloom in Ravelstein or Rachel Cusk vivifying D H Lawrence’s stay with Mabel Dodge Luhan in Second Place. Nelson does not hew slavishly to Sebald’s biography in crafting the character of Max, yet many key correspondences with Sebald are adverted to over the course of the novel: Sebald’s critics, for example, such as Michael Hofmann.
Nelson repeats Hofmann’s charge of Sebald being a “postmodern pasticheur”, whose sentences “were oddly immobilised and paralysed [...] full of meandering Gothic digressions without the pleasantness or rigmarole of the novel”. (Nelson notes Max was born in the same year Kafka’s sister died, but is generous enough to elide Hofmann’s critique of Sebald’s Kafka homages.) Then there’s the German novelist Georg Klein’s accusation of Max/Sebald having “a contrived melancholic masochism towards the past, of claiming a false intimacy with the dead”.
Early in the novel, Cressida recounts an experience of sitting next to John Banville at a signing table, and of watching “a woman approach him clutching not a copy of his new book but a bunch of daffodils”: “She had fallen in love with him through his books, she said [...] she felt seen by him.” This is somewhat akin to what Nelson is doing with Sebald: romancing his memory.
Read on: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...
It is not long before it becomes apparent that Max is not simply a fictional character, but someone based upon a very real figure: Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, better known as W G Sebald, the famed German writer and the author of a series of books that deftly combined history, memoir, fiction and biography.
Alice Nelson does not hew slavishly to W G Sebald’s biography in crafting the character of Max. Comparable to other novels that animate the life of a real life personage – often while admitting only the barest deference to fictional disguise – Nelson’s narrative decision recalls Saul Bellow depicting philosopher Allan Bloom in Ravelstein or Rachel Cusk vivifying D H Lawrence’s stay with Mabel Dodge Luhan in Second Place. Nelson does not hew slavishly to Sebald’s biography in crafting the character of Max, yet many key correspondences with Sebald are adverted to over the course of the novel: Sebald’s critics, for example, such as Michael Hofmann.
Nelson repeats Hofmann’s charge of Sebald being a “postmodern pasticheur”, whose sentences “were oddly immobilised and paralysed [...] full of meandering Gothic digressions without the pleasantness or rigmarole of the novel”. (Nelson notes Max was born in the same year Kafka’s sister died, but is generous enough to elide Hofmann’s critique of Sebald’s Kafka homages.) Then there’s the German novelist Georg Klein’s accusation of Max/Sebald having “a contrived melancholic masochism towards the past, of claiming a false intimacy with the dead”.
Early in the novel, Cressida recounts an experience of sitting next to John Banville at a signing table, and of watching “a woman approach him clutching not a copy of his new book but a bunch of daffodils”: “She had fallen in love with him through his books, she said [...] she felt seen by him.” This is somewhat akin to what Nelson is doing with Sebald: romancing his memory.
Read on: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...
February 1, 2023
Don't be fooled by the cover of Faithless. It appears to fall in the category of 'thirty-something-woman-with-relationship-problems' but is actually about Cressida, a woman grieving the death of her husband (Leo) and the death of her lover (Max). There's also a child with a complicated history in the mix, and loads of references to literature, poetry, philosophy and art. So, not a light read.
This was a book of hits and misses for me. I very much enjoyed the layered and nuanced perspective on disenfranchised grief (who witnesses and legitimises the mistress's grief?). This grief was given more weight when it is revealed that Cressida herself was the product of a long-term affair.
There is another perspective on disenfranchised grief when we learn that Max had reckoned with his German heritage, describing Germans, post-WWII as '...reeling from sorrow, but it was a sorrow they felt too ashamed to lay proper claim to...'. This sentiment reverberates through his work as an author.
The story is told from the perspective of Cressida, writing a letter to Max. One of the problems with this structure is that any backstory or filling-in-of-gaps is redundant, because Max was there and presumably doesn't need the history. It's akin to how character names are used constantly in soap operas, allowing new viewers to pick up the story - but in real life, it's not how we talk. In Faithless, some of the detail is clumsy and strained.
As mentioned, there are many references to art and literature. For the most part, I enjoyed them but it verged on being a bit full of itself, even academic. Nevertheless, for a good portion of the story, I was happy to go along with whatever Nelson had included. And then there was a reference to the The Sound of Music. Cressida says that the child, Flora, happily sat through all two hours of the film.
Cue alarm bells. The Sound of Music goes for almost three hours. With ads, it's four. Everyone knows that, right? Then I thought, maybe she sent Flora to bed before the Nazis arrive... That might scrape in at two hours (without ads). Maybe I'm overthinking it....? Basically, when stuff like this is wrong in a book, I lose faith.
This was a book of hits and misses for me. I very much enjoyed the layered and nuanced perspective on disenfranchised grief (who witnesses and legitimises the mistress's grief?). This grief was given more weight when it is revealed that Cressida herself was the product of a long-term affair.
There is another perspective on disenfranchised grief when we learn that Max had reckoned with his German heritage, describing Germans, post-WWII as '...reeling from sorrow, but it was a sorrow they felt too ashamed to lay proper claim to...'. This sentiment reverberates through his work as an author.
The story is told from the perspective of Cressida, writing a letter to Max. One of the problems with this structure is that any backstory or filling-in-of-gaps is redundant, because Max was there and presumably doesn't need the history. It's akin to how character names are used constantly in soap operas, allowing new viewers to pick up the story - but in real life, it's not how we talk. In Faithless, some of the detail is clumsy and strained.
As mentioned, there are many references to art and literature. For the most part, I enjoyed them but it verged on being a bit full of itself, even academic. Nevertheless, for a good portion of the story, I was happy to go along with whatever Nelson had included. And then there was a reference to the The Sound of Music. Cressida says that the child, Flora, happily sat through all two hours of the film.
