BIG KISS, BYE-BYE - BENNETT, CLAIRE-LOUISE

Autor: BENNETT, CLAIRE-LOUISE

Editorial: PENGUIN

EAN: 9781804271933

The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept. An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she’s loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage – a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss – make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.\n\n\n‘Shape-shifting and splendid in its disregard for conventional wisdom and contemporary minimalist tastes, it weaves rococo abundance and brazen mundanity into something as porous and unknowable as the narrator’s inner world. Claire-Louise Bennett is a true original, working at the brink of what language can do.’— Annie McDermott, Times Literary Supplement ‘If Bennett might seem at first blush a more quietly innovative writer than the novelists with whom she is inevitably compared, this is not to her detriment, but inseparable from the extraordinary subtlety and emotional detail of the psychological portraits her fiction paints.’— Doug Battersby, Financial Times ‘Big Kiss, Bye-Bye delivers an exhilarating approximation of what memory feels like. Certain specifics appear fixed – the colour of a shirt, say, or an ex-lover’s hurtful words – but the rest swirls about, shifting depending on circumstance. Bennett’s writing is unpretentious and unselfconscious, with an often startling immediacy. Her vocabulary is precise – she finds a message ‘discomposing’; her empty flat is ‘languidly transporting’ – and sometimes unexpected. Pages of spare, simple sentences are offset by meandering digressions full of possibilities. Bennett is always conscious that every moment might one day be remembered, reshuffled, retold. Memory never fully settles.’— Zoe Guttenplan, Literary Review ‘Bennett draws on “polyvocal, and apparently experimental” (note the tonal eye roll) techniques not to obfuscate, but to elucidate the real conditions of living, and writing, from the perspective of the underclass. Far from the stylistic abstractions of modernist masculinist totality or the avant-garde elite, this is the prose, we could say, of precarity. Bennett’s heroines might seek shelter in rooms of their own, but the walls always feel treacherously porous.’— Jane Hu, Bookforum ‘Bennett writes like no one else. She is a rare talent.’— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity ‘Claire-Louise Bennett’s latest novel is a quietly brilliant exploration of desire, memory and the peculiar – and often frustrating – rhythms of relationships. Following her narrator through past loves and fleeting encounters, including a failed relationship with an older ex-partner, Xavier, Bennett deftly captures and ske