It Will End with Us
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A slim but powerful poetic novel that tells the expansive story of a Southern woman’s memories of her mother and a vanishing world. It Will End With Us is Sam Savage’s latest deep dive into the mind and voice of a character, and his most personal work yet. With the raw materials of language and remembrance, Eve builds a memorial to the mother who raised her, emotionally abandoned her, and shaped her in her own image. Eve’s memories summon a childhood in rural South Carolina, a decaying house on impoverished soil, and an insular society succumbing to the influences of a wider world. “A wonderful, absorbing novel” (Atlantic Monthly) sculpted out of an “aphoristic scattering of memories—one- and two-sentence stand-alones that spill isolated down the page like little gems . . . showing us how memory works and how we make sense of our lives, drip by drip and sensation by sensation” (Library Journal). It Will End With Us is a portrait of a place full of hummingbirds and wild irises, but also of frustration and grief. It is the story of a family tragedy, provoked by a mother’s stifled ambitions, and seized by the wide-open gaze of a child. Rarely has a novel so brief taken on so much, so powerfully. “Reading the novel can feel like admiring dewdrops on a spider’s web, each paragraph and sentence glittering exquisitely. . . . Savage’s is a book of the heart as much as the head. Which is itself an accomplishment of no small note: to recognize the arbitrary, degraded thing that is memory, and allow it its loveliness for all of that.” —The New York Times Sunday Book Review “To call the book a novel, however, fails to acknowledge the poetry in its form.” —Carolina Quarterly “A novel written in a most unusual way: a series of brief paragraphs which sometimes read like diary entries, other times like descriptions from a book of recollections. The mosaic effect is enhanced by the author’s skillful use of language, his vivid, poetically-charged prose style.” —Lively Arts
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this slim, impressionistic tale of a South Carolinian family in decline, Savage (The Way of the Dog) again displays his distinctive, and late-blooming, voice. (His first novel, Firmin, about a bookstore-dwelling rat, was published when he was in his 60s.) Here, a woman named Eve Taggart sits at her mother's old desk to record the "figments, mental images, and phantasms" of her past: her eccentric mother, who only wears lavender dresses and harbors unrealized literary dreams; the games played by her boisterous brothers around the deteriorating family home, ironically named Spring Hope; and her own coming-of-age in the "busy world that I have never been quite entirely a part of." Eve's narration, broken into a series of short, associative paragraphs, is uncertain, wry, and poignant as often as it is bizarre: "Birds cannot be considered neurotic. Any bad feelings they have they get rid of by flying, I imagine." The Southern, shabby genteel setting and strains of familial madness recall Faulkner, but Eve's "inventory of tiny things" more resembles the off-kilter, experimental style of Beckett. The novel's fragmentation and insistence on the fictitious quality of memory never lessen the emotional impact of this portrait of a mother and daughter, each compelled to write and each "ill equipped for life."
