The Disappearance, by Geneviève Jurgensen, translated by Adriana Hunter

I picked this up on the strengh of a passage that I heard read on This American Life. Published in 1994, it is a memoir written by a woman who lost her first two children to a traffic accident (drunk driver, no seat belts, open window) in 1980. Jurgensen, a novelist and editor, probes her decade-old grief in a series of letters to an imagined correspondent written over a couple of years. While the writing is moving, it doesn't necessarily illuminate. Jurgensen nearly admits as much: "In my first novels I showed far more clearly what I had lost, far more clearly than I am showing you....But a book is not meant to say everything at once. It is already an achievement if it says one thing."

I had seen the biopic Iris, and was chagrined that I didn't know anything about Murdoch's novels. Based on an encyclopedia article's recommendation, I picked up this one. It's a quirky thing, something that's unlikely to get a Hollywood treatment these days. There are elements of comedy, some of it satirical and broad, and passages of genuinely-felt psychological torment. The book's handling of closeted homosexuality, for 1958, is quite sensitive. What a scandal it must have been for its time! I quite enjoyed it.

posted: 9:00:32 PM