Cue alarm bells. The Sound of Music goes for almost three hours. With ads, it's four. Everyone knows that, right? Then I thought, maybe she sent Flora to bed before the Nazis arrive... That might scrape in at two hours (without ads). Maybe I'm overthinking it....? Basically, when stuff like this is wrong in a book, I lose faith.
November 26, 2022
The ambush of longing. The stubbornness of desire. Sometimes I think we never stop wanting what we can’t have. 4
I wonder if that’s what drew you here, the sense of living in a place only precariously lodged. Where everything important is hidden below the surface. 5
I had never felt that I fully belonged to India; I only ever lived on its edges. 6
But I didn't say this to you. Instead I asked you where it was in the world that you yourself felt most at home. Was there a particular place, a stretch of coast or view from a window that you had taken into yourself? 6
For so long I felt I contained so little in comparison to your extraordinary interior universe. 6
You wanted me to show myself to you. And I did. From the very first with you it was as if some effort of performance could simply dissolve. I could hold your gaze with an unabashed attention I've never experienced with anyone else in my life. I felt myself to be so clarified, so enlarged in the light of your attention. And someone beyond the person I knew myself to be. Someone wanton and hungry. Desire is like a mirror, you said to me; the really urgent questions it asks us are of ourselves. 8
So many letters, so much talk, everything draped in language, and yet perhaps they were the only times we were truly honest with each other, those hours in bed. 9
[It] is noise. Irregularity. Mad, mad; there is no real word for the love. Love, it will have to be love. 12
How much we simply accept as children until we learn that things should be otherwise. 13
...but I'm not sure I could bear to hear someone else's memories of you. I want you to stay mine. 16
Once again I had the feeling that I had disappointed her in some small but searing way; that I had failed to understand her or respond to her correctly. 17
Who knows what goes on in the caverns of her mind. 18
My life then remained something imagined, something unfurling before me. All my books unwritten. 21
There is so little evidence in the world of what happened between us, Max. 21
Or, later, in hotel rooms. I wonder if the places we have been together remember us, if they hold our presence silently. Some impalpable aura. Something hallowed. 21
You always believed that old photographs have something spectral about them, something enigmatic and mysterious. That they are almost designed to be lost, to come to light accidentally. 22
'Well, I think that as you grow older, vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion. But that which survives in your mind acquires a considerable degree of density, a high degree of specific weight. And of course, once you are burdened with these kind of weights, it's not unlikely that they will sink you.' 26
But unlike you, Max, I do not have my eye always on the grander sweep of the world's endless catalogue of catastrophes; it's our history that consumes me. 28
What I didn't say to you was that although it was not my country, Rajakkad had always felt to me, in ways that I could barely begin to describe, as if it were my place too. 35
But this was their place, not ours, and sometimes I felt that we lived uneasily on its surface. 37
She lives in a different way to people like you and me, you said. Objects are not imbued with the same kind of enchantment, the same talismanic properties. She does not carry the whole freight of history around with her. She is not a collector, note-taker, a letter writer; not a writer at all. The world is permitted to slip through her fingers unrecorded, unpreserved except in memory. She is wholly devoted to the present, you told me once, as if (63) this was the most miraculous and baffling state of being. 64
It was the same pang of loss I felt once when I realised that in all the years we had known each other you had never made me a cup of tea; would not know how long to steep the leaves for, how much milk to pour. 'But these are not the important things,' you said when I tried to explain it to you. (64) 'Anyone can learn how to make a cup of tea. My secretary knows how I like my tea. You and I know more important things about each other.' 65
I've never let myself describe you. You who have taken up so much of my attention. Sometimes it's hard to believe that I could have fixed you so intently in my mind for so very long. That the sight of you walking towards me could still disassemble me after so many years. A part of me was always waiting for the potency of what was between us to diminish, so that it might be possible for me to leave you. 66
I still have your measurements written on a piece of paper in my diary. The precise span of your shoulders, the length of your arms. The neat row of numbers a clumsy shorthand for the hard swell of your biceps under my fingers, the weight of your chest as you rose above me in bed. It never left me, Max, that surge of longing, not once in all these years. It's become a habit of the body; the same way I never forgot the particular weight of Flora as a baby in my arms. 66
But how should I mourn for you? I have no claim on you. 67
I don't know how to stop talking to you. Half my life I've spent in conversation with you, saving poems or quotes to read (67) to you, writing letters to you. It's become a kind of compulsion and one it seems that even your death cannot cure me of. 68
There was no order to your collection, no real sense or taxonomy. It wasn't even beauty or value or provenance that drew you to some things, thought most of your collection was very beautiful and parts of it valuable. Some things you bought simply because you couldn't beat the thought of them being abandoned. 69
But in those days the hiding, and the being found, were something joyous. 70
At times, Max, I felt you had a hold over me so strong that it threatened to annihilante me. You never wanted deference or devotion, you found the story of the princesses [being burnt with their husband when he died] ghoulish. But there are ways to immolate yourself when you are still alive. 72
The freight of the love I carry for this child will always be shadowed by all the ways I have failed her, the harm done to her that I did not prevent. 83
You bequeathed your attention generously, though seeming to hold back something of yourself - the part of you that watched and observed, that viewed everything with the cold eye of the writer. It was something I recognised in myself too, the urge to scurry back to my bedroom to write things down. 86
(...) would it really have brought her the happiness she though it would? She had fixed her sights so determinedly on that horizon, she could never admit the possibility that it might be a mirage. Or a land very different from the one of her imaginings. 90
II lay there with your hand in mine, as if my touch could heal you, and you held it tightly and talked and talked. How we are wounded into storytelling, how we circle old injuries all our lives. 96
Though Leo has been dead for only only a year our marriage already feels like a mirage I walked through in the desert. 98
I loved being in bed with you, but I missed the world we saw together. 100
Such vast distances between us and yet your voice (104) so close it felt you were there with me, my head resting on your chest. I thought of the great undersea cables connecting us; miraculous, implausible - like love itself. 105
In many ways what we had was a relationship wrought from words, constructed out of imagination and invention, but it was, from the very first, grounded in the flesh. I thought I would have more time with your body. Such pleasures, you and I have had together, and somehow I always imagined there would be more. That there would be more years of exploring the intricate map of you, every line and curve of your body. I loved every change in you (..). as you got older. (...) I would love you still in older age, when your hair grew thinner and your body more vulnerable. I can't imagine a world in which you do not exist. Where, after ever separation, every absence, I know you will take my face between your hands once more and kiss me. 110
