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L'amour Commence En Hiver (2012)

by Simon Van Booy(Favorite Author)

4.08 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

2746732297 (ISBN13: 9782746732292)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Autrement

review 1: Writer I'd not heard of before. Independent publisher. Five long stories. Thought I'd better give it a fair chance. The writer is concerned with how things that happen in childhood are carried with us through the rest of our lives. Often they are weights that we have difficulty throwing off. All five stories are concerned with this theme. Even though the stories resolve on a positive note, they are filled with loss, grieving and nostalgia. For me, the three most successful were 'The City of Windy Trees', concerned with a depressed and directionless man finding the child he had never known about; 'The Coming and Going of Strangers' that illustrates how an important good deed reverberates down through future generations, and 'The Missing Statues' that shows a lost little boy... more and his impoverished and abused mother being redeemed by the generosity of a total stranger. Less successful are 'Tiger, Tiger' which draws on a faux text on child psychology, and the story from which the book takes its name.The writer's style is deceptively simple: straightforward short sentences and simple dialogues. He roams across various landscapes, like an impressionist painter, adding one detail after another about people, their behaviour and their surroundings until, gradually, his subject emerges. Often the conceits he uses are powerful ones, that enable you to re-imagine things or to think about them afresh. Such as, 'In the distance, cows perched on steep pasture and barked solemnly out to sea. Walter imagined their black eyes full of wordless questions'. Or, 'Walter's mother heard a tiny splash. She was washing her face beside the hedge. The water was mouse grey.' Or, 'an early morning blizzard like pillows ripped open.' But sometimes he just tries too hard, as in 'The most important notes in music are the ones that wait till sound has entered the ear before revealing their true nature. They are the spaces between the sounds that blow through the heart, knocking things over.' Or, 'This man's face is like the end of a book, or the beginning of one.' Or, 'The present grows within the boundaries of the past'. These are from the title story and give it a sense of being, technically speaking, 'up its own arse'.Also on the downside, the writer applies the same style uniformly throughout. The title story is written from a dual perspective, and I had to read it twice to truly fathom this, as the voices of the characters were indistinguishable. I had no real sense of the musician being a real musician or the woman being a woman.What I valued most about this collection were the writer's ability to reflect nostalgically on the formative experiences of childhood, and his use of imagery which threw the natural world into a new light. I was also learn from his plotting technique.
review 2: Breathtaking. Beautiful. Brilliant. These are the some of the words that come to mind to describe the prose of Simon Van Booy. When Simon Van Booy writes, he imprints his images upon your heart and soul. The title story, "Love Begins in Winter," is one that will live on in my heart forever. This is the third book I have read by Van Booy. I am definitely a fan and look forward to reading more from him. less

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