Briefly, A Delicious Life

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If Bleaker House was about the failure to find a story it is ironic that there is an abundance of narrative here, but for the most part Blanca’s memories and the events in Mallorca are expertly woven through with Sand’s life story. Chopin only really has eyes for his Pleyel piano, which is stuck in customs; there is more erotic charge in Sand’s solitary night-time writing, “the hiss of her skin against the page”, than there is in her sex with Chopin.

I began to think of moving on, started to fantasize about taking some rooms in the center of Palma, nothing too elaborate, just a vantage point from which I could watch the city happen. I'd argue for the deliciousness of Blanca's involvement in Sand's life during the years George Sand lives with Chopin and her own two children; the brief life that Blanca inhabits with George and through George, observing her, desiring her, experiencing sensation through her: 'I imagined how it would be to press myself against her, in between her toes, into the crook of her elbow, the crease between her nostril and her cheek, though I never quite dared try. Sand and Chopin – between them “Godless foreign odd consumptive cross-dressers … strangers and strange and strangely insouciant about their strangeness” – are instantly unpopular with the locals. To put it more plainly, then: this book feels like it has no narrative arc, nothing you can point to and say "that was a real turning point in the novel" or "that was an important moment in the plot's trajectory.I can see how it might be jarring for some readers, such a convenient authorial contrivance as it is. Stevens (Bleaker House) movingly interweaves her love life with that of 19th-century English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell in this lyrical work. Stevens appeared on BBC Radio 4's Open Book in January 2023, where she and Tom Crewe "discuss[ed] drawing creatively on marginal - and radical - LGBTQ voices from the 19th century". No standard lodging house would accept their custom and they were forced to rent barely-habitable cells in a former monastery The Charterhouse.

And yet none of it comes together to form a story that is in any way rewarding or gratifying to read.Blanca falls in love immediately with George, a mysterious woman who wears trousers and smokes cigars.

The premise of Briefly, a Delicious Life is promising: Blanca, the Ghost of an adolescent woman who died in a Spanish monastery during the 15th Century, tells us the story of Georges Sand, her lover Frederick Chopin, and her two children, who have traveled to the now long-abandoned monastery looking for warmth and comfort that will ease Chopin's tuberculosis, anticipating neither the challenging winter weather nor the impression their menage will make on the local villagers. A magnifying glass, which she held to her face, turning a giant, augmented eye upon the room, owlish and black. She not only acts as a watcher like, Death does in The Book Thief, but she also has this ability to directly interact and somewhat influence what is going on in the narrative.

A shining work of art, but so deftfully, gracefully done, that it was a struggle to stop myself from turning the pages. A young man, or perhaps he was still a boy, was attempting to direct the porter leading a donkey laden with cases.

Three hundred years earlier, I’d seen Brother Tomás with Brother Mateo in that very same garden, beard crushing against beard and the clatter of rosary beads hitting the paving stones. i mean i know that's usually a thing you say about every book lol but i feel like it needs to be pointed out. Whether writing about an angry mob or a frustrated teenager, Stevens excels at conveying extreme emotions, including physical longing and desire . The men—slight bodies, bony, both very short, standing amongst rotting pomegranates and flies in the overgrown garden of one of the abandoned cells—were gripping each other’s faces, hands like masks.It is a terrible, agonizing, unbearable experience and she goes back to the theater night after night to feel it again. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. I knew about all sorts: buried treasure, dead-end tunnels, which doors swelled shut in summer with the heat and which in winter with the damp. It is an observation of creativity, what hidden things we find in nature, each other, to create something that lasts for centuries. Chopin is sick (possibly with tuberculosis, possibly dead, depending on which doctor you ask), Sand is struggling to hold it all together, and the locals aren’t altogether happy with these ‘godless foreign odd consumptive crossdressers' living near them.