The Truth About Love
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
** 'THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE is an ambitious and poetic weaving of a long-ago family tragedy into the tragic history, and histories, of our time. Josephine Hart has come home in triumph' John Banville ** 'Opening with a long and impressively sustained overture of fractured, Beckettian prose, The Truth About Love is Josephine Hart's most ambitious novel to date. Her territory is not new. This is an Irish family story, in which the intimate and the political become ever-deepening metaphors for one another. There are echoes of Sebastian Barry's Costa-winning The Secret Scripture, Hugo Hamilton's memoir of a German-Irish childhood The Speckled People and the numinous fiction of Colm Toibin. As in Barry's masterful novel, a sort of archaeology of loss is undertaken and the past bleeds into the present. But Hart's unique treatment of images that have been familiar since Joyce blows the dust of anything she might be said to have inherited. The book, while often bleak, is an exhilarating adventure in language; the words throw up sparks of strange beauty. Added to this, there is a facility for vibrant characterisation that animates the novel at every point. These sufferers are not being described, but are incarnated on the page. By leaving them alone, Hart allows them to live. This is a brave novel about hurt and the elusiveness of consolation, suggesting that if the pieces of a broken life can be picked up at all they are never going to fit together again. For a novel of average length, the scope is astoundingly broad. Hart ranges widely and assertively through the mirrorland of Irish history' Joseph O'Connor GUARDIAN ** 'This is not a tale about romantic, idealised love, the kind that comes with soaring strings and sweeping gestures, but about a more dangerous kind of love: real, raw love, the sort of passion that can neither be controlled nor packaged. The anger and the selfishness of love-induced grief is brilliantly portrayed through the book, in particular through poor, tragic Sissy, already wounded by the death of a daughter. It's a bleak tale, beautifully told, about the one burden we must all, as human beings, survive: love' Sarah Vine THE TIMES ** 'The Truth is: love hurts. Particularly the kind of love which spills over into obsession. For as Josephine Hart chillingly shows in her latest novel, love can be a torture which is impossible to give up - whatever the price. Ambitious in scope, Hart's novel widens out from its quietly domestic opening to explore more than 30 years of Troubles in Ireland, and the country's potent cocktail of religion, heroism and the idealisation of the dead. Emotionally, and in often searing prose, she asks whether loving too much is not heroic, but damaging. That Hart lost siblings of her own when young only makes this focus more poignant, and might explain why there is something almost unbearably fragile about his novel. Yet despite the emotional intensity, Hart's writing is intellectually and philosophically robust' Lucy Beresford THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH ** 'The depiction of grief here seems to have a truthfulness that goes beyond a novelist's empathy. This is a curiously satisfying novel, characteristic of Josephine Hart in its moral seriousness. It takes on the condition of Ireland, the Troubles, as well as the small lives of a few individuals but the central point is well made: there is pain in the heart of love' Melanie McDonagh EVENING STANDARD
Review
`This is not a tale about romantic, idealised love, the kind that comes with soaring strings and sweeping gestures, but about a more dangerous kind of love: real, raw love, the sort of passion that can neither be controlled nor packaged ... It's a bleak tale, beautifully told, about the one burden we must all, as human beings, survive: love'
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I found this book very dense and deep, and was gripped. The characters are alive with Irish passion, intelligence and wit; the history, suffering and redeption of a small country is written down within the history of one family and their community. I enjoyed it a lot and will hold it in my mind for some time.
Format:Paperback
I have just finished reading this book - it will stay with me for quite a while yet. I had trouble getting into it and nearly gave up - the book starts out with an accident and the repercussions on a family and community of that accident. Without giving the plot away completely, I found quite a few scenes, especially involving the mother, breathtakingly brilliant. The indepth analysis ongoing throughout the book was mind blowing. It did seem to trail away towards the end and lost its energy, but I think it was an essential part of the telling of the story, to bring you back down slowly, having shown you deep inner recesses of the human soul/mind/entity. A beauty.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is one of those novels to which the term "poetic" attaches itself. This is usually a bad thing and 'The Truth About Love' doesn't buck the trend. From an sinkingly opaque stream-of-consciousness prologue, as a dying boy is ferried into hospital, the narrative proceeds as a series of first-person narratives, none of which manages to be authentic or convincing. I've given it two stars because somewhere, buried beneath the wishful thinking, is a potentially interesting meditation upon the nature of love and memory. My problem is that the various narrators' concepts of "love" -- which Hart, as organiser of the farce, doesn't seem to question, unless I'm missing a trick -- are ethereal and idealised to the point of evaporation.
I also struggled with the concept of Irishness that seeps into every corner: characters seem to exist in a curiously un-Irish state of unsceptical, self-conscious national(ist) fervour. The dialogue clunks desperately and lurches into sudden fits of exposition where characters address the reader over the head of the interlocutor. It's curious (and symptomatic of the book's pretensions) that a reference to "The Late Show" -- which anyone who hadn't lived in Ireland would probably find more problematic than mention of Pearse and Collins -- goes unglossed.
There is a bibliography.
I also struggled with the concept of Irishness that seeps into every corner: characters seem to exist in a curiously un-Irish state of unsceptical, self-conscious national(ist) fervour. The dialogue clunks desperately and lurches into sudden fits of exposition where characters address the reader over the head of the interlocutor. It's curious (and symptomatic of the book's pretensions) that a reference to "The Late Show" -- which anyone who hadn't lived in Ireland would probably find more problematic than mention of Pearse and Collins -- goes unglossed.
There is a bibliography.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
