The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Friend won the National Book Award in 2018 and finally I read it and know why. The plot is usually described as: “After the loss of her beloved friend/mentor, a writer adopts his heartbroken dog.” Dogs in books are usually a promise of comfort, and nowadays it’s not just us elders, the military, and health workers that might know more dead folks than living ones; “How does one go on” is more relevant than ever.
There’s so much of life and death explored in this very short book: love and loss, aging, pets and grief, suicide and survival, career and relationships, friendship and mentorship, power and privilege. Almost every review has a different take on the book—a sign of how excellent it is. Age, interests, and temperament all have a role to play in how you perceive the book, making it a great pick for bookclubs. Some will get into the East Coast academia setting, some will find it off-putting. Whether everyone enjoys the book or not, most can relate to something in it and there’s so much to talk about, it’ll make a lively discussion!
A literal “literary” novel, with writers as main characters and many (very apt) quotes & references to the arts, the book starts as a journal in the form of missives to the departed. It’s not an exploration of the textbook stages of grief, but more a realistic portrayal of how someone’s death—especially someone we’ve known a long time—can force us to re-examine not only the relationship, but our own lives. In this case, so much of the main character’s life requires reframing that she ends up in therapy. Her friend didn’t actually leave her the dog, but the current wife never wanted a dog and won’t keep him. The dog Apollo is bereft, and the writer is also; she takes him in and he becomes the center of both her grief and her healing. Our pets: our relationships, our projections, our selves, our best beloveds. The comfort is there.
For me, the book revealed itself in the last forty pages. The Friend is a meditation on friendship—cross-sex and cross-species, an homage to the souls of dogs, and a brilliant, gently vicious exposé of the dead white male. It made me think, it made me cry, and it made me laugh—recommended!

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A Life of One's Own

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved it. It’s hard to imagine a fresh take on Bloomsbury until reading this truly wonderful novel. With lush and lyrical prose Priya Parmar draws a portrait of love—many portraits, in fact. Presented as a journal/scrapbook—journal entries are interspersed with letters and telegrams from others to others—the story is told from Vanessa’s point of view, and covers the period whence the Bloomsbury circle formed until Leonard Woolf’s return to Britain from India. As is common with young, smart, artistic people, the focus is mainly on romantic love of the difficult kind: unrequited love, desperate love, stupid love, forbidden love, mad love, dangerous love—and damaging love. Of course this is what makes a story about rich, privileged people who take themselves (too) seriously a universal story, and by focusing on Vanessa, Parmar brings in familial love and the love of friends as well. At its core, the novel is the story of a woman’s (not a young girl’s) coming of age, a glimpse into what it is to love a person doomed to madness, and an exploration of what it takes to remain a stable personality amidst the whirl and wonder of the creative lifepath.  There are layers and depth here, and beautiful sentences to be savored.
(I received an E-galley of the novel for review from Ballantine and Netgalley)


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