We so rarely slept or woke together. Sometimes we dozed for half an hour in the afternoon and I cherished the feeling of drifting off in your arms, of feeling your body loosen. 110
How small we are against the world, and how easily injured. 111
The cups of tea and bowls of soup. A hand on your brow, a blanket for your lap. I wanted to do these things for you. 111
Sylvia was more herself than anyone I knew and yet something about her was not entirely fixed. She was open to the world, to (119) the life-altering force of art or music, or another person. 120
How do we become what we are, Max? Those of us who are not forced into exile, but choose it for ourselves? 120
And me, loving the place I grew up, but with the spectre of England as the true home, the true country, hovering always over me. And then to arrive here at last and find that it wasn't home at all. 121
'I'm not sure,' I said, 'that anyone ever loves the life they imagined.' 121
A rare burst of afternoon sunlight pours through the front windows, flooding the room and giving everything a burnished glow. 124
He described the beauty of the house, which had been in his mother's family for generations, and where he had spent all his childhood summers. 133
Yeats was wrong, the novelist said, pulling on his overcoat, it was not a choice between perfection of the life and perfection of the work; the two were inextricably intertwined. 161
... is this not what we do, all of us who write? Sift through the muck of life for material, transforming and embellishing as we see fit, profiting from the pain of others, from our own pain. 162
We never escape the injuries done to us by history. 163
I began to think that perhaps we could not have anything more than we did. That it was not possible for us to both to feel and fulfill our desires. Perhaps it was only distance and longing that kept us bound together. Did you see it in those terms, Max? Did you ever imagine a real life with me? 164
For most of my life I clung to the belief that I contained some glimmer of greatness. I think all writers - perhaps all artists - must secretly believe this. To carry on through difficulties, we need to sustain the illusion that the work is essential, that we have somehow been marked out to impose our own particular vision on the world. 167
I had the overwhelming feeling that the shell of my self might crack at any moment. That nothing was safe anymore. 167
Hello, darling, you would say when I picked up the phone, and a flood of love and longing would come over me. 168
And me, waiting for your call, your visit, for you to find time. Suspended lives. Do men ever wait like this? I can't imagine it. What if we simply refused to wait anymore, if we turned our backs and walked away into our own lives, leaving you to watch us recede? But to do that I would need to make you less essential to me. And I didn't know, Max, how that was possible. 169
In the late afternoons we lay by the pool, the light around us so thick and golden it felt like a touchable thing. 174
But I did not say this to you. There is much I did not say. 175
Some of the pages were turned down; you always did this to books as a way of flagging a particular line of poem you loved. 176
It was always just you and me, closeted together in our own universe. How well can you know someone in one room, Philip Roth wrote. 180
'All my love,' you signed your letters. But where was that love, Max? What did it mean? 183
Even in the years we did not speak I wrote to you, though I did not send those letters. 188
Proust did warn, after all, that we should be wary of searching for the realities that hide behind our fantasies, the actualities inevitably proving dissatisfying. 189
Of course, this knowledge of Leo was a product of my imagination. I knew him in the way I might claim I knew a character in a well-loved novel, which is to say only as something I had invented, with a few pegs on which to hang my imaginings. 192
"Few buildings, few lives /
Are built so well even their ruins are beautiful."
- María José Navia
'No, don't be sorry. It's so interesting, what lodges in the mind.' 197
To live always between two worlds and destroy your ability to be fully at home in either - it seemed a terrible fate, like a cruel curse of the gods. And yet how many of us live like that. We are exiled, or we exile ourselves, or we simply fail to choose. 198
.. because of course fate resides in Baci wrappers. 204
"Art and love are the same thing. It's the same process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."
- Klosterman
How many afternoons had I left my desk, slipped that coat of the hook in the hallway and walked through the vineyards and fields surrounding the house, my hands thrust deep in my pockets, head down, the dream of the work still strong in me. 207
Despite all the distances and absences between us, I always felt beloved by you. 211
'There's a wonderful quote about translation. It says the beautiful ones are never faithful and the faithful ones are never beautiful.' 215
Faithless quotes
But I could hardly complain, for is this not what we do, all of us who write? Sifting thought the muck of life for material, transforming and embellishing as we see fit, profiting from the pain of others, from our own pain. Not so many years I late I would do the same thing to you Max, after all. 162
We never escape the injuries done to us by history. 163
It was you, Max, who kept me away from other people. I had loved you for nearly all my adult life and that love had slowly begun to alter me. What was between us, provisional and secret as it was, was turning me into someone I had never expected to become. 162
It had never been overtly discussed, but so full of stunned intimacy had the affair been, so engulfing and luminous those weeks in Italy, that she considered the transformation of your relationship into something more permanent was inevitable. 173
In the late afternoon we lay by the pool, the light around us so thick and golden that it felt like a touchable thing. It was miraculous to wake in the night and see you beside me, to stare at your face and watch the rise of your chest as you breathed. To drink coffee with you in the mornings and listen to the fall of the water as you showered. 174
But this I did not say to you. There is so much I did not say. 175
Leo had learned passable Hindi and Nepali from all his years of work in those countries, but he always said he felt himself to be a different person when he spoke them. Not because there was any essential difference, but because it was so much harder for him to bring his true self to the surface in a language that did not belong to him. No matter how fluent he became, the nuances would always elude him. And he could never be funny in any language except English, not even French, which he spoke fairly well. 216
He asked me which language I felt most myself in, and could not think of how to answer him. How much of ourselves are we ever truly able to reveal in any language? In many ways I felt most myself when I was with you, Max, but of course I could not say that to Leo. 216
You did not ask me what I was doing in Bombay and I felt again that little ripple of resentment - that you were not interested in the real shape of my life. As long as I materialised before you, a vision of beauty and charm, you did not really need to know the details. 232
You covered your eyes with your hand for a moment ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry too.’ What clichés we are reduced to. I should have read you a poem, I should have been able to wrap language around all that was happening. But we just sat there, wordless, on the wall by the sea. 234
There was a small prick of resentment in Lucian’s tone during this brief discussion. It was barely perceptible to others, but I saw the swift change in my brother’s internal weather. He had never liked to be criticised. 245
… I realised that U need to write about you. I stood up, walked back to the hotel and opened a page of my notebook.
