Customer Reviews

The Lights of Earth

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This was a great book. Berriault is a superb writer. She draws her characters with incredible skill and pulls you into the not-so-happy life of her main character. Every line of this book is beautifully written. I haven't read any contemporary authors better at crafting a sentence than Ms. Berriault. On top of all this great writing is incredible insight into the nature of human existence. Worth reading for the writing, the story, or the philosophical insights, and you'll get to appreciate all three! Though the story is a bit depressing at times, it does provide some hope in the end, which, it seems from the reviews I've read, Women in Their Beds does not.

This is a deeply affecting and exquisitely written book. I've gone from Women in the Beds to The Son to The Lights of Earth and feel priviledged to have spent reading time with such a talented writer. What troubles me is that I didn't know about her until she won the National Book Critics Circle Award and that I might never have known of her if Counterpoint Press and Northpoint Press before them hadn't had the courage to publish her.

A sense of impermanence, impending loss and abandonment are woven throughout this wonderful novella, an unsung masterpiece from an under-recognized luminary of American fiction writers. The unnerving insight of Berriault's characters is courageous, and one can relate to the sense of abiding loneliness they carry with them. They are not the popular, successful ones, at ease with themselves and life, but both blessed and cursed with the vision. They have seen far too deeply for glib cheerfulness.

Gina Berriault's "The Lights Of Earth" is a wonderfully intimate novel which explores feelings of guilt, pain and betrayal in a woman novelist Ilona on the verge of losing a lover who's taken off to high places. Using beautifully lyrical prose, she insinuates and entices, then reels and draws you in. Ilona's sense of foreboding when she meets the hosts of the dinner party she attends with Claud foreshadows not so much her breakup with Martin but more significantly her discontinued relationship with her older semi-retarded brother Albert whom she had deliberately left behind. The feelings of guilt, pain and loss that these later chapters evoke are so real and true they moved me to tears. Berriault's genius lies in the economy, intimacy and emotional accuracy of her writing. I think Ilona realised at the end that the world isn't made of two kinds of people, those "blessed" and those not. Ilona's distress from Martin's departure is mirrored in Albert's hopeless pining for his sister to make contact and this is what gives the novel a balance and roundness that makes "The Lights Of Earth" such an excellent novel. I don't know if this is the place to discover Berriault. I do know however that I enjoyed it immensely and if the proof of the pudding isn't in the eating, where then lies it ?