Gain Excessive Joy Injures The Heart Produced By Elisabeth Harvor Conveyed As Paper Copy
felt like this might be a bit "of its time" earlys it's definitely a preMeToo book, Claire is a mess, oddly obsessed with her unethical therapist, deeply depressed and insecure, It's interesting to be in her head, but not particularly pleasurable, A bit too streamofconsciousness for my taste, I'm sure it's fine, but just not my speed, A stream of consciousness book I could have done without, . . Do not know why or how i managed to read the whole book considering nothing at all happens, The book is approxpages but has nothing to offer in terms of plot, or well articulated analysis on obsessions, The back of the book said things “escalate” but seriously nothing of interest happens in this book, They say never judge a book by its cover, in this case I was guilty of judging a book by its title.
And I was sorely disappointed, There was no excessive joy, and I was never convinced that her heart was actually injured,
Claire claims to be very happy at points in the story, but I never bought it, It felt like a lie she was telling herself, Like a teenage girl with a crush, she tells herself she's in love, But it simply does not ring true for me, . She comes off as desperate and wholly pathetic and incapable of real, " grown up love", And when one would expect despair to set in, beyond initial shock, she seems no worse for wear,
As some
reviews have already said, this book is a bore, Claire is a bore. Nothing happens . at least not until the end, where we are provided resolution to a narrative that never really took shape, Arghhh This book is painful. I finished it, though, triumphantly I finished it, Nothing happens. I felt like an insomniac reading it, dredging though the overly cerebral passages, The author is a good writer, but I think that this book needed more direction/editing/feedback or something to allow the author to better flourish.
Stick to her stories. The novel is based on a terrific short story, "How Will I Know You" but the novel is long, baggy and cumbersome tiresome.
As a friend noted, "What Harvor does so well in her stories: the accretion of detail, of wellobserved moments, doesn't translate to the novel.
" An interesting and sometimes engrossing character study, Claire is
obsessively in love with Declan, and goes to sometimes strange lengths to
get close to him, Harvor's writing style varies from intense, moving, and
mesmerizing to boring and unsatisfying and everything in between, but the
good parts are very, very good.
This is her first fulllength novel after a
number of volumes of poetry and short stories, She's worth watching.
My favourite quote has a wee bit of a spoiler, so stop here if you don't
want to know.
SPOILER
SPOILER
SPOILER
"She was so longing for him to drive faster that she kept tensing her feet
to urge him over the speed limit.
She knew that her father was dead, but
she wanted to get to him in time to say goodbye to him before he died.
This
didn't make any sense, even to her, but her feet believed it, " p.When she begins to have trouble sleeping, Claire Vornoff drives out into the country to become a client of Declan Farrell, and an education of sorts begins.
An alternative practitioner and an iconoclast in the medical establishment, Farrell is magnetic, unsettling, and Claire is both beguiled and skeptical as she tries to resist his ability to get through to her.
As time goes on, her attachment to him deepens, reinventing itself over and over, But when she has a brief affair with a married man things escalate, setting in motion a series of startling and unexpected events.
Astute, compassionate, and alert to the dilemmas of contemporary urban life, Excessive Joy Injures the Heart charts the tricky anatomy of obsession, and brilliantly captures our neverending quest to remedy the aches in our minds, bodies, and spirits.
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