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Loading... What to Look for in Winter (edition 2011)by Candia McWilliam
Work InformationWhat to Look for in Winter by Candia McWilliam
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A starkly truthful account of this Scottish novelist's life, including her struggles with alcohal, her feelings of insecurity, her relationships with her ex-husbands and children, and the condition called blepharospasm that caused her blindness. With each chapter I experienced a different emotional response ranging from sympathy to frustration, disbelief and admiration.
And yet because McWilliam is such a good writer, this is an important and useful book. Utilitas, firmitas, venustas, which she reminds us are the three Vitruvian qualities a building needs (utility, strength and beauty), are in abundance here. "Good writer" means more than just that, or evading the common traps of the genre: it means also having something worth saying.
The British literary sensation--"the most startling, discomforting, complicated, ungovernable, hilarious and heart-rending of memoirs " (The Telegraph)--the story of a celebrated writer's sudden descent into blindness, and of the redemptive journey into the past that her loss of sight sets in motion. Candia McWilliam, whose novels A Case of Knives, A Little Stranger, and Debatable Land made her a reader favorite throughout the United Kingdom and around the world, here breaks her decade-long silence with a searing, intimate memoir that fans of Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, Mary Karr's Lit, and Diana Athill's Somewhere Toward the End will agree "cements her status as one of our most important literary writers beyond question" (Financial Times). No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I expected this to be a memoir about dealing with blindness, but it really is not. This is a memoir that seems to be simultaneously about everything and nothing at all. McWilliam covers the entirety of her life, and jumps around throughout. The memoir is written in stream-of-consciousness format, and the tone is depressing. Certainly McWilliam has experienced difficult and tragedy. Her mother committed suicide, and McWilliam is a recovering alcoholic. Still, the tone is terribly woeful. I've read plenty of memoirs about horrible things, and this one is particularly depressing. Much of the author's time is spent analyzing her relationships with her ex-husbands.
All of this said, McWilliam is quite a writer. She has some beautiful turns of phrase. Her technical writing ability is quite amazing. But this memoir is completely inaccessible. The writer seems to have little awareness of the benefits she reaped from growing up among the intelligentsia. I love the literary world in which McWilliam lives, but I found this memoir to be dull, slow going. ( )