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Loading... First Love (2017)by Gwendoline Riley
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I loved this book. The interactions between the characters were riveting, like being unable to turn away from a car wreck. OK, I was confused about the time shifts, but to me that didn't matter. I took each scene on its merits - there wasn't really any plot to fit them into anyway. I would love to read more of her work. Neve and Edwyn - what in heavens name are they doing together? Why are they married? What is the point of the torture they inflict on each other? As Neve looks back on her life in a desultory fashion it becomes both clear (and yet still mystifying) that deep forces of personal history are at work here. Or maybe she’s just in hell. I don’t know. There is something relentless about Gwendoline Riley’s characters, their insistent cruelty, and baffling willingness to have cruelty inflicted upon themselves. I want to chalk this up to just a case of unhappy families. But this time I found it sort of pointless. There didn’t seem to be any growth in the characters. And moments when they were not harming each other were just as inexplicable to me as moments when they were. That said, Riley’s writing — the sentences themselves — are compelling. I was often surprised by turns of phrase, oblique observations, Neve’s sad mother. But increasingly I found myself wondering what I was getting out of the process. Only very gently recommended, but confident that there are better things to come from Riley. I enjoyed the book and disagree with most of the takes I'm seeing in the few reviews here. I don't think the book is about her relationship with the husband, per se, rather it's a look at the abusive relationships she has found herself in and a character study of her mother. The book asks a lot of questions and doesn't give many answers, besides the obvious ones. In this way, it is like life: there are no tidy or linear narratives, besides the ones we tell ourselves. I found the mother character particularly interesting, and I am not usually a fan of "mother characters". I usually don't like when authors put an ironic distance between the protagonist and other characters, but here I enjoyed it. Is she herself headed down the same path as the Mother? Is she attracted to self-harm and abusive relationships because of her Father? Yes and yes, but nothing is ever really that straight forward. My only critique is that I think it could have been longer. no reviews | add a review
Neve is a writer in her mid-30s married to an older man, Edwyn. For now they are in a place of relative peace, but their past battles have left scars. As Neve recalls the decisions that led her to this marriage, she tells of other loves and other debts, from her bullying father and her self-involved mother to a musician who played her and a series of lonely flights from place to place. Drawing the reader into the battleground of her relationship, Neve spins a story of helplessness and hostility, an ongoing conflict in which both husband and wife have played a part. But is this, nonetheless, also a story of love? No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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In First Love, Gwendolin Riley’s brilliant, disturbing fifth novel, she presents a marriage as a minefield or toxic warzone, seething with hazard, a place where there are no winners, only losers. ( )