The first section of this book held me completely in its thrall: it’s stunningly good; narrating the experiences of an injured soldier in the First World War and flashing between past, present, and future with dazzling fluidity. It should be confusing but you’re so utterly in it that it feels completely natural. The prose is like crystal: clear, finely cut, gorgeous. The second section carries it on elegantly, as the story shifts and moves in wholly unexpected and thrilling ways, and seems to traverse the most fundamental questions of human life. And its just so achingly beautiful.
Those first two parts were so perfect that I didn’t really want anything else, but then the third section shift to the wife’s perspective and jumped ahead a bit in time, and I loved it too, and the way it refracted some themes from the earlier sections and deepened others. And then the fourth section jumped even further ahead, and that was harder to stomach, because I had this peevish feeling that it didn’t need to do that; that it was too much of a good thing, though I did love the new characters, and the span of generations. But still, the book lost a little something for me there, and though I reconciled myself to its weaving back and forth over the next few sections, when it jumped again in the eighth chapter, it felt like stretching to the very limit of what the book’s ideas could contain without cheapening them. The added characters, more loosely connected, were a further strain, all the more so because some of them were real people, which teeters on the boundaries of gimmick, and some of them are Polish, and felt a bit exoticized.
At its best, Held is a gorgeous exploration of love and death. I could not help but think of bell hooks, in All About Love, writing about how love is the only thing that allows us connection after death — this is what Held seeks to explore, both on an individual level and a collective one, and echoing, somehow, in geology as well, in tides and snowfall. These reflections are subtly interwoven with an exploration of trauma and histories of violence — it reminded me of the best of Michael Ondaatje’s work (is this a Canadian thing?). There’s a bit of play with questions of science and proof and mesmerism and such too, but this was mostly much less compelling. The heights of its powers come when the book lyrically evokes longing and desire; the way you love someone so much that you feel their presence beside you. It does this so marvelously, so persuasively, so beautifully. So uneven though the book may be, it’s an incredible work.
Kasia Reads 