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From Publishers Weekly
Smart was a globe-trotting journalist until she picked up a collection of George Barker's poetry in a London bookshop and decided to fall in love with him. Grand Central , first published in England in 1945, is a poetic prose recreation of her side of the affair, during which she bore him four children and he remained with his wife. Many will be put off by the self-pitying solipsism of this brief work and by its occasional slips into cliche ("Everything flows like the Mississippi"). At best Smart achieves a sort of neurotic, erotic hysteria, and in part 4 she pulls off an astonishing technical feat, counterpointing the Song of Songs with the hideous minutiae that accompany her arrest with Barker in Arizona for an undisclosed crime. However, this cult book will best suit those whose taste runs to the more maundering Romantic poets. Accompanying the novella is its putative sequel, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals , which wasn't published until 1978. This brief work shifts the emphasis toward the concrete and quotidian. As a result, Smart's more poetical conceits seem forced. Robbed of the central focus that her affair with Barker gives the first novel, Assumption meanders dully.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The anticipation, ecstacy and agony of love,
By A Customer
This review is from: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (Paperback)
Simply breathtaking - a unique account in magical prose poetry of all consuming love, which you will return to again and again. Almost too painfully visceral at times, snapshots of sheer beauty leap out of the page as you ride the non-stop vertical drop on the rollercoaster of their relationship - not for the faint or hard hearted.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Has no equal,
By Dale Hrabi (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (Paperback)
A remarkable book by a remarkable woman, By Grand Central Station captures the almost hallucinatory, painfully intense experience of a powerful love affair. By no means a "novel" with the expectations that term raises of plots and carefully delineated characters, the book reshapes already dramatic true events into brief but grand art (Smart's circa 1940 pursuit of the then-famous poet George Barker--based entirely on her love of his writing--her discovery that he already had a wife, and the necessarily tragic passion that ensued).The book tells this story, but through a beautifully crafted howl of language. At times, the writing has the richness and cadence of scripture which sets it worlds apart from conventional prose. You can read it again two years later and feel like you've returned to the Catholic mass after years of "sensible" agnosticism. If you like a story told more straightly (for it does take a certain kind of sensibility to savor this howl) read Rosemary Sullivan's excellent biography of Smart, BY HEART. It's hard to beat the saga of her decades-long affair with Barker, her subjugation of her genius to his and to the four children they conceived...and ultimately, of the way this cult book was rediscovered in the 1960s and brought her a fame that would completely eclipse his.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
LOVE cuts deep,
By A Customer
This review is from: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (Paperback)
Scathing, deeply poetic rant of obssessive love forced into obssessive hate. Deep and lasting, based on the author's actual experiences.
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