Fforde didn’t take it very seriously, naming the owner’s manual for his car, but Mitchell recommended a book by Max Porter called Grief is the Thing with Feathers, reading a passage from it as part of his allotted time.
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.I recently included a link to a podcast that featured authors David Mitchell and Jasper Fforde where, at the end of the program(me), they each had to recommend one book and make the case for it in some brief period of time – I think it was three minutes – after which the host would choose the winner. Part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's extraordinary debut combines compassion and bravura style to dazzling effect. 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. 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. In this moment of violent despair they are visited by Crow-antagonist, trickster, goad, protector, therapist, and babysitter.
The father imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness, while the boys wander, savage and unsupervised. And there are his two sons who like him struggle in their London apartment to face the unbearable sadness that has engulfed them. Here he is, husband and father, scruffy romantic, a shambolic scholar-a man adrift in the wake of his wife's sudden, accidental death.
0 kommentar(er)