It was you, Max, after all, who said that works of literature are like crystallised twigs, hardened remains of our former lives. 257
Or perhaps not anger exactly, but more of a wonder bitterness, for what is anger ever really but pain? 257
‘No,’ Sylvia said. ‘In the catalogue of life’s experiences, it’s not one that I regret.’ 263
It had baffled you, this insistence on living in the present. It was you, after all, who once wrote that the appointments we have to keep in the past are just as important as those we might have in the future. 264
… every attempt to understand someone else is full of occlusions. That every life is essentially unknowable. 265
If only all difficult knowledge came to us aslant, could be tempered and gently told. 268
I wanted whatever sorrows she had to be ordinary ones 269
I wonder if that’s what drew you here, the sense of living in a place only precariously lodged. Where everything important is hidden below the surface. 5
I had never felt that I fully belonged to India; I only ever lived on its edges. 6
But I didn't say this to you. Instead I asked you where it was in the world that you yourself felt most at home. Was there a particular place, a stretch of coast or view from a window that you had taken into yourself? 6
For so long I felt I contained so little in comparison to your extraordinary interior universe. 6
You wanted me to show myself to you. And I did. From the very first with you it was as if some effort of performance could simply dissolve. I could hold your gaze with an unabashed attention I've never experienced with anyone else in my life. I felt myself to be so clarified, so enlarged in the light of your attention. And someone beyond the person I knew myself to be. Someone wanton and hungry. Desire is like a mirror, you said to me; the really urgent questions it asks us are of ourselves. 8
So many letters, so much talk, everything draped in language, and yet perhaps they were the only times we were truly honest with each other, those hours in bed. 9
[It] is noise. Irregularity. Mad, mad; there is no real word for the love. Love, it will have to be love. 12
How much we simply accept as children until we learn that things should be otherwise. 13
...but I'm not sure I could bear to hear someone else's memories of you. I want you to stay mine. 16
Once again I had the feeling that I had disappointed her in some small but searing way; that I had failed to understand her or respond to her correctly. 17
Who knows what goes on in the caverns of her mind. 18
My life then remained something imagined, something unfurling before me. All my books unwritten. 21
There is so little evidence in the world of what happened between us, Max. 21
Or, later, in hotel rooms. I wonder if the places we have been together remember us, if they hold our presence silently. Some impalpable aura. Something hallowed. 21
You always believed that old photographs have something spectral about them, something enigmatic and mysterious. That they are almost designed to be lost, to come to light accidentally. 22
'Well, I think that as you grow older, vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion. But that which survives in your mind acquires a considerable degree of density, a high degree of specific weight. And of course, once you are burdened with these kind of weights, it's not unlikely that they will sink you.' 26
But unlike you, Max, I do not have my eye always on the grander sweep of the world's endless catalogue of catastrophes; it's our history that consumes me. 28
What I didn't say to you was that although it was not my country, Rajakkad had always felt to me, in ways that I could barely begin to describe, as if it were my place too. 35
But this was their place, not ours, and sometimes I felt that we lived uneasily on its surface. 37
She lives in a different way to people like you and me, you said. Objects are not imbued with the same kind of enchantment, the same talismanic properties. She does not carry the whole freight of history around with her. She is not a collector, note-taker, a letter writer; not a writer at all. The world is permitted to slip through her fingers unrecorded, unpreserved except in memory. She is wholly devoted to the present, you told me once, as if (63) this was the most miraculous and baffling state of being. 64
It was the same pang of loss I felt once when I realised that in all the years we had known each other you had never made me a cup of tea; would not know how long to steep the leaves for, how much milk to pour. 'But these are not the important things,' you said when I tried to explain it to you. (64) 'Anyone can learn how to make a cup of tea. My secretary knows how I like my tea. You and I know more important things about each other.' 65
I've never let myself describe you. You who have taken up so much of my attention. Sometimes it's hard to believe that I could have fixed you so intently in my mind for so very long. That the sight of you walking towards me could still disassemble me after so many years. A part of me was always waiting for the potency of what was between us to diminish, so that it might be possible for me to leave you. 66
I still have your measurements written on a piece of paper in my diary. The precise span of your shoulders, the length of your arms. The neat row of numbers a clumsy shorthand for the hard swell of your biceps under my fingers, the weight of your chest as you rose above me in bed. It never left me, Max, that surge of longing, not once in all these years. It's become a habit of the body; the same way I never forgot the particular weight of Flora as a baby in my arms. 66
But how should I mourn for you? I have no claim on you. 67
I don't know how to stop talking to you. Half my life I've spent in conversation with you, saving poems or quotes to read (67) to you, writing letters to you. It's become a kind of compulsion and one it seems that even your death cannot cure me of. 68
There was no order to your collection, no real sense or taxonomy. It wasn't even beauty or value or provenance that drew you to some things, thought most of your collection was very beautiful and parts of it valuable. Some things you bought simply because you couldn't beat the thought of them being abandoned. 69
But in those days the hiding, and the being found, were something joyous. 70
At times, Max, I felt you had a hold over me so strong that it threatened to annihilante me. You never wanted deference or devotion, you found the story of the princesses [being burnt with their husband when he died] ghoulish. But there are ways to immolate yourself when you are still alive. 72
