Josephine Hart (1942–2011)

Intense, tight, taut, bleak, painful, devastating little novel. Brought to mind that famous Pink Floyd line: "hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" Our protagonist doesn't know it when the story begins, but he is quietly desperate for an opportunity to feel alive. The interior state which leads him to make an almost incomprehensibly destructive choice is drawn with far more nuance than your usual 'midlife crisis' trope. Occasionally individual sentences can be a bit overwrought show more but the prose is full of direct little artillery shells such as 'But I did not die in my fiftieth year. There are few who know me now, who do not regard that as a tragedy.' show less

Damage is one of those novels that you know from the start is not going to end well. It tells you so in almost the first paragraph, but therein lies the draw. What happens to make such a statement? What could possess someone to conscientiously do something so wrong that would cause him or her to make a blanket assessment like that? The resulting pages are every bit as horrific, emotional and intensely personal as the narrator cautions the reader to expect. Short but powerful, Damage is like show more watching a runaway train; the reader cannot look away even while knowing the outcome is going to be awful. Like said accident, it also leaves its mark on the reader as it explores what it means to love.

Love - According to 1 Corinthians 13, love is patient and kind and is completely unselfish. According to Ms. Hart and the anonymous narrator, it is the greatest act of selfishness one can achieve. It is all-consuming, impatient, cruel, and decidedly impure. It eats a person alive and spits them out again, battered and bruised. Survivors of this ordeal know that they can survive anything, while those not strong enough to handle it find themselves mere shells of their former selves and their lives irrevocably altered. Presented in this light, Ms. Hart confronts the reader with the age-old question of whether it truly is better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all.

It is quite telling that while every other character is named and fleshed out a bit, the narrator remains anonymous. As the narrator does not shrink from the truth and does nothing to hide his own complicity in his decline, the reader is left to wonder if he remains anonymous for his own protection or as punishment for his actions. Similarly, the focus on the sensual, almost cruel trysts between Anna and the narrator raise the question of whether their attraction is truly this life-altering love, as discussed, or plain lust. Is one worse than the other? Does it really matter given the damage that occurs?

Anna is the key to the mystery and really deserves her own story. Cool and collected, strong-willed, maddeningly secretive and yet surprisingly pliant to the narrator's desires, who does she really love? Why is she so willing to sleep with her fiance's father? What is her motivation behind her actions? Ms. Hart tantalizes readers with the answers, but rather than frustrate, the remaining mysteries only enhance the tension.

What pulls this emotional cauldron together is the language. Stark but elegant, the words are almost audible to a reader. The language evokes a clear image of the mysterious narrator, his family and his emotional trauma while building those important connections to the reader. Damage takes the reader on a roller coaster ride of emotions, raising question after question about what it means to love, and ultimately leaves the reader gasping for breath at the end. show less

A Masterpiece on the premise and intricacies of Sibling Rivalry. Josephine Hart carries the reader down many a dark alleyway of the mind in what I consider one of the best first-person novels I have come across since Jules Verne's 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was captivating, riveting, and sometimes challenging to assimilate about the extent to which Ruth tried to upend her orphan sister Elizabeth. The plot snowballed from minor seeds of hate and envy into gargantuan leaps of Ruth taking show more over Elizabeth's life, which didn't seem fair, but it was enough to keep me vested in the entire story and see it to the very end. Definitely worth the read. show less

A very 'cold' book, which fits its protagonist. However, when it comes to hopeless obsessions over emotionally unavailable objects of desires, I think this novella falls into the pitfall of not selling the core obsession. Everything is described at a distance. That fits when the protagonist is living out his usual life, but for a book like this, I need to believe in the core conceit: that Anna is someone who is worth giving up everything else for.

Ultimately there wasn't enough of a show more distinction drawn between the protagonist's 'ordinary' life and his life with Anna. It's all written in the same rational, minimalistic way. A train steadily marching its way to disaster and commenting on it in a distant, removed style. show less