A Brief Stay with the Living Book

Marie Darrieussecq's mesmerising novel A Brief Stay with the Living continues her concern with deciphering, understanding and writing loss. In her previous two novels (My Phantom Husband and Breathing Underwater) Darrieussecq had carefully and beautifully drawn the disorientating effect of being left or leaving; of grief without mourning (concerns about the presence of absence being so much a fixation with Lacanians such as Darian Leader, to whom, among others, she dedicates her book). And in Brief Stay, a novel narrated by four voices (a mother and her three daughters), she further investigates her theme by deepening it; here each character is trying separately to cope with the death of son/brother Pierre. A writer of considerable talents with a love of wordplay and allusion, Darrieussecq's prose-poetry will not be to everyone's tastes. The book is a tad ostentatious, told in a dense, discordant, sometimes self-indulgent stream of consciousness, often seeming confused and certainly confusing; the characterisation paltry, the focus uneven, but the attempt is brave, the writing vivid, the voice intelligent and the book, while exacting, ultimately prepossessing and entrancing. Marie Darrieussecq continues to grow into an important writer worth reading and discussing. --Mark ThwaiteRead More