The freight of the love I carry for this child will always be shadowed by all the ways I have failed her, the harm done to her that I did not prevent. 83
You bequeathed your attention generously, though seeming to hold back something of yourself - the part of you that watched and observed, that viewed everything with the cold eye of the writer. It was something I recognised in myself too, the urge to scurry back to my bedroom to write things down. 86
(...) would it really have brought her the happiness she though it would? She had fixed her sights so determinedly on that horizon, she could never admit the possibility that it might be a mirage. Or a land very different from the one of her imaginings. 90
II lay there with your hand in mine, as if my touch could heal you, and you held it tightly and talked and talked. How we are wounded into storytelling, how we circle old injuries all our lives. 96
Though Leo has been dead for only only a year our marriage already feels like a mirage I walked through in the desert. 98
I loved being in bed with you, but I missed the world we saw together. 100
Such vast distances between us and yet your voice (104) so close it felt you were there with me, my head resting on your chest. I thought of the great undersea cables connecting us; miraculous, implausible - like love itself. 105
In many ways what we had was a relationship wrought from words, constructed out of imagination and invention, but it was, from the very first, grounded in the flesh. I thought I would have more time with your body. Such pleasures, you and I have had together, and somehow I always imagined there would be more. That there would be more years of exploring the intricate map of you, every line and curve of your body. I loved every change in you (..). as you got older. (...) I would love you still in older age, when your hair grew thinner and your body more vulnerable. I can't imagine a world in which you do not exist. Where, after ever separation, every absence, I know you will take my face between your hands once more and kiss me. 110
We so rarely slept or woke together. Sometimes we dozed for half an hour in the afternoon and I cherished the feeling of drifting off in your arms, of feeling your body loosen. 110
How small we are against the world, and how easily injured. 111
The cups of tea and bowls of soup. A hand on your brow, a blanket for your lap. I wanted to do these things for you. 111
Sylvia was more herself than anyone I knew and yet something about her was not entirely fixed. She was open to the world, to (119) the life-altering force of art or music, or another person. 120
How do we become what we are, Max? Those of us who are not forced into exile, but choose it for ourselves? 120
And me, loving the place I grew up, but with the spectre of England as the true home, the true country, hovering always over me. And then to arrive here at last and find that it wasn't home at all. 121
'I'm not sure,' I said, 'that anyone ever loves the life they imagined.' 121
A rare burst of afternoon sunlight pours through the front windows, flooding the room and giving everything a burnished glow. 124
He described the beauty of the house, which had been in his mother's family for generations, and where he had spent all his childhood summers. 133
Yeats was wrong, the novelist said, pulling on his overcoat, it was not a choice between perfection of the life and perfection of the work; the two were inextricably intertwined. 161
... is this not what we do, all of us who write? Sift through the muck of life for material, transforming and embellishing as we see fit, profiting from the pain of others, from our own pain. 162
We never escape the injuries done to us by history. 163
I began to think that perhaps we could not have anything more than we did. That it was not possible for us to both to feel and fulfill our desires. Perhaps it was only distance and longing that kept us bound together. Did you see it in those terms, Max? Did you ever imagine a real life with me? 164
For most of my life I clung to the belief that I contained some glimmer of greatness. I think all writers - perhaps all artists - must secretly believe this. To carry on through difficulties, we need to sustain the illusion that the work is essential, that we have somehow been marked out to impose our own particular vision on the world. 167
I had the overwhelming feeling that the shell of my self might crack at any moment. That nothing was safe anymore. 167
Hello, darling, you would say when I picked up the phone, and a flood of love and longing would come over me. 168
And me, waiting for your call, your visit, for you to find time. Suspended lives. Do men ever wait like this? I can't imagine it. What if we simply refused to wait anymore, if we turned our backs and walked away into our own lives, leaving you to watch us recede? But to do that I would need to make you less essential to me. And I didn't know, Max, how that was possible. 169
In the late afternoons we lay by the pool, the light around us so thick and golden it felt like a touchable thing. 174
But I did not say this to you. There is much I did not say. 175
Some of the pages were turned down; you always did this to books as a way of flagging a particular line of poem you loved. 176
It was always just you and me, closeted together in our own universe. How well can you know someone in one room, Philip Roth wrote. 180
'All my love,' you signed your letters. But where was that love, Max? What did it mean? 183
Even in the years we did not speak I wrote to you, though I did not send those letters. 188
Proust did warn, after all, that we should be wary of searching for the realities that hide behind our fantasies, the actualities inevitably proving dissatisfying. 189
Of course, this knowledge of Leo was a product of my imagination. I knew him in the way I might claim I knew a character in a well-loved novel, which is to say only as something I had invented, with a few pegs on which to hang my imaginings. 192
"Few buildings, few lives /
Are built so well even their ruins are beautiful."
- María José Navia
'No, don't be sorry. It's so interesting, what lodges in the mind.' 197
To live always between two worlds and destroy your ability to be fully at home in either - it seemed a terrible fate, like a cruel curse of the gods. And yet how many of us live like that. We are exiled, or we exile ourselves, or we simply fail to choose. 198
.. because of course fate resides in Baci wrappers. 204
"Art and love are the same thing. It's the same process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."
