This is Happiness

I cannot distill this magnificent beauty into any kind of worthy review. This is writing that transcends the ordinary and the extraordinary. What a gift this has been to me to have discovered this and to have read it slowly and deliberately - hanging on every word and wondering how a novel about such ordinary life could make me feel this way. This is prettier than any poem and profound in ways spoken and unspoken.

I will just give you few samples here and just know that this is every single page…

“The world has enough critics, and technique, tone, pitch, and the rest were all rendered irrelevant by the fact that the singing stopped your heart. It reached in and seized it and didn’t let go,. It said Listen, here’s a human being who has suffered for love. It said Here’s a heart aching , and that ache was large enough, urgent and familiar enough, for you all to feel it and by feeling participate in something you yourself were either too timid, closed or unlucky to have known personally, or had know long in the long ago of your own innocence over which you had since grown the skin necessary to tolerate the loss and stay living”

“Pieces of story she would discover intact in her. She would draw them into the air with a single phrase and be elsewhere for a moment, eyes distant and eyelashes winging as an image fleeted past. Christy would gently try and bring forth more, but like a fallen chandelier inside her the whole was shattered and beyond repair and there were only exquisite shards.”

“It’s the truth all the same. And it was not just because of the beaten stillness, the bridles sun-haze, the burnt-off excesses of a Sunday afternoon that reduced the moment to essence, not just because we sat on the side of the gold chalice of that sloping meadow, in an elliptical time, other and alchemical, or because of the overwhelming need I now felt to, for want of a word, fix what was broken, to connect and make live, alive, what was dead, though all of these would in time come to seem part of it, it was mostly that I know then that I was as close at that moment to another human being as I had been in this life…”