literature : fiction Samantha Harvey’s third novel, “Dear Thief”

literature : fiction 
Samantha Harvey’s third novel, “Dear Thief” (Atavist)

James Wood:  literary critique :: 
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/08/fly-away

How to read?  Or the Art of Reading. sg
First sentence:

“In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, I have, yes, seen through what you called the gauze of this life.” 

...the “feathered breaths” of her grandmother, how her “exhales were smooth and liquid, which seems to me now the surest sign of a life’s exit—when the act of giving away air is easier than that of accepting it”; the way the dying woman’s skin has “flattened a tone—and I mean it this way, like a piece of music gone off-key.” The scene and the location are somewhat magical. 

quote Lorca at them: “Poetry was your only response to anything they did or said and you used it as wastefully as somebody emptying a cartridge into grey sky. The poems would leave indents of silence, like hammer marks on metal.” She had an air of “magnificent poverty.” She “looked out of place almost anywhere substantial.” 

still wearing it, but it was dirty and torn in one place, so that the white of Butterfly’s shoulder came through, “like some fallen rampart,” betraying “a loss of dignity far greater than if you had stood naked in public.”

People who get talked about, who are remembered as “figures,” tend to be memorable either for some large achievement or for scandalously doing nothing very much—for just being.

Leonard Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Raincoat,”(super poem song, complex and intricate touching on fidelity towards friend and betrayal of friend) sg also about a love triangle, and also written as a letter to the person responsible for the marital destruction.

a degree in philosophy, and you sense a continuous pressure of intellectual inquiry, in sentences that are rich but always lucid. As in her exquisite first novel, “The Wilderness” (2009), which is narrated by a man who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, Harvey explores the strange elasticity of time, and our relation to it: how we might carelessly let years go by without self-assertion or resistance; how we wantonly reshape the past; how we live too much in the past (and yet never enough to satisfy us, because it has so painfully gone)

unusual and and almost impossible possibility of an observation: sg 
 the past is where our true potential lies:

There is freedom there; there is always freedom in the past. The self you left behind lives in endless possibility. The older you get, the bigger and wilder the past becomes, a place that can never again be tended and which is therefore prone to that loveliness that happens on wastelands and wildernesses, where grass has grown over scrap metal and wheat has sprung up in cracks between concrete and there is no regular shape for the light to fall flat on, so it vaults and multiplies and you want to go there. You want to go there like you want to go to a lover.

careful attention to the world—from the “reproachful magnetism” between two tango dancers to the way a snowflake lands on a windowpane, “in that ludicrous wet collapse that removes all the mystery.” Harvey exactly sketches a Spanish bullfight—the moment, near the end, when bull and matador recognize each other, and then the moment when that mutual animal recognition is destroyed: “When the bull finally realizes that the man is cruel, there is no longer recognition. The bull is not cruel; why does the man have to be. . . . The bull staggers and drops like a rock into its short shadow, and is dragged away to music.”  

remarkable novel asserts its own curious freedoms.  what kind of freedom each person in life seeks?  sg