Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“Gorgeous and a little unnerving. . .Reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.”–The New York Times
A woman confronts the afterlife of intimacy, in a deeply tender novel by one of our most acclaimed and inventive fiction writers
The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept.
An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she’s loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage –a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss—make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bennett (Checkout 19) serves up a striking novel about a writer's retreat into solitude in the aftermath of a love affair. Having relocated from London to the English countryside, the unnamed middle-aged narrator ruminates on the past, beginning with memories of her former lover Xavier, a "jetsetting" and unscrupulous private banker. She thinks back on the keepsakes she left behind, such as the dozen roses she left wilting in a vase, and tries to remember the sound of his voice. As time goes on, the past begins to intrude in physical form, including with the arrival of a package of books from her first publisher that contains a handwritten note from her former English teacher, whose voice comes back to her from three decades ago, prompting her to reflect on the way in which the past steadfastly refuses to die: "half-buried distorted things have a habit of rearing their noxious malformed heads again." Bennett ranges freely in register and tone, from passionate desire evocative of Ulysses's Molly Bloom to a measured treatise on violence in cinema. Through it all, the narrator seeks to form a picture of herself apart from what she imagines others think of her: "I have removed myself so that I can think of you which I cannot do while you think of me," she reflects, to no one in particular. It's an intellectual tour de force.
