The Presence of Absence
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
“Flows with depth and power....wide-open wonder.”—Washington Post
“Simon Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable....wise, witty and always breathtakingly beautiful.”—San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of the Year
As a writer lies dying, he has one last story to tell: a tale of faith and devotion, a meditation on what lies beyond this life, and a prayer of gratitude that may lead to rebirth. This is Simon Van Booy at his visionary best.
“Language is a map leading to a place not on the map,” announces a young writer lying in a hospital bed at the beginning of The Presence of Absence. As he contemplates his impending physical disappearance and the impact on his beloved wife, he realizes, “Life doesn’t start when you’re born . . . it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to another person.”
Infused with poetic clarity and graced with humor, Simon Van Booy’s innovative novella asks the reader to find beauty—even gratitude—in the cycle of birth and death. Stripped of artifice, The Presence of Absence is a meditation between the writer and the reader, an imaginative work that challenges the deceit of written words and explores our strongest emotions.
Simon Van Booy is not only a master storyteller but a writer whose fiction is rich with philosophical insights into things both mapped and undiscovered. The Presence of Absence parts the darkness to reveal what has been just out of sight all along.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dying and acceptance are explored in this inventive and moving story of a man with a terminal illness by Van Booy (Night Came with Many Stars). Max Little, a writer, grapples with telling his wife Hadley about his being diagnosed with an unspecified rare disease. He also contemplates suicide, only to realize the act would hurt Hadley even more. Max's reflections come in the form of short journal entries written in his hospital bed, framed with a prologue in which Van Booy claims to have received the journal from Hadley, and decided to expand it into a novel after Max's publisher deemed it too fragmented. Each entry, sparked by "the drunk librarian of memory," is rich in setting and emotion. Max takes readers to the playground where he first met Hadley and to a therapist's waiting room where he befriended Jeremy, who is often at his bedside and becomes close with Hadley as well. The second section, written by Van Booy's author character, begins with quotidian scenes of a young girl and her parents living in New Jersey, which end up linking beautifully to Max's journal. As ever with Van Booy, the reader is in good hands.
