Original Bliss
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Kennedy is a world class writer."--The New York Times Book Review
A brilliant American debut from one of Scotland's most acclaimed writers, named by Granta as one of the Twenty Best Young British Novelists.
Emotionally numb, crippled with insomnia, and caught in a frightening, abusive marriage, Helen Brindle believes that God has recently left her. She spends her days performing banal domestic chores in front of a blaring television. On the BBC one day she watches a self-help guru expound on, among other things, the "rules" of masturbation and the importance of "interior lives." Edward G. Gluck, she discovers has developed a program that guides lost souls toward contentment. Helen seeks him out, hoping to find an answer. Instead she discovers Gluck's own sadomasochistic obsession, and his profound shame and disgust. And what they both encounter, painfully, is the love each fears and both yearn to embrace.
"A darkly comic tale.... [that] is hilariously funny about sexual obsession and brilliantly perceptive about the dynamics of human relationships."--The Baltimore Sun
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The prose in Glasgow writer Kennedy's wrenching first U.S. publication both mesmerizes with its musicality and startles with the frankness of its sexual detail. Glasgow matron Helen Brindle's search for someone "who would tell her what was wrong and how to right it" bats her back and forth between an abusive husband and Edward E. Gluck, a sex-obsessed self-help guru whom she first sees on a late-night TV program about masturbation. When Helen flies to Stuttgart where Gluck is lecturing on his patented "Process" for self-improvement, romance blossoms between them. But Helen's discovery of Gluck's weakness for a particularly repulsive form of pornography spooks her into returning to Mr. Brindle. In her terrifying world, pious Helen has only God to hold on to through bouts of stomach-turning abuse and compromised love. As Kennedy charts Helen's course and her flights from Brindle to Gluck and back again, the narrative is relentless and often grim. Relief comes to the reader at the story's end, when Helen's intense religous faith is justified. Not for the faint of heart, or for those made wary by liberal use of the G-word, this novel manages to address its characters' deep pathos brazenly, and without apology. FYI: Kennedy was named as one of the 20 best new British writers by Granta in 1993.
