Customer Reviews

Lili

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Abigail De Witt's first novel, Lili, is blindingly brilliant and beautiful. With deft strokes, she paints a panaramic view of Lili's internal world, plumbing the depths of the shadow side of the personality. With a sure sense of craftsmanship, De Witt takes the reader to the edge of the abyss, all the while showing the very thin line between the Divine and madness. Lili lives her life honestly and intensely. Deeply religious as a child, she loses her child-like faith with the death of her older brother, Andre. Some would say she had a failed marriage. I say she lived a strange, but love-filled, mostly asexual marriage. Piere is wholely believable in his acetisism and madness. Her devotion to her retarded son, also a strange, almost abstracted devotion, is poignant and touching. The passionate but short-lived sexual involvement with her friend Paule, a Jewish poet is, nevertheless, a lifelong love affair. Finally, while seeming to lose her faith, she in deeply spiritual throughout the length of the book. Her brutal devotion to truth is a type of spirituality in itself. One could even say that 'to question is the answer'. A novel totally engaging and captivating throughout! A must read.

Abigail DeWitt's ability to weave sensuality and emotional intelligence into her characters is startling. Here is a perfect example of the richness of the female voice expressing the importance of a human being's interior life. Ms. DeWitt cuts to the bone with unique grace and narrative skill!

LILI is one of those rare and special novels that takes the reader in completely unexpected directions. The strange spiritual journey of LILI--through love, war, motherhood, and religion--is captivating from start to finish. The novel's focus on this very particular and complex heroine has universal reverberations. The writing is original and extremely well-crafted, full of marvelously wrought symbolism and emotional drama. I'm thinking of reading it again.

First the positives...the dialogue in Lili is excellent, very natural. I enjoyed the few phrases of French too. And, in the end, I decided that I liked Lili the character and will remember this book and its plot and characters for quite awhile, which is saying a lot.

Now, the negatives...I felt some of the same descriptions were used over and over, like Claude's sleeping habits (swimming motions) or Claude's mouth. "Claude's mouth hung open, pink and shiny..." or Claude's "lopsided mouth" or his mouth was open "wetly" or "his mouth still hung open slackly." I already had a picture of Claude in my mind and these detailed descriptions of him throughout the book were distracting to me.

At times I felt like I was trudging through this book, and I agreed with Lili when she thought, "They were all...concerned with their own separate, random lives; she kept trying pointlessly to connect them: it would just exhaust her in the end." I was getting exhausted from her over-analyzing too.

BUT, I did stick with the book and am glad I did. I hope this review does not seem too negative. I did enjoy the book, and have never read one quite like it. Even though I have finished the book for over a week now, I still find myself thinking of Lili.

If or when Abigail De Witt writes a second novel, I will check it out.

I was so excited to get this book that when it finally arrived, I dove right into it immediately. Unfortunately, ten pages later all I wanted to do was dive out. While DeWitt is obviously a talented writer, I just felt no compassion for Lily, her title character. Lily just seemed so far away, and while I realize this disassociation was most probably a literacy device, used to describe Lily's own sense of being outside herself and her environment, it just made me bored and uninvolved in this character's fate. I just had no interest in what happened to Lily, and by the end I found her to simply be annoying and boring. In fact, I don't even remember the ending of this book, which shows how little impact it had on me. Unfortunately, the best thing about Lily is the beautiful cover, which proves you can't judge a book by its cover.