Customer Reviews

The Bruise

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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?

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.

"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

Magdalena Zurawski's new debut novel, "The Bruise" recently came out thanks to The University of Alabama Press. Zurawski examines the precincts of truth/honesty, writer/speaker, reality/dream, traditional/experimental narrative, and more. Her prose consists of tightly woven rambling sentences that detail the minute nuances and fantasies that make up the narrator M-'s reality, the details progress the narrative forward, constantly blurring reality and fantasy.

M- is a neurotic, obsessive lesbian that is terrified of her obsessions because she understands all actions change and determine ones reality. Because of her attention to change and fear of change, the novel centers on M-'s slow paced acceptance of the hard fact - a person cannot be in control of everything and consequentially must learn how to interact with a world that is full of unforeseeable events. Like Virginia Woolf before her...[...]

To quote Dorothy Parker, this is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It is to be thrown with great force. The author seems incapable of writing in a concise and/or coherent style. Almost every sentence is a run-on sentence that reads as if it was written by a child. For instance, from the first page of the chapter entitled "The Ham Steak":

"Although I could not let myself stop seeing the beauty in the way that I ate ham I was grateful not to be alone when eating ham because the sense of pleasure that I felt when I ate it as I wished to eat it seemed so great that I was often scared to be lost in the detail of my experience thereby losing the sense of my greater surroundings."

No. Just no. Where on Earth are the commas? This isn't artistic, it's just BAD! That may be my opinion, but punctuation exists for a reason. The sex scene in the following chapter (written in the same style, I might add) has to be one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I've read outside of the internet.