My husband and I recently celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary and being in a lovey frame of mind, pulled this from my shelves. Yeah, not the romantic tale I was expecting.It starts off with Nina fixing dinner downstairs while her husband, Phillip, is upstairs resting. She calls him down to dinner multiple times but gets no response. Finding this strange, she goes upstairs to their room and finds him dead on their bed. Does she call 911 or anyone else to report the passing? Nope, she spends all night alternately holding his hand staring at him or pacing his body while she ruminates on all their decades together.The writing itself is good & kept me reading, though I felt a little let down with the content. By the novel's end, I was left wondering how these two managed to have a successful marriage at all when Nina's memories of her husband largely seemed to show them not madly in love but more platonically getting by, almost bored with each other. In fact, they must have been bored with each other since Nina recounts the affairs they both had while married (odd thing, I thought, to fixate on as you sit there with your husband's dead body). Nina also has some other strange fixations going on during this night: 1) She considers calling her daughter but then decides nah, it can wait, she's probably on a date .... and then goes on to imagine the guy her daughter took home to have sex with! For real, this lady's husband just died, and she's sitting in this room imagining her daughter throwing down with some random guy! Whaaa TF?! 2) Nina remembers how after the first time she and Phillip had sex, he responded with "You surprised me, I expected your body to be different... not as beautiful" Ummm, thanks?! Why are these two together again?? 3) She also admits that she has this weird thing with her fear of heights -- it's not because she's afraid of the fall... no, she's afraid of her desire to jump and experience freefall! Okaaay. There was also a strange confession regarding an abortion that just had me shaking my head in confusion. It was just odd to me that she fixated on death and affairs so much. Yes, her husband just died, but I don't know...this story didn't seem like a celebration of a life at all.. Total bummer. But like I said, there was something to Lily Tuck's writing that I did enjoy, despite the weirdness of this story as a whole. I'm curious to try another of her books in the future to see how her novels compare. Coping with the death of a loved one without being able to say goodbye is a very relatable theme and leads to some powerful moments throughout the book... However, the writing is choppy and sometimes jumps to foreign languages without explanation of the meaning, the shifts in past/present of the storytelling is difficult to follow, and I never warmed up to the main character due to a lack of emotion portrayed in each scene. There is no clear indication of how far back Tuck's characters are traveling when she jumps to the past. She also jumps between a theoretical past (of her husband in the classroom) and a true past (spanning several decades). You never know where you're going to be from one paragraph to another. I felt it would be helpful to know French and Italian while reading this book, as she switches for several lines at a time without further explanation. Maybe knowing what she was saying during those parts would have helped me enjoy this book more.
Do You like book E Ti Ho Sposato (2012)?
I liked this story but I'm confused about the ending.
—Jansendance
Heart-wrenching and lyrical, like Didion.
—cupcakesandbiscuits
