![]() WINNER OF THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY. From beginning to end, I thought myself engaged with what we now call the personal narrative. Buy a cheap copy of The Friend book by Sigrid Nunez. ![]() The heartbreak inscribed in those final words fills the page to the margin and beyond with the penetrating loneliness-the sheer textured burden of life itself-that all of Sigrid Nunez’s fine writing had been at brilliant pains to keep both within sight and at bay. They don’t always mesh or make a satisfying design, but they are held together by the tone of the narrator’s voice: light, musing, curious, and somehow wonderfully sturdy. The dog, the suicide, the writing life: These are the three strands of thought and feeling that make up the weave of The Friend. ![]() ![]() I don’t know whether or not The Friend is a good novel or even, strictly speaking, if it’s a novel at all - so odd is its construction - but after I’d turned the last page of the book I found myself sorry to be leaving the company of a feeling intelligence that had delighted me and even, on occasion, given joy. ![]()
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