{"id":6243,"date":"2015-12-31T11:20:26","date_gmt":"2015-12-31T11:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6243"},"modified":"2016-01-04T12:47:14","modified_gmt":"2016-01-04T12:47:14","slug":"the-life-writer-by-david-constantine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6243","title":{"rendered":"The Life-Writer by David Constantine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/strong>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

and In Another Country: Selected Stories<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

Published by Comma Press, 24 and17 September 2015 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Poet and translator David Constantine was awarded the Frank O\u2019Connor International Short Story Prize 2013 for his collection, Tea at the Midland<\/em>, the title story of which won the BBC Short Story Prize in 2010.\u00a0 This year, his story \u2018In Another Country\u2019 appeared in a new incarnation (adapted\/extended by director Andrew Haigh) as the acclaimed film 45 Years<\/em>, starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay.\u00a0 The Life-Writer<\/em> is his long-awaited second novel.\u00a0 In Another Country <\/em>is a specially selected collection of the best of Constantine\u2019s stories from the last two decades, published to celebrate the launch of the film.\u00a0 Read together, they show a passionate and sensitive writer\u2019s mind dealing with the great questions of life.<\/p>\n

In The Life-Writer<\/em>, biographer Katrin\u2019s dying husband, Eric, becomes remote.\u00a0 Only on his deathbed does he start to tell her about a journey he made to France in his youth, which she senses is of great importance to him. After his death, Katrin opens a trunk in their attic belonging to \u2018another country\u2019, i.e. the past.\u00a0 She discovers that she wants to know this man\u2019s life before she met him – all 45 years of it.\u00a0 She takes leave of absence from her university department, stalls her publishers and begins sorting Eric\u2019s memorabilia into files for each year.\u00a0 She translates many letters from a woman called Monique (who had turned up at the funeral), and seeks the help of Eric\u2019s lifelong friend Daniel to unravel their meaning.\u00a0 She is lonely and sad; Daniel is lonely too, and longing to recount those old adventures.\u00a0 Katrin goes ever deeper into the land of sexual jealousy, as she pieces together Eric\u2019s relationship with Monique.\u00a0 Above all, she is almost literally dying of sorrow:\u00a0 \u2018Katrin is in a place of her own making, intensely solitary, craving the ghost of the man she married, in a youthful appearance, as she never saw him, except as an image that floated into fixity, black and white, on the waters of a dark-room half a century ago.\u2019 In Constantine\u2019s astute description of grief, all else loses its value against what is lost.\u00a0 He also offers, through his characters, some arresting observations, as when Katrin rejoices in the thought of young Eric \u2018obeying life\u2019s chief command: become the one you are!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018In Another Country\u2019, the first story in the eponymous collection, shows a wife reacting in a very different way.\u00a0 Mrs Mercer is appalled to hear that her husband had a previous \"\"<\/a>life.\u00a0 The story is based on the shocking idea that someone from the past can be preserved in ice as he or she was then<\/em>.\u00a0 Mr Mercer lost a girlfriend down a crevasse in Switzerland and, in his 80s, has just been told of the discovery of her body.\u00a0 \u2018He fell back down the decades\u2019, and elsewhere \u2018stared at his face [in a photograph], trying to fetch out the twenty-year-old\u2019.\u00a0 Whereas in the film it is her sorrow and anger that come across most strongly, here, in the story, it is his grief:\u00a0 he feels and feels and remembers and is pulled back and needs help to understand and bear it:\u00a0 \u2018Though he was the one with the information his face seemed to be asking her for help with it.\u2019 \u00a0\u00a0Significantly, in both the story and the novel, the wives are childless and the earlier girlfriends pregnant.<\/p>\n

The remaining sixteen stories in the collection are so rich and thought-provoking, so deserving of slow and careful reading, that I found myself able to imbibe only one or two at a time.\u00a0 Constantine\u2019s imaginative empathy seems inexhaustible, his questions (embodied in his characters) of the first importance.\u00a0 Here are old men with sexual fantasies, lovers with dreadful anxieties, loners or eccentrics of all kinds with access to epiphany.\u00a0 There are stop-in-your-tracks descriptions of the natural world, such as one in an apple-orchard: \u2018Quietly they moved through the apple light plucking fruit that was shining pearl and shades of red and gold and underwater green.\u2019\u00a0 Water appears everywhere, its lineaments and movement charted with real love.\u00a0 Just one of many stand-out stories is \u2018Under the Dam\u2019 – the Lawrentian history of a love triangle.<\/p>\n

This sentence, from the story \u2018An Island\u2019, gives a flavour of the whole:\u00a0 \u2018And so we left, barefoot, the light of outdoors, brilliant, chased with breeze, leapt at everything, jaunty and careless, and all the phenomena were flung into keen appearance and the light that did it to them shouted triumphantly.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

* 2015 Notable Books <\/p>\n

The stories in the collection are so rich and thought-provoking, so deserving of slow and careful reading, that I found myself able to imbibe only one or two at a time. Constantine\u2019s imaginative empathy seems inexhaustible, his questions (embodied in his characters) of the first importance […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6243"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6253,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6243\/revisions\/6253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}