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The Bruise (2008)

by Magdalena Zurawski(Favorite Author)

4.14 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1573661449 (ISBN13: 9781573661447)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Fiction Collective 2

review 1: This is a beautifully written bildungsroman that revolves around what Michel Foucault talks about here:"How has sexuality come to be considered the privileged place where our deepest 'truth' is read and expressed? For that is the essential fact: Since Christianity, the Western world has never ceased saying: 'To know who you are, know what your sexuality is.' Sex has always been the forum where both the future of our species and our 'truth' as human subjects are decided."For M, the semi-anonymous college student narrator of Zurawski's novel, sexuality (homosexuality and genderqueer identity in particular) becomes the open field through which she seeks answers to relentless existential questions about her self, her world, and others. It's fitting that the novel is set in a u... moreniversity, because its central question is "How can you know?" How can you know what is real, what is imagined? How can you know what is true for yourself? How can you truly know or love another person? Zurawski's compulsive, looping, at times claustrophobic style calls to mind Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard, but hers is the story of a young woman who must ultimately learn how to rescue herself through the generative eros of experience, knowledge, and art. I thought it was eerie and fantastic.
review 2: My friend Brent called me to make sure I hadn't already read The Bruise, because he wanted to send it to me so badly.I seem to be continually impressed by everything FC2 publishes, but this book is way up there - I have never read a voice like this one. What feel (in sentences, in paragraphs, in chapters) like circles (bound systems, closed loops, equidistant tethered points) open up in a wide variety of unexpected directions - the reader is held in a kind of centrifugal force that simultaneously flings you out and keeps you held all the way through. The protagonist, a college-aged woman named M- who's living in the dorms, attempts to deal with all the social challenges of her age (as well as a relationship to inner life that seems perpetually impossible) after developing a large bruise on her forehead that follows an encounter she has with an angel at the opening of the book. Throughout the narrative, she lives questions beyond the reach of typical bildungsroman fare - mostly about how to love anyone carefully, how to keep one's imagination safe while also finding the love of others, and moreso about how any person ever begins to write. I found myself surprised on every single page, and thinking lots about how the act of forming a sentence accurately (and satisfyingly) is really about the most appropriate metaphor there is for becoming one's adult self. The voice that Zurawski has created for M- is demonstrative in the most actively, groping, searching sense. This book leaves me speechless. less

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