- Klosterman
How many afternoons had I left my desk, slipped that coat of the hook in the hallway and walked through the vineyards and fields surrounding the house, my hands thrust deep in my pockets, head down, the dream of the work still strong in me. 207
Despite all the distances and absences between us, I always felt beloved by you. 211
'There's a wonderful quote about translation. It says the beautiful ones are never faithful and the faithful ones are never beautiful.' 215
Faithless quotes
But I could hardly complain, for is this not what we do, all of us who write? Sifting thought the muck of life for material, transforming and embellishing as we see fit, profiting from the pain of others, from our own pain. Not so many years I late I would do the same thing to you Max, after all. 162
We never escape the injuries done to us by history. 163
It was you, Max, who kept me away from other people. I had loved you for nearly all my adult life and that love had slowly begun to alter me. What was between us, provisional and secret as it was, was turning me into someone I had never expected to become. 162
It had never been overtly discussed, but so full of stunned intimacy had the affair been, so engulfing and luminous those weeks in Italy, that she considered the transformation of your relationship into something more permanent was inevitable. 173
In the late afternoon we lay by the pool, the light around us so thick and golden that it felt like a touchable thing. It was miraculous to wake in the night and see you beside me, to stare at your face and watch the rise of your chest as you breathed. To drink coffee with you in the mornings and listen to the fall of the water as you showered. 174
But this I did not say to you. There is so much I did not say. 175
Leo had learned passable Hindi and Nepali from all his years of work in those countries, but he always said he felt himself to be a different person when he spoke them. Not because there was any essential difference, but because it was so much harder for him to bring his true self to the surface in a language that did not belong to him. No matter how fluent he became, the nuances would always elude him. And he could never be funny in any language except English, not even French, which he spoke fairly well. 216
He asked me which language I felt most myself in, and could not think of how to answer him. How much of ourselves are we ever truly able to reveal in any language? In many ways I felt most myself when I was with you, Max, but of course I could not say that to Leo. 216
You did not ask me what I was doing in Bombay and I felt again that little ripple of resentment - that you were not interested in the real shape of my life. As long as I materialised before you, a vision of beauty and charm, you did not really need to know the details. 232
You covered your eyes with your hand for a moment ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry too.’ What clichés we are reduced to. I should have read you a poem, I should have been able to wrap language around all that was happening. But we just sat there, wordless, on the wall by the sea. 234
There was a small prick of resentment in Lucian’s tone during this brief discussion. It was barely perceptible to others, but I saw the swift change in my brother’s internal weather. He had never liked to be criticised. 245
… I realised that U need to write about you. I stood up, walked back to the hotel and opened a page of my notebook.
It was you, Max, after all, who said that works of literature are like crystallised twigs, hardened remains of our former lives. 257
Or perhaps not anger exactly, but more of a wonder bitterness, for what is anger ever really but pain? 257
‘No,’ Sylvia said. ‘In the catalogue of life’s experiences, it’s not one that I regret.’ 263
It had baffled you, this insistence on living in the present. It was you, after all, who once wrote that the appointments we have to keep in the past are just as important as those we might have in the future. 264
… every attempt to understand someone else is full of occlusions. That every life is essentially unknowable. 265
If only all difficult knowledge came to us aslant, could be tempered and gently told. 268
I wanted whatever sorrows she had to be ordinary ones 269
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 6, 2023
“What did you really wish for Max? That I should drift through the world unencumbered, while you returned after every meeting to the crucible of your family? Thos trains bearing you away from me at station after station took you back to Clara and to Ellen, to the drawing room of the vicarage, a good coal fire burning, your jacket hung over the back of the chair where you had left it, a plate of food kept for you on the counter.” Cressida is writing a long letter to her recently deceased lover. She has had an affair with him for year and years – since she was 20 and he 36. They are both successful writers – he more than she – and he has a wife and an adopted child.
The novel is written in the first person and addressed to Max, a renowned German-born writer. When it opens, Cressida has just learnt of Max’s recent death and has fled to his hometown of Dunwich in Suffolk with seven-year-old Flora, whose relationship to her is unclear. Dunwich is where Max lived and where Max’s wife and grown-up daughter still live. Cressida proceeds to tell the story of their relationship, and also of her family and of Flora.
It's a little plodding at the beginning but settles into a seductive groove over time and is very real in the way that it described the role of a “shadow bride” as Cressida terms herself. She writes very convincingly of the extreme pain and extreme pleasure of a long-term affair and its impact on all. At one stage late in the book, she comes face to face with Max’s widow and reflects “I wonder if perhaps I had been wrong about Clara all these years. Imagining her so blindly content, knitting her sweaters and baking her pies, when all along she might have been miserable. You and I , Max, were the ones who were supposed to have the claims on unhappiness, on longing, on sacrifice. Clara was the one whose happiness we were supposed to be protecting, and yet what if it was all for nothing?“
I felt that Max was not developed enough as a character. Or maybe not as a seductive character – here is one reviewer’s perspective: “Cressida continually acknowledges the power imbalance in their relationship and illuminates several details that, taken together, form a fairly negative character assessment of Max, suggesting someone who is more of a tedious bore than an irresistibly magnetic lover.” (https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...)
Then at the end of the book, Nelson says that she based Max on a real person: Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, better known as W G Sebald, the famed German writer (who was also known as Max). He is a writer that I haven’t read and know nothing of – so maybe in a more literate person’s reading, the character of Max would be a more complex and interesting one. I just found him dreary and longed for Cressida to leave him. But maybe that was intended by the author too. Its true that its often hard to see what people are attracted to in their partners.
Ultimately, it is a very convincing book about what it is like to have an affair. I agreed with this reviewer: “While at times the plot of the novel meanders, the prose is always beautiful, and Cressida’s calming voice speaks softly and evenly to the reader as if reading them a bedtime story. The novel is curiously detached, most of the action being told to the reader rather than shown, in a way which would make most creative writing teachers recoil; but for this book it seems to work. Nelson is measured and consistent in her approach.” (https://www.theaureview.com/books/boo...)
The novel is written in the first person and addressed to Max, a renowned German-born writer. When it opens, Cressida has just learnt of Max’s recent death and has fled to his hometown of Dunwich in Suffolk with seven-year-old Flora, whose relationship to her is unclear. Dunwich is where Max lived and where Max’s wife and grown-up daughter still live. Cressida proceeds to tell the story of their relationship, and also of her family and of Flora.
