by Gail Jones
2007 Europa Editions
Method of selection: one-word titles
First: A whisper: sssshh. The thinnest vehicle of breath. This is a story that can only be told in a whisper.
What got my attention: …her dress, the particular blue of hydrangeas, spattered with the purple of my father’s blood.
Other reviews: Reading Matters, Literary Minded, omphaloskepsis, Let’s Arise Again
I consider myself passably intellectual, but many of the books I like are not. It seems like more astute authors are just as likely to be poor writers (while more likely to be poor financially) as their trash paperback brethren, but they mask their ineptitude with vocabulary, complex concepts, and humor, as I have done with this very sentence.
So I get very excited to find a book that is a challenging read, but with language that still manages to flow, and to engage. Such is the case with Sorry by Gail Jones.
This book seemed to have everything working against it, with a plot involving a young girl in Australia, World War II, two intellectual but shitty parents, a deaf-mute boy, and a misfit aboriginal girl. And Gail Jones herself lives in Perth, which I’m told is the end of the Earth. It all sounds terribly boring, but the text is alive because Gail Jones is not a shitty writer, giving us gems like these:
- …unseemly, but oh! vivacious with gore.
- …to sense skin as a gift…
- There might have been a snake in the house, for all our watchful attention.
It is not plain language, but rather precise language, and I was quickly swept into the anguish and tragedy of the story. While the writing flows, it is still challenging and at times one has to re-read whole paragraphs to take it all in, but this is a good thing. It is stuffed margin to margin with information, and that satisfies my intellectual urges while still stimulating my emotional ones. It reminds me a bit of Jeanette Winterson, who is one of my favorites.
Sorry is so not shitty, it’s actually good.
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