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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
