Praise For The Life-Writer
"Tender and powerful ... [T]he beauty of Constantine’s writing lies in his extraordinary patience and precision with every whorl of consciousness, his unabashed fascination with every leaf and branch of the inner life. His emotional intelligence is as abundant as his linguistic gifts, and as necessary to the story he’s telling, which, at heart, is that of a woman, newly widowed, reckoning with her own unexpected desire for a task she can’t complete, a task no one can complete ... The Life-Writer isn’t so much a love story, or even an unrequited love story, as it is the story of a late, beautiful and painful awakening."—New York Times Book Review
"The Life-Writer evokes both the rapture and heartache of first love and the windswept loneliness of bereft old age."—Wall Street Journal
"British writer Constantine, long unfamiliar to North American readers, seems ready for discovery with this lyrical novel ... Haunting."—Kirkus Reviews
"Constantine’s analysis of character is breathtaking, and his prose is eloquent and moving. The novel is a truthful account of both the physical pain and the mental anguish of grief, and yet the journey remains a hopeful one."—Publishers Weekly
"An intelligent, heartfelt novel about the subjectivity of memory and the inadvertent or purposeful distortion of reminiscence ... Gorgeously expressed."—Booklist (starred review)
"A quiet and contemplative portrait of grief and its aftermath. Warmly recommended."—Library Journal
"Constantine’s beautifully meticulous, subtly rhythmic prose ... every perfectly placed word, every resonant image, marks him as a writer’s writer, but also as one who has his reader’s aesthetic and moral engagement fully in mind ... In the deceptive evenness of his tone, Constantine is reminiscent of Alice Munro, and he has the same tendency to surprise you with a stab to the heart, or to fill you with sudden quiet reverence for unexpected beauty."—Quarterly Conversation
"At its heart ... The Life-Writer turns on the same ideas of love, loss and memory that animate 'In Another Country' and has about it much the same air of tempered suffering. It would, we might expect, be filmed in the same ... manner as 45 Years."—Times Literary Supplement
"Constantine . . . proves himself yet again one of the greatest analysts of feeling working in fiction today, and one of the most lyrical. The first chapter is so shockingly accomplished that I had to stop, go back and immediately reread it."—The Guardian
"Here, [Constantine] has a persistent interest in the discarded pieces of other people's lives that can reawaken one's own past, or open up the incommunicable in the present."—Financial Times
"Constantine's subject is, unlikely as it may sound, the whole of human experience, yet he writes with a focus and precision that opens the world instead of closing it. How he does it with so much warmth, and so much peace, is something it'll take me a lifetime to understand."—Ben Rybeck, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)
"Within the compact dimensions of The Life Writer is housed a multi-dimensional narrative about how art, love and inspiration transcend time and space, unleashing elements that can both isolate and destroy even as they transform both the storyteller and the listener... If you love the Romantic and the beauty of the irrational, as well as vivid, elemental prose, then you must read this book!"—Mary Harju, Joseph Fox Bookshop (Philadelphia, PA)
"Sometimes, we must write the stories we need to hear. Occasionally tragic and always tender, David Constantine's novel is a moving exploration of the ways in which we relate to the people we love... A remarkable story of grief, rediscovery, and reconciliation."—Sam Kaas, Village Books (Bellingham, WA)
"Fans of Javier Marías's The Infatuations will recognize the gradual, internal novel in Constantine's latest... In the best sense of the word, the reader suffers with Katrin as she reads and hears the words of her husband's former lover yet feels the need to celebrate what her husband once had. Through this, she may discover what it is she's supposed to be doing when she's ready to shed her suspended life."—Todd Wellman, Boswell Book Company (Milwaukee, WI)
"The Life Writer is a quietly beautifully written novel by David Constantine. It is an emotionally charged book that delves into the grief and loss of one so loved by another... Through her tragedy and fixation Katrin becomes a woman of substance that you are glad that you traveled with to the end of this enchanting novel."—Lynn Riehl, Nicola's Books (Ann Arbor, MI)
2016-07-20
British writer Constantine, long unfamiliar to North American readers, seems ready for discovery with this lyrical novel. While ill, Eric tells a rhapsodic story of his past—one unknown to his wife, Katrin, and one unfinished when he dies. Interest piqued, Katrin consults Eric’s oldest friend, Daniel, and also plunges into letters and diaries and other ephemera, uncovering her dead husband’s relationship, long before she knew him, with a French artist named Monique. Soon, Katrin is writing Eric and Monique’s story and cannot get it out of her head. Last year’s In Another Country demonstrated Constantine’s incisiveness and lyricism, especially in the title story, which also concerns a wife discovering details about her husband’s past love life. That story, compressed and lithe, pulverized. Here, though, Constantine wallows, and one grows a little tired as he delves into a predictable pattern in the book’s first half: Katrin’s visits to a doctor, late-night ruminations, a visit with Daniel, repeat. Be patient, though: the second half is stronger, and the novel does build to a satisfying and honest conclusion. But a larger problem here is the language, which, while pretty, often feels ponderous; Constantine knows he can write an ornate sentence, and he overdoses on them. As a result, the reader always feels one step ahead of Katrin’s emotional discoveries, the author hovering over his protagonist instead of trudging alongside her; sentences like “She bethought herself of her role” or “Life continued, it insisted, it bore you along through the motions of living” prove a little distancing. You may like those sentences—this is, of course a matter of taste—but when, of Katrin’s own work, Constantine writes, “she takes a writerly pleasure in its clarity, its matter-of-fact tone,” it’s hard not to wonder whether Constantine might have benefited from something similar. A flawed but nevertheless haunting (and haunted) novel.