It's a little plodding at the beginning but settles into a seductive groove over time and is very real in the way that it described the role of a “shadow bride” as Cressida terms herself. She writes very convincingly of the extreme pain and extreme pleasure of a long-term affair and its impact on all. At one stage late in the book, she comes face to face with Max’s widow and reflects “I wonder if perhaps I had been wrong about Clara all these years. Imagining her so blindly content, knitting her sweaters and baking her pies, when all along she might have been miserable. You and I , Max, were the ones who were supposed to have the claims on unhappiness, on longing, on sacrifice. Clara was the one whose happiness we were supposed to be protecting, and yet what if it was all for nothing?“
I felt that Max was not developed enough as a character. Or maybe not as a seductive character – here is one reviewer’s perspective: “Cressida continually acknowledges the power imbalance in their relationship and illuminates several details that, taken together, form a fairly negative character assessment of Max, suggesting someone who is more of a tedious bore than an irresistibly magnetic lover.” (https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...)
Then at the end of the book, Nelson says that she based Max on a real person: Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, better known as W G Sebald, the famed German writer (who was also known as Max). He is a writer that I haven’t read and know nothing of – so maybe in a more literate person’s reading, the character of Max would be a more complex and interesting one. I just found him dreary and longed for Cressida to leave him. But maybe that was intended by the author too. Its true that its often hard to see what people are attracted to in their partners.
Ultimately, it is a very convincing book about what it is like to have an affair. I agreed with this reviewer: “While at times the plot of the novel meanders, the prose is always beautiful, and Cressida’s calming voice speaks softly and evenly to the reader as if reading them a bedtime story. The novel is curiously detached, most of the action being told to the reader rather than shown, in a way which would make most creative writing teachers recoil; but for this book it seems to work. Nelson is measured and consistent in her approach.” (https://www.theaureview.com/books/boo...)
April 24, 2023
“At times, Max, I felt you had a hold over me so strong that it threatened to annihilate me…But there are ways to immolate yourself when you are still alive.” So wrote Cressida about her recently deceased lover of many decades, Max, a much older married man she had first met at age eighteen. Their secret affair dominated her life, her retelling of their intimate story the focus of Nelson’s novel. Cressida’s “eulogy” to Max, her contemplation of their love, her sacrifices and the deceptions attached to sustaining their connection, portray a passionate and poignant study of their intense relationship and its impact on how Cressida comes to see herself.
Nelson skilfully inhabits Cressida and her grief, the character’s self-assessment meticulously recorded as she reveals her “capacity for love and deception” in her relationships. I found the absence of melodrama surprising in a novel of such intense emotion, a credit to Nelson’s literary skill. As Cressida moves through her life, she relates her search for peace of mind, perhaps in marrying Leo sacrificing the intensity of her passion for Max to achieve stability.
There is much more in this novel than the recording of a passionate love affair. I was fascinated by the discussions of literature, family, and what “survives mortality” (Michael Cunninham). Perhaps not my choice for winner of The Age Book of the Year 2023, but a worthy contender, nevertheless.
Nelson skilfully inhabits Cressida and her grief, the character’s self-assessment meticulously recorded as she reveals her “capacity for love and deception” in her relationships. I found the absence of melodrama surprising in a novel of such intense emotion, a credit to Nelson’s literary skill. As Cressida moves through her life, she relates her search for peace of mind, perhaps in marrying Leo sacrificing the intensity of her passion for Max to achieve stability.
There is much more in this novel than the recording of a passionate love affair. I was fascinated by the discussions of literature, family, and what “survives mortality” (Michael Cunninham). Perhaps not my choice for winner of The Age Book of the Year 2023, but a worthy contender, nevertheless.
April 1, 2023
A difficult book to assess. Almost flawless writing, well-constructed and thought provoking on the one hand. On the other, the theme (young beautiful woman falls for older wiser powerful man) is hardly original, the inner ruminations become overwrought and tedious after a while, and the characters, both the protagonist and her lover are not empathetic in any way. Cressida is a woman who seems completely at a loss as to her own beliefs, principles or motivations, other than the irresistible urge to satisfy her desires. Lies are her stock in trade and at the end of the book she doesn't appear to have undergone any kind of moral transformation, even in regard to the child, the custody of whom she achieved through lying. The male character, allegedly based on W.G. Sebald, is impenetrable, lost somewhere in his intellect and we're given no insight into why, given his relentlessly chauvinistic behaviour, Cressida found him so utterly irresistible over so many years. The fact that most of the narrative is written as a "letter" to Max, from the present looking back means that we're forever distanced from the story, seeing it through the lens of both the narrator and the author at the same time. And I loathe the cover. It might have been alright for a novel called "Hopeless" but even then ....
September 21, 2022
When I first picked up this book I realised it was a slow read and needed time dedicated to it so I put it away. I have picked it up again this week on holidays and am so glad I allowed the time and space for this story.
This is a book about love and overs and choices and writing and how who we are influences who we become. The protagonist refers to a musicality of writing and this book is like a melody- the interweaving between points in time and characters flows so seductively and weaves gorgeous novel.
Nelson has cleverly written characters who are neither likeable nor un-likeable. They are flawed, often selfish and make choices we don’t necessarily agree with but they are not inherently bad.
We know from the start that both the major loves of the protagonists life are dead and she is now with a child- but whose child we don’t know. As the story unfolds we get to know all the characters and their histories until it all comes together at the end.
Highly recommend but do so when. You have time to appreciate Nelson’s stunning writing style.
This is a book about love and overs and choices and writing and how who we are influences who we become. The protagonist refers to a musicality of writing and this book is like a melody- the interweaving between points in time and characters flows so seductively and weaves gorgeous novel.
Nelson has cleverly written characters who are neither likeable nor un-likeable. They are flawed, often selfish and make choices we don’t necessarily agree with but they are not inherently bad.
We know from the start that both the major loves of the protagonists life are dead and she is now with a child- but whose child we don’t know. As the story unfolds we get to know all the characters and their histories until it all comes together at the end.
Highly recommend but do so when. You have time to appreciate Nelson’s stunning writing style.
