A saddening, poignant read
5 steloj
I've been struggling for several days to know how to review Christopher Boon's incredible debut novel, The Passing Of The Forms That We Have Loved. It is an exquisitely written exploration of memory and misunderstood communication where lives can be irrevocably altered by the seizing of an opportunity or by allowing it to pass by. However Boon portrays a young man's gradual mental disintegration with such clarity and intensity that I frequently found myself needing to set the book aside in order to recover myself from the chapter I had just read. As a reader who usually devours novels in one or two sittings, this need of space was an unfamiliar experience, but not an unwelcome one. I was always keen to reimmerse myself into this story.
I feel it should be noted that The Passing Of The Forms That We Have Loved does include graphic and, as I remember …
I've been struggling for several days to know how to review Christopher Boon's incredible debut novel, The Passing Of The Forms That We Have Loved. It is an exquisitely written exploration of memory and misunderstood communication where lives can be irrevocably altered by the seizing of an opportunity or by allowing it to pass by. However Boon portrays a young man's gradual mental disintegration with such clarity and intensity that I frequently found myself needing to set the book aside in order to recover myself from the chapter I had just read. As a reader who usually devours novels in one or two sittings, this need of space was an unfamiliar experience, but not an unwelcome one. I was always keen to reimmerse myself into this story.
I feel it should be noted that The Passing Of The Forms That We Have Loved does include graphic and, as I remember from my own mother's demise, disturbingly authentic descriptions of someone living through the final stages of cancer. I found these scenes difficult to read, but also cathartic and I appreciated Boon's understanding of the way in which relationships between family members are changed by cancer's demands. Children find themselves taking on parental roles as the sick parent reverts to childlike incapacity.
We don't really get to know our narrator prior to the beginnings of his slide so I couldn't tell how predisposed he formerly was to self-destructive behaviour. In the aftermath of his loss however we see him seemingly determined, subconsciously, to destroy everything good about his life, perhaps in anger but also as a kind of guilt-ridden atonement for the way in which he feels he failed his father. It sounds like a grim read and, indeed, it is. I found my moods altered significantly by this book, recognising something of myself in the character and also, I think, gaining a greater understanding of the human compulsion to make striking life changes as a result of such situations. That our narrator's choices seem so unfulfilling and, as just a reader, being unable to step up and help him makes The Passing Of The Forms That We Have Loved such a saddening, poignant read