Damage

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 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.'

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 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 show more 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 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 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.

“Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”

Josephine Hart "Damage".

Damage is a novella. It is a short terse sizzling little gem of a book about betrayal, passion and what happens when your one wrong choice causes your life to go out of control.

The main character in this book has always tried to do the right thing. He is a serious straight laced man He's a A loving father and a devoted husband and he is happy in his somewhat sterile but pleasant marriage.

All that ends when his son brings home a new girlfriend. The narrators falls madly in love with her, actually madly in obsession with her I should say, a triggering a tragic turn of events for all concerned.

This short little book packs so much intensity it is show more astonishing. I first read it many years ago. It stands in my top ten for best books ever.

Damage is Shakespearean in nature, and the drama that plays out in the pages is impossible to turn away from. One knows, instinctively from the start, this is not going to turn out well and you may feel like shouting a warning through the pages. But our main character's only chance is to follow the words of the quote from the book:

"Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive".

Damage is best read in one sitting and is short enough so that, if that is what you want to do, it can easily be done.

The subject has been done before but not quite in this way it is here. The author, Josephine Hart, is an amazing writer. She was a poet as well which explains the amazing writing. I have read one of her other books, Sin, dealing with the subject of Envy and while it is good but I think Damage is better.

For the record..this book was made into a film but I'd skip it..the book is much much better.

So five intense unforgettable stars from me for a book you will be thinking about YEARS after you turn the final page. show less

In this intense and shocking novel, an unnamed narrator details the treacherous and frightening spiral from his life of ease and comfort into one of depravity and obsession. The narrator, a well-to-do politician and doctor with a beautiful wife and two children, has always felt that things have come to him too easily and nothing he's attained has truly been a challenge for him. He walks through life with a deep sense of ennui, content to live his life in the shadow of a deep seated discomfort and numbness, when one day his son, Martyn, brings home the latest in a series of women. But Anna, Martyn's new girlfriend, is different, and the narrator immediately takes notice of her in some disturbing ways, feeling instantly as though he has show more finally met one of his own kind. The relationship between this man and Anna is instantaneously deviant and sexually fearsome, and soon the narrator is being slowly driven mad with the compulsion to possess Anna in every way. This is a serious problem, for Martyn has marriage in mind, and though he allows Anna the freedom that she needs to be who she is, he doesn't realize that she is abusing his trust. As the narrator becomes more and more obsessed with this odd woman, whom his wife also feels strangely about, his life begins to crumple and distort in a series of events that will shatter not only him his family, but anyone connected to Anna as well. Deeply physiologically disturbing, this close and spare novel immediately grabs you in its teeth and shakes you, until finally you are left spent and breathless, marveling at the cruelty and deception within it.

From the moment I began this book, there was a dark and portentous feeling surrounding me as I read. I think part of this comes from the fact that Hart knows her material and is able to be lush and spare at the same time, creating a sense of confinement and dread within the narrator's confession. For that is truly what this book really is, a confession of the dark misdeeds that the narrator succumbs to in his pursuit of Anna. The narrator himself is an odd fellow. He is supremely indifferent to all aspects of his life. From his loving wife to his perfect children, he feels almost nothing and strives to understand why he feels so dead inside. When he meets Anna, he becomes alive in a frightening instant and becomes obsessed with her in a way that is truly out of character for him, and truly worrisome to the reader.

Anna is a damaged person. She says this herself and explains to the narrator how dangerous people like her can be. She exists as a sort of repository for the narrator's growing obsession and doesn't really have any defining characteristics other than her ability to egg him on to further and further acts of madness. She is cold and calculating and seems to grow in her capacity for destruction as the narrator begins to sink into her. As he diminishes, she increases, and though he believes he's in control of everything that happens between them, in reality it is she who is in control. Something I noticed about Anna was how she passively pushes people to their extremes and then lets them believe their actions are their own idea, when in reality, she is the impetus for the destruction that takes place around her. She submits, but only when it's advantageous for her to do so, and she creates a sense of well being tempered with an acute anxiety for the narrator as she slowly strips his life away.

One could argue that all this destruction comes from the narrator himself, that he is, in fact, the hinge upon which all this madness rests. In my opinion, that would be to simple an assessment, for there's something about Anna that inspires rational people to do irrational things. In her quiet acquiescence she gives power and freedom to all sorts of malevolent ideas that seem to overtake people. Though she is rational and seems benign, she quietly unlocks all the secret desires of the people around her and sends them spinning out of control. The scariest thing about this is that Anna knows who and what she is and what she can do, and though she warns the narrator, she also strangely clings to him in an effort to live out her secret desire for domination. She is powerful, but also quiet and seemingly demure, her cacophony of malignancy resting just below a placid surface.

I felt a lot of discomfort reading this book, due to the curious sense of detachment exhibited by its characters, and when this all-consuming obsession and desperation took over the story, it was almost to unbearable to read about. The mental changes the narrator goes through are rather chilling and alarming, and by the time I turned the final page, I was unsettled and disturbed in way that bothered me but also made me wonder at Hart's awesome capacity for creating her story. Though our narrator has had his life, family and livelihood ripped away by his savage obsession with Anna, he still doesn't regret what he's done and still hungers for her both physically and mentally.

I loved this book, not only for its masterful style but for Hart's ability to get under my skin like a splinter and stay there. A lot of the book is written in a very direct and quiet way, but the story is chaotic and formidable, and it left me feeling vulnerable and unsettled in some vaguely strange ways. I think those readers who are looking for something that will riddle them with complex feelings and those who enjoy books that are deft yet sparse would love this one. I know I'm looking forward to reading more from Hart because I think she has an incredible narrative gift and the ability to create characters whose coldness is wondering and impeccable. show less

Damage was on my list as a Father's Day read, if you can believe it. I read it over two lunch breaks. Some father! Told from the point of view of a doctor turned politician who has an affair with his son's girlfriend-turned-fiancee. What makes this (short, only 200 or so pages) story so intoxicating is the slow descent into hell this man willingly makes. When he first introduces us to his life he had been a well-to-do man who has a seemingly perfect family. Two smart and beautiful adult children, Martyn and Sally, a gorgeous wife Ingrid and a stable, well respected career. He does not deny that he had a good life...pre-Anna, his son's girlfriend. Then he meets Anna and all hell breaks loose in a slow unraveling sort of way. Inexplicably show more there is an instant attraction between the two of them and an affair ignites abruptly. While the physical relationship is spontaneous the mental obsession builds gradually until it is all consuming...for both of them.

There is a sense of foreshadowing, a warning of sorts in the line "Can't you sense, smell, taste disaster waiting in the corners of the house?" (p 36).
Anna's explanation as to why she is the way she is, "I have been damaged. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive" (p 42) is probably the most often quoted in reviews. show less

"Damage" is so vivid, the prose so clear and beautifully rendered that it's inevitable that this book would be made into a movie. Wonderfully dark and twisted, "Damage" examines the depths of human desire and obsession in all their brutality and ugliness. The narrator seems extremely, uncomfortably real, his actions entirely plausible. The character of Anna seemed a little unlikely and some of the dialogue was a bit melodramatic, but overall, this is a very powerful novel that is quite hard to put down! I was struck a few times with how much (I think) this novel is a sort of modern-day "Wuthering Heights." There is a strange, dark, incestuousness about the love story. Love and tragedy are woven wonderfully together. And something about show more the character of the aloof, almost cruelly-strong Anna reminded me of Bronte's Cathy with brother Aston as Heathcliff (and perhaps there's a little Heathcliff in the narrator as well). At the very least, Anna is as indecipherable as Cathy. show less