October 8, 2022
Poignant, delicate and eloquently written, “Faithless” is a work of literary fiction that tells the story of Cressida and her passionate yet haunting experience of love, loss and desire.
In this moving ‘coming of age’ story, the author evokes the harsh dichotomy between all-consuming love vs infatuation, intense desire vs familiar comfort, and romantic idealism v achievable stability. Written in both sharp yet graceful prose, ‘Faithless’ is the type of novel that lovers of literary fiction and character driven stories would surely appreciate.
The narrative is written from the protagonist’s perspective and regular shifts from her present thoughts to a recount of her enigmatic past, allowing the profound abyss of Cressida’s character and complex experiences to gradually unfold in an intricate & intriguing way. Despite the book’s slow-paced and sombre nature, Faithless was a captivating and absorbing read. Lovers of heartbreaking romance, coming of age stories and historical literary fiction, this book is for you!
In this moving ‘coming of age’ story, the author evokes the harsh dichotomy between all-consuming love vs infatuation, intense desire vs familiar comfort, and romantic idealism v achievable stability. Written in both sharp yet graceful prose, ‘Faithless’ is the type of novel that lovers of literary fiction and character driven stories would surely appreciate.
The narrative is written from the protagonist’s perspective and regular shifts from her present thoughts to a recount of her enigmatic past, allowing the profound abyss of Cressida’s character and complex experiences to gradually unfold in an intricate & intriguing way. Despite the book’s slow-paced and sombre nature, Faithless was a captivating and absorbing read. Lovers of heartbreaking romance, coming of age stories and historical literary fiction, this book is for you!
September 27, 2023
I had to crash through this novel in just 3 days, as I'd forgotten to read it for my reading group.
Fortunately I found it quite absorbing, despite the generally unlikeable characters. Nelson's writing is artful, drawing the historic threads of the tale out gradually and teasingly - making for a compelling read.
I found Cressida infuriatingly passive in so many aspects of her life, so the one or two times that she does take ownership of a situation are a bit surprising. I also struggled to accept the premise of the story - that she would be likely to remain passionate, burning with an adolescent desire, and devoted to such a selfish man who gives so little, for so many years.
My reading group meets tonight and I think this novel will give us plenty to discuss.
Fortunately I found it quite absorbing, despite the generally unlikeable characters. Nelson's writing is artful, drawing the historic threads of the tale out gradually and teasingly - making for a compelling read.
I found Cressida infuriatingly passive in so many aspects of her life, so the one or two times that she does take ownership of a situation are a bit surprising. I also struggled to accept the premise of the story - that she would be likely to remain passionate, burning with an adolescent desire, and devoted to such a selfish man who gives so little, for so many years.
My reading group meets tonight and I think this novel will give us plenty to discuss.
March 23, 2025
This book completely surprised me and not in a good way. Yes it was written beautifully but I just couldn't stand our girl, Cressida. Max, Max, Max was all that consumed Cressida. It just annoyed me that she was doing exactly what her Mother went through but I feel it was worse cause Max's family never knew of her. The fact there were warning signs at every point in the book made her character even more unbearable. Then the fact she lied to her brother over Flora being his, was so selfish of her. Yes she was probably doing for good intentions but I feel her brother was looking for an out and her lie caused him to take refuge in a religious group to disappear. It would have been a DNF if I had not said to myself I had to read all my books before I brought another.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 9, 2022
If I’d given up where I put the book down the first time I probably would’ve given this one or two stars, but it redeemed itself in the second half so my rating goes up by one. Recommended by a friend, I struggled to enjoy the incessant rumination about her relationship with Max that had no light and shade for the reader, until Flora and Leo appeared on the pages and the story started to have a rhythm about it. We’ve all been there, talking forever about our lost loves, but this book (for me) showed no insight behind the choices Cressida made, and no depth as a character. I know that many have enjoyed this book (including my friend) but this wasn’t for me.
September 20, 2022
This is beautifully written with such evocative and superb prose. The plot, however, does amble on and it is difficult to imagine the intense attraction between Max and Cressida. Max comes across as such a pretentious, old bore. And Cressida is incredibly self absorbed and seems to lack any degree of empathy for other women. Together they form a selfish, self-centered pairing who are very difficult to like or care about. Flora’s story was far more interesting and it’s a pity not more was made of it. The depth of emotion was palpable, a profound read.
January 15, 2024
A beautifully written book full of literary references and lovely descriptions of place which left me feeling very frustrated. I felt little sympathy for the main character, her lengthy ruminations on her love affair with Max and her treatment of Leo was calculated and selfish. I am with Sylvia when she said that 'fondness and kindness were a much better foundation for a relationship than love.'
November 9, 2022
Exquisite novel. I did not think it was going to take off and I struggled through the first fifty-sixty pages admiring its lyricism but feeling quite disengaged. Then it took off and I wanted to savour every paragraph. Sheer poetry. A beautiful life story told in a cleverly structured way and an insightful reflection on the writing life.
November 20, 2022
I loved the voice, the pace, the mystery that reveals itself at the end. The all too familiar love/lust/longing which drives relationships is beautifully rendered in exotic and quotidian locations, with the heart and a quest for meaning as the guiding star.
May 1, 2023
I had to abandon this book at page 206. I so wanted to like this book but reading it was hard work. Probably spent more time on this book than I should have. There was some lovely writing but overall it was such a disappointment.
September 15, 2023
A soothing melancholy that I connected with disturbingly and also didn’t understand at all in the sense of my rejection of its themes. I went from understanding Cressida to in some ways hating her for the same parts that I connected with in her so go figure.
August 18, 2022
I could not put this book down. Engrossing and wonderfully written.
August 26, 2022
"How much we simply accept as children until we learn that things should be otherwise"
September 15, 2022
Very well written and good book to read
December 6, 2022
Did not finish because I did not care 🙃
I love the premise of this book and I want to come back and try again but definitely not this year.
I love the premise of this book and I want to come back and try again but definitely not this year.
April 21, 2023
boring
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