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Frances And Bernard (2013)

by Carlene Bauer(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0547858248 (ISBN13: 9780547858241)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: A brilliant bit of ventriloquism. While "Frances" is not Flannery O'Connor, and "Bernard" is not Robert Lowell, they are near approximations, and Carlene Bauer makes them come alive as two distinct individuals, both of them literary, witty, and deeply concerned with questions of religious faith. The novel is written entirely as letters between Frances and Bernard or between one of them and another correspondent. Frances and Bernard are serious people and the matters they are wrestling with are serious, too (occasionally opaquely so to this secular reader, though I didn't mind)--but the novel that features them has a lovely buoyancy and sparkle.
review 2: This is quite a remarkable book. 'Remarkable' in one sense because, if I had really spent more time learning... more what it was about before I read it, I might not have read it. If someone had told me, 'It's about two highly intelligent, spiritually conflicted writers who, almost reluctantly, fall in love, yet whose personal demons prevent them--perhaps thankfully--from pairing up in marriage," I would have said 'Thanks, but no thanks.' Yet Frances' and Bernard's story -- told entirely through letters, between themselves and others -- is so finely crafted, in prose so crisp and rich and telling, that the novel seems much heftier and epic than its slim size would suggest. The two protagonists are often annoyingly brainy, name-dropping philosophers and theologians right and left, yet by the end of the novel you feel as if you know, and care about them, intimately. This is one of the few novels I would love to re-read. less

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