Customer Reviews

Diffidence

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4 star:		(1)
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Through images and language, Diffidence captures the unspoken dynamics in relationships of all varieties. The story is subtle and entrancing, bringing the reader into a world of intimacies, regret, and the relief of still having the potential of a future. Great book to take you out of your own world and into an equally compelling world of another.

If you tired of the thriller sex, overblown relationships in fiction, leading only to a killed time and improved sales then try DIFFIDENCE by Jean Harris. It is a real literature with the development of characters, mother-daughter-grandmother-close friends lines, all intimate, tense, painful like in real life. Jean Harris is a master of dialogue and skillful in rendering the emotion of relationship, always leaving something closed, having the reader not to turn pages fast, but to think, try it him/herself. Author's Fire Island landscapes and scenes smell of salt, wet canvas, abandoned piers and subconcsious human isolation, something we are all afraid of and still carry on through our entire lifes. At times Harris' prose moves confidently into the realm of poetic deliverance:

"The act of telling always failed.
It began as a telephone call at night,
a street corner conversation,
impulses dislocated into
wires in the dark"

This novel is a poem you'd like to read slowly, slowly opening layer after layer of the emotional meaning underneath the strata of a real prose style.
Andrew Profer

"Diffidence" is a taut, smart and fun novel; a lesson in the psychology of the couple -- the readers interested in the psychology of an artist-in-love, artist-as-mother, artist-as-daughter-of-a-woman-fond-of-machinations, or artist-as-a-lesson in how to reinvent yourself, will find here stuff aplenty.
The protagonists of this beautiful novel linger in your memory long after you put the book down. At a time when so many published novels are thinly veiled bloated stories that lack the respiration of a real novel, it is refreshing to read this one. This is not an enlarged story -- one in which the writer just added layer after layer of verbal and descriptive padding interspersed with psychobabble; this is constructed from the first beam as a novel and you regret when it's over.

Mircea Sandulescu, author of "Escapes and Ashes."

"Diffidence unfolds in one of story-telling's mystery zones, a place where the battle for distance between narrator and her objects is both fierce and oddly stylized. I don't remember when I last read such intelligently constructed writing. Plus, it's erotic and visually beautiful." --Andrei Codrescu

This is a very tightly crafted,emotionaly intense novel, a fascinating mixture of lucidity,sarcasm,irony, self deprecating humor and also compassion, tenderness and unhinged sensuality.Seemingly a free spirit,an artist,Claire Neil-the tormented daughter,mother, former wife and reborn hot lover-is in reality a whirlpool of contradictory sentiments and emotions in quest of moral options. At the end of the book, she overcomes her diffidence, her overly cautious ways, through-what else?-love.Not an easy read(the writing of Jean Harris is dense,apothegmatic,cross-cultural and always intellectually challenging),"Diffidence" becomes a hypnotic lecture, once you enter its elaborated construction.Jean Harris is a true writer, gifted, sensitive , in great control of her skills.

Jean Harris's territory is the psychology of the couple--its gaps and attractions,
its pains and revelations. Intelligently hermetic, she negotiates souls. Diffidence
is a mélange of air and stone, strength and vulnerability. Powerful and sensitive
at the same time, the novel squeezes destinies in one cup of prosa-forte that you
want to swallow sip by sip thinking of lost love and conquered vanities.