So I Am Glad [Hardcover]

A. L. Kennedy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 4, 2000

She made her American debut last year to glowing reviews with her acclaimed short novel Original Bliss ("A world-class fiction writer"  --Thomas Lynch, New York Times Book Review; "Like no other book . . . Erotic and funny . . . A high-wire act"  --Daphne Merkin, The New Yorker). Now, in her first full-length novel to appear in this country, the prize-winning Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy returns to the themes of isolation, emotional destitution and love with an ambitious, darkly funny book -- part love story, part ghost story -- that confirms her place as one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of her generation.

Jennifer Wilson is by vocation a disembodied voice, a radio announcer hiding from her life in a job that perfectly suits her constitution by allowing her to remain audible but invisible, protected by an invincible wall of anonymity. Then one day a new boarder appears at the house she shares in Glasgow, a stranger who she discovers is -- preposterously, impossibly -- Cyrano de Bergerac back from the dead. With terrific wit and compassion, Kennedy's novel tracks their painful movement towards connection, the progress of an improbable but deeply passionate love affair between a lost soul wandering the world trying to remember who he is -- longing to be a hero, longing to be known -- and a comically self-protected young woman who is equally unable to inhabit her own life, unable to feel anything at all, until she surrenders herself to the apparition of a great love.

Once again, A. L. Kennedy has created an unforgettable world, not so unlike our own, populated by heroic misfits who are unwittingly drawn into exhilarating, terrifying adventures that require all their bravery and love. So I Am Glad -- awarded three prizes in Scotland -- is sure to delight fans old and new.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

There is no other word to describe what A.L. Kennedy does with her fiction than alchemy. How else to explain a novel like Original Bliss, which combined the basest of materials--an abused and depressed Glasgow housewife and a pornography-addicted professor--and conjured up literary gold? In So I Am Glad Kennedy does it again, rendering a remarkable love story out of two characters who, on the face of it, are not terribly lovable. Jennifer, for example, is a young woman who lacks what most people have: "whole hordes of feelings, all barrelling round inside them like tireless moles."

As I write this, I can see extremely clearly that nothing terribly bad has ever happened to me. I can't recall a single moment of damage that could have turned me out to be who I am today. I can dig down as deep as there is to dig inside me and there truly is nothing there, not a squeak. For no good reason, no reason at all, I am empty. I don't have any moles.

Jennifer, however, turns out to be a less than reliable narrator when it comes to the facts of her own life. Her parents, for example, had the damaging hobby of making her watch them have sex when she was a child. And now she has a few sexual quirks of her own, chief among them a taste for inflicting pain on her partners. If Jennifer is hardly the stuff of romantic fiction, neither is the man who drops suddenly and quite literally into her life: Martin, a sweating, frightened amnesiac who eventually claims he is Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac.

From this rather outlandish premise, Kennedy builds an intricate tale of mad love, bad love--and in the end, the love that heals all wounds. Is Savinien insane? A ghost? The literal resurrection of a long-dead French writer? Not even he seems to know for sure. As for why he's here now: "I must have been a catastrophe--He made me come back." And certainly Savinien has as many bad qualities as Jennifer--a killer in his past life, a drug addict in this one. And yet only in each other can these two damaged people find their salvation. What makes this story work is Kennedy's quirky humor and stunning prose style combined with a wholly original point of view. She can be every bit as tough as fellow Scottish writers Irvine Welsh or Duncan McLean, but she has a surprising tenderness, as well, investing even the most brutal moments with humanity and a frisson of wonder. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

