Burntcoat

Product Information

A major success in her 20s finances her acquisition of Burntcoat, a large riverside warehouse-like building at the outskirts of an unnamed British town. but i’ve encountered short stories and non-fiction which have touched on it and have actually found it not to be a problem. Twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, she is the award-winning author of six novels and three short-story collections: The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes, Madame Zero, winner of the East Anglian Book Award, and Sudden Traveller, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. But, as one would expect, the novel keeps circling around those (literally and figuratively) feverish months. Informed by and written during our time of pandemic, the November book for the Nervous Breakdown Book Club is another selection worthy of the “club’s” name.

But in the meantime Halit’s illness offers a kind of terrible but ecstatic consummation of their love. Oddly enough, I loved the shape-shifting aspect of it, to the point where I wondered whether the various threads might have started off as short stories in their own right. First things first, we fight to survive, it might be that we have to fight this fight all alone and yes die alone like so many did and continue to do because of Covid19. At fifty-nine, Edith is living alone at Burntcoat, her warehouse-sized studio-cum-apartment, purchased several years earlier with the proceeds from a prestigious prize. They have the confidence of new lovers: “It did not seem possible joy would be disrupted, or that our bodies could break.Storage, auction, an exchange for cattle and cargo brought upstream from the estuary, or perhaps it was used to mend masts. I'm deliberately keeping this review short because I think each reader deserves to experience the trajectory of the story for themselves.

Overall , it’s a disturbing book in many ways and leaves me feeling very unsettled which is probably the intention. Just as with other dystopian novels I’ve read, this one got under my skin and the realism left a huge mark on me.I'm quite fascinated by this book, which deals on interesting questions of art, memory, and loss, and strangest of all, has a pandemic subplot that might turn off some readers for whom 2020 is fresh. As her relapse progresses, Edith reflects on different aspects of her life, memories spanning her childhood on the margins, the route to becoming an artist, and her relationship with Halit – an experience she describes with an electrifying sense of intimacy.

There’s a tendency too for Edith to express herself via pseudo-philosophical, gnomic observations, which I found slightly overblown and irritating at times. Ou é cedo de mais para ler sobre o tema ou terei de procurar uma abordagem diferente, talvez mais sublimada. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited.The upper planks of beech were steamed pink, bent and hooped to extraordinary angles, the lower trellis strengthened by charring. There is a lot of gratuitous sex that seem unnecessary and it just gets too much especially as the author has already made clear the passion Edith and Halit feel for each other. This section of river is slow and opaque, calke-green, with acidic willows above the metal sidings, chained entry points and steps that disappear down into the water. Perhaps I felt more detached because the pandemic described didn't feel right - not COVID-19, yet similar enough that I found myself comparing. While Edith’s impending death clearly sets the tone from the outset, there’s more than enough going on elsewhere to prevent it from being a ‘straight’ pandemic novel.