Grief is the Thing with Feathers
Max Porter, 2016
Greywolf Press
128 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781555977412
Summary
Winner, 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize
Here he is, husband and father, scruffy romantic, a shambolic scholar—a man adrift in the wake of his wife's sudden, accidental death.
And there are his two sons who like him struggle in their London apartment to face the unbearable sadness that has engulfed them. The father imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness, while the boys wander, savage and unsupervised.
In this moment of violent despair they are visited by Crow—antagonist, trickster, goad, protector, therapist, and babysitter. This self-described "sentimental bird," at once wild and tender, who "finds humans dull except in grief," threatens to stay with the wounded family until they no longer need him.
As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss lessens with the balm of memories, Crow's efforts are rewarded and the little unit of three begins to recover: Dad resumes his book about the poet Ted Hughes; the boys get on with it, grow up.
Part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's extraordinary debut combines compassion and bravura style to dazzling effect. Full of angular wit and profound truths, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is a startlingly original and haunting debut by a significant new talent. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1981
• Where—High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England, UK
• Education—M.A., University of London–Courtauld Institute of Art
• Awards—International Dylan Thomas Prize
• Currently—lives in South London, England
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Book Reviews
Although charged throughout with high emotion, the novel is rarely sentimental. Porter resists the static register of the maudlin, creating instead a fabric of constant shifts and calibrations in voice, moving from rage to madness to profanity and humor. He has an excellent ear for the flexibility of language and tone, juxtaposing colloquialisms against poetic images and metaphors. The result is a book that has the living, breathing quality of the title's "thing with feathers."
Katie Kitamura - New York Times Book Review
Like a book of hours for the bereaved.... Mr. Porter gives expression to grief in all its emotional manifestations.... Unpredictably playful, [filled] with sarcasm, absurdity and black-winged humor.
Wall Street Journal
As resonant, elliptical and distilled as a poem, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is one of the most moving, wildly inventive first novels you're likely to encounter this year. It's funny ― in a jet-black way yet also fiercely emotional, capturing the painful sucker-punch of loss with a fresh immediacy that rivals Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.... Like C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, Julian Barnes' Levels of Life, Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk...Porter's unusual novel puts grief in its place not by dismissing it, but by confronting it dead-on as a painful but inescapable part of life. Grief is the Thing With Feathers is a wondrous, supremely literary, ultimately hopeful little book.
NPR.org
[A] bizarre and brilliant debut.... What keeps the story from being excessively familiar is Porter's sense of detail...as well as his imaginative and elegant approaches to structure and style.... Simultaneously straightforward and mysterious, the book illustrates the need for and calls into question moving on, as a concept.
Chicago Tribune
Grief Is the Thing With Feathers argues that books, literature and poetry can help save us. This book is a sublime and painful conjuring of a family’s grief and the misfit creature with the power to both haunt and help them. It is a complex story, not simply-told or sparse: Nothing is missing. Let it be a call for more great books of this length to be recognized for what they are―whole. Extraordinary is a book with feathers.
Los Angeles Times
A powerful, surreal novella-poem of grief and healing. Devastated by the loss of his wife, Dad struggles to take care of his boys, himself, and finish his book on the poetry of Ted Hughes. Crow (a man-size black bird) moves in, taking the role of wild but tender shepherd to the family.
San Francisco Chronicle
Piercing the wordplay and abstractions and flights of fancy are the sharp specifics that make the family's loss clear and their grief that much more real... . [Grief Is the Thing with Feathers transforms] the indescribable absence that is grief into palpable, undeniable life.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
A heartbreaking and life-affirming meditation on the dislocating power of grief.... Porter’s characters express their feelings through observations that are profound and simply phrased....The powerful emotions evoked in this novel will resonate with anyone who has experienced love, loss, and mourning.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.)[R]emarkable....a man grief-stricken by his wife's sudden death.... Like a prose poem in its splendid language but with its own swift flow, this is highly recommended for ambitious readers.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Porter delivers a staggering tale of a father grappling with the sudden loss of his wife in this sharply poetic and darkly stunning debut novel.... A truly exceptional work of fiction.... Readers will not soon forget Porter’s distinct style.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Porter’s daringly strange story skirts disbelief to speak, engagingly and effectively, of the pain this world inflicts, of where the ghosts go, and of how we are left to press on and endure it all. Elegant, imaginative, and perfectly paced. A contribution to the literature of grief and to literature in general.
Kirkus Reviews
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