A Brief Stay with the Living

by Marie Darrieussecq

Book Overview

From the 'stunningly talented' author of Pig Tales and Breathing Underwater comes a new novel about a family haunted by their past. An exploration of loss and guilt, A Brief Stay with the Living is... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571214959
• ISBN13: 9780571214952
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Length: 208 Pages

Customer Reviews

A Brief Stay with the Living

"Every day it's the same story, piece the family back together again: Anne in Paris, Nore here still in bed, Jeanne out yonder". That's the voice of The Mother, one of four voices running an internal monologue throughout A Brief Stay With The Living. Her daughters Anne, Nore, and Jeanne all share their thoughts in the same manner as they walk, sleep, sit, drive, spin, recollect their way through the same day. A day in the life of the french-speaking anglo-irish-basque Johnson family. But something has happened to separate the family, a social explosion or a centrifugal power sending each one off on her own, yet everyone longing to somehow make contact and work their ways back together. This thing, this something, is a force so strong that it has shaped the voice of every single person in the book. It is wedged in between their need to deal with it and their trouble dealing with it collectively, and as you read through A Brief Stay With The Living you slowly realize that they me seem like a dysfunctional family, but the becoming-family-again part is missing from the picture, and since they're all so wonderfully weird you can understand how they would struggle to find one another when so much has to be dealt with on every individual level. And that's what I like about this book. The quirky characters, their rambling thoughts, the lack of structure that in itself creates a new structure, and the shared memory which haunts them all in different ways. A voice in a corridor, the vapor from a breath on the outside of a window, someone at the door. That one. Four voices All four women tell a story with a distinct tone. The Mother, a former air hostess, now remaking her life with Momo, the boyfriend with a self-inflicted gunshot wound that has mangled his face, in a house in the South of France, while she apparently sees a psychologist who tells her to let go, but of what? Her children? The past? The thoughts that travel in circles? Nore, or Éléonore, is the the youngest of the three girls. Living in the mother's house, studying, seeing this guy, some guy, going through post-teen pre-everything else thoughts. But above all Nore is sea-struck. Her story wanders to the surf breaking, lighthouses, waves rolling, the sea, pushing and pulling, the sea. And "above all, avoid flashbacks, backlashes, relay batons", which incidentally also is emblematic of how the four women deal with this... thing. Then there's Anne, the middle child, wandering the streets of Paris, and the one rambling the most, taking lines of flight that lead her into what resembles most of all a psychosis or a somewhat schizophrenic behaviour. Anne firmly believes that she either has been or will be recruited by agents of some unnamed secret service, and her thoughts keep drawing in bits and pieces of every perception she has, feeding them to the machine that runs it all, the machine that speaks of agents, recruiting, speaks in missions and secrecy. Finally, Jeanne. The oldest of thr