Original Bliss [Hardcover]

A. L. Kennedy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 1999

From one of Scotland's most widely praised writers, named by Granta as one of the Twenty Best Young British Novelists: a beautiful and terrifying story of passion and pornography

Helen Brindle thinks she has lost God--but it is simply love that she's missing. She certainly can't find it at home, with the violent, deadly Mr. Brindle: trapped in an abusive marriage, tormented by existential and personal doubt, she suffers from insomnia, emotional paralysis, and pathological inhibition. Until she meets Edward E. Gluck.

Edward Gluck is a public personality, a renowned genius and group mental healer, guru to people like Helen through his famous self-help process; privately, he is painfully obsessed with masturbation and self-punishment, unable to employ his own fatuous self-help techniques to overcome his personal disgust and psychological anemia.

Original Bliss tells the story of an excruciatingly awkward courtship between two soul- sick people--the one brutally shy, the other an exhibitionist--searching for a way to break out of their isolation. By turns acerbic and tender, and with remarkable economy and precision, A. L. Kennedy writes about the attempt to close emotional distances and fill physical voids, and the aching need for completion and healing. A brilliant American debut from one of Scotland's finest young writers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Only a writer of rare talent could take an abused housewife and a pornography addict and weave around them a terrifically tender love story. A.L. Kennedy starts her extraordinary novel in Glasgow, Scotland, where Helen Brindle leads a life of quiet despair. Mrs. Brindle has lost her "original bliss," her ability to pray and to have her prayers answered. "She found she had lost the power of reaching out. Now and again she could force up what felt like a shout, but then know it had fallen back against her face. Finally the phrases she attempted dwindled until they were only a background mumbling mashed in with the timeless times she had asked for help." Enter Edward E. Gluck, an expert in cybernetics, whom Helen hears first on the television and then on radio. Dr. Gluck seems so effortlessly self-confident, so sure of himself that on impulse she arranges a trip to Stuttgart where he is participating in a conference, hoping that he can give her the answers she's looking for.

After an uncomfortable first meeting, Helen and Edward soon discover themselves to be kindred spirits. For if she has lost the ability to reach out, he never had it; pornography is his substitute for human connections: "The books, the magazines, I could use them according to my schedule, they seemed perfectly convenient and unshameful. Naturally, at that point I didn't quite realize I'd end up having private carrier's lorries arriving to dump shifty, plain, brown packages, addressed for only me, at every house and research establishment I would ever be associated with." Kennedy works a miracle here, creating in Edward a character with creepy proclivities who is, nonetheless, utterly lovable. And when these two damaged people finally rediscover their bliss in each other, nothing could seem more right or more natural. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

The prose in Glasgow writer Kennedy's wrenching first U.S. publication both mesmerizes with its musicality and startles with the frankness of its sexual detail. Glasgow matron Helen Brindle's search for someone "who would tell her what was wrong and how to right it" bats her back and forth between an abusive husband and Edward E. Gluck, a sex-obsessed self-help guru whom she first sees on a late-night TV program about masturbation. When Helen flies to Stuttgart where Gluck is lecturing on his patented "Process" for self-improvement, romance blossoms between them. But Helen's discovery of Gluck's weakness for a particularly repulsive form of pornography spooks her into returning to Mr. Brindle. In her terrifying world, pious Helen has only God to hold on to through bouts of stomach-turning abuse and compromised love. As Kennedy charts Helen's course and her flights from Brindle to Gluck and back again, the narrative is relentless and often grim. Relief comes to the reader at the story's end, when Helen's intense religous faith is justified. Not for the faint of heart, or for those made wary by liberal use of the G-word, this novel manages to address its characters' deep pathos brazenly, and without apology. (Jan.) FYI: Kennedy was named as one of the 20 best new British writers by Granta in 1993.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 213 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First American Edition edition (January 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375402721
• ISBN-13: 978-0375402722
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,148,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sacred love emerging from the profane: tenderly told!, April 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Original Bliss (Hardcover)

I greatly admire what A.L. Kennedy accomplishes in her telling of "Original Bliss." She takes two characters, each ensnared by a different brand of loneliness which neither fully comprehends, and has them coming together to establish a sacred bond of compassionate love. To put it more succinctly, Kennedy gives us an author porno-addict and a spiritually lost housewife, and develops an unexpectedly tender love story beginning with their shaky first encounter. Further, A.L. Kennedy realizes a fundamental truth which seems to escape many others: fascination with pornography has more to do with loneliness than with anything else! I cannot understand why this book would offend -- it looks at dark areas of the human heart and says, "here, too, the light of compassion may shine."

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Small Miracles, May 3, 2000

By 

"copperphyle" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Original Bliss (Hardcover)

If we do not have faith that this beautifully- shaped, sharply observed, often darkly comic story will arrive at the destination we anticipate, we might well find the novel all but impossible to read. Likewise, we need to believe in the narrative voice, that it has the authority and ability to perform multiple triangulations as it reveals the details of of lives that are lonely, bereft, corporeal. Every Cinderella tale risks providing a too-easy solution, and this one comes perilously close. Fortunately, we and the story are brought around by the writer's keen insight and gorgeous, edgy, compressed, sensual, poised, precise, vivid, surprising language that fairly bristles with life on the page.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great drama, starring an emotionally-flawed cast, January 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Original Bliss (Hardcover)

A.L. Kennedy Knopf, Jan 199, $21.00, 214 pp. ISBN: 0-375-40272-1

In Glasgow, Helen Brindle wonders what she ever did to become trapped in a marriage to her verbally abusive and violent spouse. Her ego is so shattered that Helen suffers from an A to Z list of mental disorders.

Desperate for help, Helen reads a book on mental healing by the self-proclaimed guru Edward Gluck. Helen decides he can actually help her and travels to Stuttgart to obtain the renowned Edward's aid. Helen and Edward are immediately attracted to one another, but he has as many phobias as she has. Worse yet, unlike her, he does not trust his own mental healing techniques. Ultimately Helen returns home, but Edward keeps sending her postcards confessing his love for her. When the abusive Mr. Brindle intercepts one, Helen's life is in danger from his reaction, leaving it up to Edward to hopefully come to his beloved's rescue.

ORIGINAL BLISS demonstrates why A.L. Kennedy is considered one of the top Scottish writers today. Her relationship story line constantly moves forward, but it is the depth of the characters that turn this into a wonderful reading experience. The three prime players all suffer from some form of mental disorder that either leaves them paralyzed, self-loathing, or violent. However, readers will feel empathy towards Helen, pity towards Edward, and disgust towards Mr. Brindle. This novel is a great relationship drama, starring individuals whose flaws overwhelm them.

Harriet Klausner