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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful invocation of the boundry between observation and life, June 17, 2011
This review is from: The Bruise (Paperback)
Where is the line between having an experience and observing that experience? If an experience is not observed, is it real? If an experience is not remembered, did it happen? If a person has no memories, are they real? How can your imagination be real? If what you imagine has an effect on other people, is it more real than an interaction with another person, which has no effect on that person? These are lines that a writer must face to perfect her craft--and these are the quandaries explored in The Bruise.
Set at an unnamed American College (but clearly, Brown University, and narrated by a Senior, majoring in Literature, who is facing the triple terror of love, leaving school (and thus becoming an adult), and figuring out how to write.
Written in a stream of consciousness, completely self-absorbed narrative, Ms. Zurawski gives us a highly readable book.
Where is the follow-up?
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Bruise is a truly innovative and moving first novel, August 23, 2008
This review is from: The Bruise (Paperback)
A hypnotically rhythmic, profound and lyrical novel. As much a work of poetry as prose, with a winningly neurotic, love-hungry and loving narrator whose off-kilter insights about her own internal world, her imagination, the world around her, literature and art give new life to once-familiar objects.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Wound of Consciousness, December 5, 2008
This review is from: The Bruise (Paperback)
"I recently finished The Bruise, Magdalena Zurawski's wonderful extended meditation on the wound of consciousness (as close as I can come to a name for the--both physical and metaphorical bruise--carried by the novel's protagonist: a mark of Cain that both sets apart and protects, a wound like that in Kafka's Country Doctor). With great precision and insight, Zurawski leads us through the impossible journey, impossible to escape, impossible to resolve or conclude, of discovering what part of us lives out there in a real world, a world that is not us, and how it is, if we do, that we do not ourselves become nothing? In consciousness, even our bodies betray us. We cannot fulfill our animal lives, our natural sexuality without the danger of falling out of ourselves and into the other, and we cannot realize our own reality unless we do. I can't think of anyone I've read since I first came across Kafka who so deeply understood the contradictions of consciousness, and so bravely refused the temptation to falsely reconcile them, refuse to offer her readers the ideological comforts of characters in free flights of Woodsian autonomous consciousness." Quoted with permission by Jacob Russell, from Jacob Russell's Barking Dog
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