Customer Reviews

Original Bliss

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

 

 

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."

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.

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

An truly original voice that meditates on the relationship between guilt and desire, god and physical pleasure and desire, creating indelible characters that you will not forget.

A. L. Kennedy's writing is nothing if not economical. She certainly knows how to put words on a page that get immediately to the point. In that sense, she resembles a pornographer in her style, but her message has much more to it than raw lust. Her two main characters in this novel are obsessed unhappy people who know something is very wrong within themselves but can't find the key to self-healing and redemption. Only through genuine fumbling about and a little focused concentration, as well as the catalyst of hormonal attraction, do they finally manage to have some breakthroughs. In that sense there is light in this otherwise bleak novel of abuse, obsession, and self-negation. One wonders how these people got into such dire straits. Is Mrs. Brindle's problem really that she's lost touch with God, or does she have a clinical case of depression that perhaps some zolof or prozac can alleviate? And how did Gluck become so crazed with pornography? Was he really lusting after his mother his whole life but didn't know it? The author needed to make their stories a bit more plausible rather than just setting these folks in motion with not much of a preamble. And Mr. Brindle is merely a monster, a very scary monster, to be sure, and one we have not a shread of sympathy for, but he's yet another force set into motion here rather than a plausible human being. Still, the book is interesting, and the writing style kept me involved even though I ultimately felt a little crazed myself by the time I turned the last page. A. L. Kennedy, like Jonathan Coe, is a writer to be watched. I hope she doesn't get stuck with the themes of this novel, but does something completely different, but with equal skill and force.

A L Kennedy is regarded as one of today's most promising young writers. Her writing, her way with words, is decidedly contemporary, modernist and may not appeal to readers bred on novels styled the old school way. Kennedy favours the intensely emotional, the dysfunctional and the unmentionable for her subjects. She also believes in the value of shocks, which she delivers with the use of brutally strong language. But you're not offended because it somehow feels right. The honesty and nakedness of the emotions she writes about is made all the more real by the starkness of its expression.

"Original Bliss (OB)" is about how two unspeakably damaged souls find solace and healing in each other. Helen Brindle, the battered housewife, is too numb to feel pain anymore. She has lost her life force, her line of communication with God and makes a desperate connection with cybernetics expert Edward Gluck after she sees him on TV. Unbenown to Helen, her would-be saviour is in a private hell of his own. He loses himself completely in his intellectual pursuit to forget he can't feel and finds unrelenting relief in pornography. Their first unhopeful meeting at a conference in Stuttgart leads to a relationship which can't be adequately described or pidegeonholed as an affair because that would be too limiting. Their relationship is both tentative and desperate. Like two wounded animals touching each other as a prelude to rediscovering their own beating hearts. Kennedy's prose is choppy, claustrophobic and suffocating but how else should it be if we're to understand Helen's and Edward's predicament ? We also mustn't forget Mr Brindle, Helen's abusive husband. He's a monster and inexcusable even if he doesn't know it himself.

OB isn't exactly an easy or pleasant read. It's edgy and awkward in parts. The words - especially the dialogue - don't flow. They stutter and jerk because our two protagonists are only just learning to articulate. The words they speak form snatches of broken sentences because they're as much directed to themselves as to each other. Nonetheless, OB is an impressive and arresting piece of work. Kennedy is clearly an original talent and one whom we will surely hear alot from in the future.

Helen Brindle, a Scottish homemaker, was raised to believe that sex is evil and that men are dangerous because all they want is sex. It's not surprising, then, that her marriage is an unhappy, and indeed abusive, one, but at least she has her religion to bolster her. When she loses her faith and becomes unable to pray, she has a deep existential crisis. She can no longer sleep and, in fact can barely even function. Watching television one day, she sees pop psychologist Edward E. Gluck, whose "New Cybernetics" promise a road to fulfillment. In contrast to the self-effacing Helen, Edwards has a level of self-regard that seems to have grown out of the doting attention of his mother, who, when he was child, told him that the trains he heard from his bedroom window were calling his name "Edward E Gluck, Edward E Gluck, Edward E Gluck." Helen travels to Germany where Edward is delivering a set of public lectures, and an instant, a powerful, magnetic bond forms between them. But Helen, of course, is married, and Edward turns out to have powerful demons of his own: he is a compulsive masturbator and pornography addict.

"Original Bliss" is the story of Helen, Edward, and Helen's husband, whom we know only as Mr. Brindle. Quirky, violent, at times disturbing and at other times beautiful, it is a story of love as salvation, brilliantly written in intelligent, unflinching prose.

Any novella that begins with an Open University broadcast on the etiquette of masturbation deserves three stars at the very least.

My conclusion is that A.L. Kennedy is a very good writer who is a little odd. But then we're all a little odd, aren't we?

Seriously, though, you can tell these stories have been honed to perfection. There has been a lot of polishing.

Like an earlier reviewer, I was very disappointed with this work, considering the positive critical reception it received. Mrs. Brindle's home life, her loss of God, and the essential meaninglessness of her days are well drawn. Kennedy's style seems to suit the main character's emotional and spiritual impoverishment. To believe, however, that Mrs. Brindle would be rescued from life with her physically abusive, monster of a husband by a megalomaniac pornography addict was beyond crediblity. That readers have been capable of accepting this as some sort of love story amazes me. All I could think was that the ending was some sort of bizarre tongue-in-cheek feat. Like an earlier reviewer, I found the style cramped and claustrophobic. Reading the book was a bit like listening to a fingernail being scraped across a blackboard--the short phrases really grated after a while. I would not recommend the novel at all.

Original Bliss is a story of strength and weakness side by side. Helen and Edward need and are hurt by the lust and love for each other. Told in a frank and adult manner this book is definitely not for children.