- Paperback: 128 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber (21 May 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571203280
- ISBN-13: 978-0571203284
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 13.3 x 1.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,235,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Marie Darrieussecq's unique and beautiful book Breathing Underwater is a breathtaking display by a young novelist whose previous two works had already marked her out as a serious and sensual writer of some power. Pig Tales was the enormously successful story of a woman's transformation into a sow, a bizarre but telling fairy tale that spoke intelligently about gender, identity, sexuality and change. Phantom Husband was a compelling and disturbing drama: a woman's husband disappears one day, no word, no reason why. How, in such a position of absence, without the fact of loss, does one carry on and cope? And what does grieving mean without its object? Breathing Underwater, despite its apparent slightness, builds on and further investigates these themes and is an absolute triumph.
The main voice in the book, an unnamed young mother, walks out on her husband and her life (a situation that is almost the direct inversion of that in Phantom Husband). She takes herself and her daughter to the seaside. She escapes, although we don't really know what from. And in the most fluid, elegant, unhurried, aqueous prose-poetry she, her mother and her daughter are all seen succumbing, surviving and changing. Darrieussecq bravely eschews any temptation to psychoanalyse her characters or to moralise about them. We, as readers, are simply invited to observe. And despite the heat-haze, the blinding brightness of the sun, the enervating heat, what we observe are the slow, languid transformations that the coast evokes. There is a sensuality somehow embedded in this writing and a wonderful intelligence. Breathing Underwater almost defies description: limpid but with a compelling ambiguity, often it is only toward the end of an often long paragraph that we know who has spoken; enigmatic and allusive but also lucid, simple and direct. This is writing of the highest standard but, more importantly perhaps, a lovely, very affecting, lambent treat of a novel. Mark Thwaite
Review
"'A haunting new novel from the internationally celebrated author who illuminates those parts of life other writers cannot or do not want to reach.' Independent on Sunday"
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The plot is simple: a married woman leaves her husband, taking their young daughter with her on a bid to escape her life.The husband, with the help of a private detective, attempts to track them down as they move from place to place across the continent. But that is not the main reason for reading this novel.
Breathing Underwater, like Darrieussecq's other novels, wings its way straight from the postmodern, quantum universe, breaking down all physical and mental boundaries. The psychological merges with the material in this hyper-real tale of a mother and daughter relationship. As usual,Darrieussecq challenges all fixed ways of thinking, being and believing. Through the several(first-person) narrators we begin to get a picture of a world in continual flux, ever-changing and never safe, and we are never quite sure where the dividing line lies between mind and world. This is all heightened by the vivid coastal setting. Highly recommended.
Breathing Underwater, like Darrieussecq's other novels, wings its way straight from the postmodern, quantum universe, breaking down all physical and mental boundaries. The psychological merges with the material in this hyper-real tale of a mother and daughter relationship. As usual,Darrieussecq challenges all fixed ways of thinking, being and believing. Through the several(first-person) narrators we begin to get a picture of a world in continual flux, ever-changing and never safe, and we are never quite sure where the dividing line lies between mind and world. This is all heightened by the vivid coastal setting. Highly recommended.
Format:Paperback
Two of the most extraordinary books of recent times have been about mothers taking their children to the sea. The second is Veronique Olmi's chilling Beside the Sea, which shares much of the darkness of this novel but is in many other ways its opposite.
Darrieussecq's language flows over the reader like warm waves on a sunny day. It's a style that is in danger of being too rich (novellas often provoke the question "how long could such and such be sustained?" Fortunately in the case of Breathing Underwater, as with Beside the Sea, the answer is "exactly this long"). We are in danger of drowning in the prose, being engulfed by its languid warmth, and any one of a number of metaphors provoked by the book's title and story. But, as with the characters - the mother who runs away from life taking her daughter with her and the world-weary detective (who reminds me a lot of Arbergast from Psycho) who comes searching for her - the prose's gentle but unrelenting warmth wins us over and leaves us transformed as it does the novel's protagonists.
Infinitely superior to Pig Tales (which fortunately I read afterwards or I may not have come to this), whcih was a simple allegory stretched too far, Breathing Underwater is one of those deceptively brilliant novellas one comes across so rarely that illustrates exactly what the form can do in pushing a single idea to the edge of breaking point. An absolute masterclass recommended without hesitation.
Darrieussecq's language flows over the reader like warm waves on a sunny day. It's a style that is in danger of being too rich (novellas often provoke the question "how long could such and such be sustained?" Fortunately in the case of Breathing Underwater, as with Beside the Sea, the answer is "exactly this long"). We are in danger of drowning in the prose, being engulfed by its languid warmth, and any one of a number of metaphors provoked by the book's title and story. But, as with the characters - the mother who runs away from life taking her daughter with her and the world-weary detective (who reminds me a lot of Arbergast from Psycho) who comes searching for her - the prose's gentle but unrelenting warmth wins us over and leaves us transformed as it does the novel's protagonists.
Infinitely superior to Pig Tales (which fortunately I read afterwards or I may not have come to this), whcih was a simple allegory stretched too far, Breathing Underwater is one of those deceptively brilliant novellas one comes across so rarely that illustrates exactly what the form can do in pushing a single idea to the edge of breaking point. An absolute masterclass recommended without hesitation.
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is indoubtedly unlike most others i have read, and to be honest i'm still making my mind up as to wheather or not i liked it. Firstly, be prepared, there is no story at all. The synopsis says it all. It is all about the style, the attention to detail of the world and how the author's descriptions make the world somehow strange or unfamiliar. Forget dialogue, getting to grips with characters or even their names, and the reader never uncovers the motives of the characters in this book. This can be a difficult read and at times i was unsure about which character was in the spotlight as the narration jumps around a lot. There seems at a first glance to be a lot against this novel, but i paradoxically found that what made this novel infuriating at times, the ambiguity, vagueness also are its strenghts. It is highly poetic and leaves a lot of responsibility with the reader regarding the book's interpretation or meaning. Maybe this is a case of getting out what you put in. Try it for yourself.
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