This is my first acquaintance with Sigrid Nunez’s writing and I am left hoping I will have many other opportunities to further my acquaintance with more. Nunez’s style is a smooth stream of consciousness, an intelligent, introspective, painfully honest stream of the private mind of the protagonist, who nevertheless enters into other people’s lives and stories intimately, even imagining them if she does not herself know them. I am not certain we ever even learn the name of our protagonist, nor is there any sense of lack in not thus being informed. A curious, highly original form of writing, which charmed me from the very first page.
All that said, it is not particularly easy to review such a book, does not lend itself to being talk about in terms of plotline. Yes, we can say that the protagonist goes to visit a friend in hospital who is dying, and stays with her to the end, and along the way, she has several encounters with her ex, and with various other people who happen to cross her path, including the Airbnb hostess, the rescue cat, the dying friend of course, an elderly neighbour and her son, and a few others. The encounters make it clear that the protagonist is deeply interested in other people’s lives, and very far from self-centred even though the stream of consciousness takes the reader deep within the musings of the protagonist.
A lot of this book reflects on death, dying, the end of life, but in a searching way rather than in any morbid manner.
Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling though. You are never your true self except when you’re alone – but who wants to be alone, dying?
p188
Nunez’s writing likes to confront unpalatable truths. The protagonist, on listening to a podcast of the terminally ill, she finds it unoriginal and disappointing:
I can’t help suspecting that, rather than say what they really think and feel, these people are saying what they think other people want to hear. Meaning, what is acceptable, appropriate – becoming.
p188
The italicisation of that last word is particularly damning.
Her dying friend is like the protagonist in unflinchingly facing painful truths – she is estranged from her only daughter and only surviving relative, but does not attempt a reconciliation even when she close to her end, knowing that it would be useless and anyway, not what she desires,
you want to forgive all, my friend said, and you should forgive all. But you discover that some things you can’t forgive, not even when you know you’re dying. And then that becomes its own open wound, the inability to forgive.
p163
The novel ponders the meanings of words, of how we express ourselves – and indeed, the protagonist, the dying friend, her ex, all the key characters are themselves writers and trade in this currency, and so are particularly attuned to it. She had planned to keep a journal of her friend’s last days, but then she doesn’t:
I discovered I didn’t want to make a written record after all. The reason seemed to be that I had no faith in it. From the beginning it felt like a betrayal […] No matter how hard I tried, the language could never be good enough, the reality of what was happening could never be precisely expressed. Even before I began I knew whatever I might manage to describe would turn out to be, at best, somewhere to the side of the thing, while the thing itself slipped past me […]
p181
Nunez, such an established writer, then expresses the very problem she knows so many writers struggle with too: “
We put the words down as they must be put down, one after the other, but that is not life, that is not death, one word after the other, no, that is not right at all. No matter how hard we try to put the most important things into words, it is always like toe-dancing in clogs.
Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. […] These writers who believe that the way they write is more important than whatever they may write about – these are the only writers I want to read anymore, the only ones who can lift me up. […] Language would falsify everything
p182
A protagonist and an author after my own heart. Such a pleasure to have read my first Sigrid Nunez book.
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