The mordantAnot to say morbidAhumor and predilection for cold-bath shock that distinguished Kennedy's first novel published in this country, Original Bliss, mark her even stranger and more ambitious second foray as well. The narrator and protagonist of this story, set in Scotland in 1993, is 35-year-old radio announcer Mercy Jennifer Wilson. She uses the name Jennifer, perhaps because her taste for ruthless, highly choreographed s&m makes Mercy a misnomer. Jennifer wakes up one morning in the house she shares with three roommatesAArthur, a disaffected pastry chef; elusive Liz, ("who has developed being absent into her principal character trait"); and Peter, a do-good crusader to the Balkan statesAand meets Martin, the man Peter has found to rent his room while he's in Romania. Or at least she assumes the rumpled, ill-looking man with no memory and a faint electric sheen to his sweat and spit is Martin. As it turns out, however, "Martin" is Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, reincarnated after several hundred years in Purgatory, and Jennifer falls in love with him. There are some inconveniences: Savinien is often weak, always proud, tends to go missing and believes fervently in dueling to the death with anyone who dishonors him. Jennifer's most prominent characteristic, she claims at the outset, is her calmness: "I am not good at emotional payoffs. I am not emotional." She responds with equanimity to the weirdness that has entered her life, and it is her cool account of the wildly improbable that makes this novel so arresting. Kennedy's deadpan ironyAher dialogues, in particular, have a noirish sitcom feelAand her beautiful, translucent descriptive passages project a dreamlike aura over what is finally, despite its narrator's protestations, a moving story. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st Us Edition edition (January 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375407316
• ISBN-13: 978-0375407314
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,211,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Old fashioned romantic love comes to modern Glasgow, June 30, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: So I Am Glad (Paperback)

This book is one of the finest novels I've ever read. A wonderful premise
with characters I believed in and cared deeply about. With funny,
insightful, courageous writing as well.

So I am Glad is a somewhat gritty Magical Realist story set in modern day
Glasgow. It is about an emotionally damaged woman named Jennifer whose
life begins to change when a man with amnesia unexpectedly appears in her
apartment one day.

That in and of itself would make for a decent premise. The beauty of
Kennedy's premise is that the man is Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac. Most
readers will only know Savinien from the play about him or the movies
based on the play. But he is indeed a real historical figure, a romantic
whose life revolved around duelling and writing and love.

One of the more interesting things about this book is how such a man,
mysteriously brought back to life 300 years after his death, would deal
with modern laws against violence and the apathy of modern people. Indeed,
a sub-theme running throghout the book is a commentary about political
apathy: Jennifer stops occasionally to rant about events from the news
that she announces for a living which anger her but which she feels
powerless to do anything about.

The core of the book, however, is about the relationship between Jennifer
and Savinien. Even though they fall in love with one another, their
relationship is slow to develop (very slow in the beginning) and suffers
horribly along the way.

There is a kind of dreadful symmetry about the two characters which
hinders their relationship. Both of them have personalities which help
them cope with their fear of being hurt by other people. Jennifer because
she was abused as a child. Savinien because his appearance led people to
mock him. Jennifer isolates herself from others emotionally, refusing to
feel love among other things, while Savinien needs other people to show
their love or respect for him. This is, of course, a recipe for disaster.

Jenifer inflicts pain during sex with someone (not Savinien) in order to
assert her invulnarability to and control over those people she allows
closest to her. Savinien used to duel to assert his invularability to and
control over those who would belittle himthese actions also gets in the way of their relationship to some extent.

Watching Jennifer and Savinien try to love one another when their own
neuroses and fears drive them apart is an intense, at times agonizing
experience. But ultimately it is an important and rewarding one. Which is
probablly something close to the author's intent, to show us why loving
others is so difficult and why it's so important to suceed.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not your usual romantic fantasy., March 13, 2000

By 

Mark Bonney (Seattle) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: So I Am Glad (Hardcover)

It would be far too easy to merely state that this book is about a lonely woman, who meets a man, who claims to be the reincarnation of Cyrano de Bergerac. This is an emotionally complex story with some of the most beautiful language put to paper that I've read in years. There are paragraphs I want to cut out and put on the wall as keepsakes. This is certainly not your everyday romantic fantasy. So I Am Glad is just as much about pain as it is about love.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars some gems within, September 16, 2000

By 

M. H. Bayliss "book queen" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: So I Am Glad (Hardcover)

Though there are many beautiful passages and the love story is intriguing, overall I found the book a bit tedious. It's hard to relate to any of the characters since none is particularly likeable, and the plot meanders somewhat. Perhaps if the book were shorter, it would have packed more punch. Still, the author does many things right -- the Cyrano parallel was well conceived and well outlined.

It's hard to describe the sensation of reading this book -- the scenes seeemed so detached at times as to be surreal and I found myself getting disoriented within the novel. I didn't enjoy the experience that much, but I would not want to dismiss the author who has many good ideas and interesting premises. A bit odd overall, but interesting.