Depression is passed down the generations in a tale of family struggle that becomes an intense celebration of art,language and lifeRepeatedly in Imagine Me Gone, troubled characters ask themselves how life can be at once so fine and so painful. The pain is the grief of loss, or past and future,and the ordeal of daily life for those unable to imbue it with meaning. The beauty is the magnificence of nature, love and perhaps most of all art: music, and with its power to still unhappiness by reaching “the note that the heart pines for”,and language. All the characters are wordsmiths, who relish the sentences they create and have some belief that to find the right words to recount pain is to make it more bearable. Life illuminated in this way becomes so intense that a man approximately to kill himself can rejoice in the precariousness of existence: “How narrowly we all avoid having never been.”This is the moment novel by the prizewinning American writer Adam Haslett. Union Atlantic was a more overtly topical myth set in the corrupt banking and military world of the US after 9/11, and told in rougher prose. Imagine Me Gone makes the elemental American landscapes of the previous novel the setting for a more classical tale of family struggle. There seem to be conscious shades of Faulkners As I Lay Dying,as the narrative is told by alternating members of the family who even narrate their own deaths. But there is still a modern social critique at work: notably of the pharmaceutical industry and the frightening debts doctors allow vulnerable patients to incur. Related: The 100 best novels: No 55 – As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930) Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com