Briefly, A Delicious Life

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Three hundred years earlier, I’d seen Brother Tomás with Brother Mateo in that very same garden, beard crushing against beard and the clatter of rosary beads hitting the paving stones. A decade or so after that, there was the boy from the village who sold bad oranges with the boy in the kitchens who made bad preserves. Around the turn of the sixteenth century there was a complex triangulation amongst Brothers Augustin, Miguel, and Simón. And so on, over the years: countless combinations, differing ages, differing levels of urgency and tenderness, but always more or less the same, the kissing and gripping and so often the very same skittishness, the entirely justified fear of being found out, the creeping sensation that they were being watched. Stevens appeared on BBC Radio 4's Open Book in January 2023, where she and Tom Crewe "discuss[ed] drawing creatively on marginal - and radical - LGBTQ voices from the 19th century". [10] Personal life [ edit ] funny, righteous ghost, she&#8217sbeen hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying on Both the novel and the film of Gone With the Wind have traditionally been regarded as canonical accounts of life in the 19th-century US. According to Sarah Churchwell’s bracing new book, it is time to remove the narrative from its undeserved pedestal and examine its problematic treatment of feminism, class and, above all, race afresh. She persuasively suggests that Margaret Mitchell’s story has been inspirational in the worst possible ways, leading to everything from Trumpism to racist brutality and has inadvertently led to an America even more divided than before. Briefly, A Delicious Life Though Blanca is attracted to George partly because of the way she dresses, she is still appalled when George goes into the village in a suit. How do the villagers react to the way George presents herself, as opposed to her friends in Paris?

George and her family clash with the villagers several times throughout the novel. Did you sympathize with one group over the other? What grievances did you feel were justified? Do you think a resolution could have been reached?

He pointed at the portraits of the Madonna that lined the walls of the Charterhouse corridors: canvas after canvas of broad, white foreheads, beatific smiles, occasional exposed breasts proffered to babies with the faces of old men. Those virgins, he said, were the only ones he was duty bound to protect. Blanca finds herself intrigued by George breaking convention, drawn to the woman, and curious to learn more. While she tries to figure George out, Blanca reflects on her own memories of life before she died and how her young death came to be. ⁣ As a ghost, Blanca is able to inhabit others’ bodies and experience their sensations, hear their thoughts, witness their dreams and memories, and even see their futures, making her a near-omniscient narrator. Discuss the author’s choice to give Blanca these powers. How would the story differ if Blanca’s powers were more limited in scope? I don't hesitate to mark 'Briefly, a Delicious Life' as a five-star read. It will be something I'll reread, and have as a fixture in the STAFF RECOMMENDATIONS section of the library. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

wear their unconventionality, in George&#8217scase, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when Imagine you are about to bite into an apple. Imagine never having bitten into an apple before. The fruit at your lips is an unknown thing. It might burst like a tomato! Yield like a peach! Snap like a carrot! [...] This is what it was like for me, the first time I heard Chopin play the piano.’

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. our MC, Blanca, is a ghost who I could listen to for hours and days. I thought she was a really good narrator for this story, and it added a queer, sultry element that made this book. she also had her own heartbreaking and saddening story, adding to the overall somber nature of the novel. We know we are curious about the dead, but imagine a life lived so vibrantly as to make the dead curious about us. Nell Stevens brings a reader into the strange and brilliant artistic exile of George Sand, writing this tender story with tremendous heart and daring. Here, reader, are the low-lying truths of love, art and time." I gave myself outfits, too: the kind George wore, trousers, shirts, sturdy shoes. I gave myself a swagger as I walked into the room where George was sitting and said, Hello, darling. And George would look up and see me (See me! The thrill!) and say, Hello, you, and we would find that we were speaking the same language.”George Sand reads too contemporary a portrait, feverishly imagined by said 14 yo fangirl in a time when the Internets and fandom forums for, I don’t know, “fantasies [of] having sex with George” were… not a thing. And don’t get me started on Chopin!

Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author. My name is Blanca. I died in 1473, when I was fourteen years old, and had been at the Charterhouse ever since. Over the centuries, I suppose, I came to think of it as solely my domain. I knew more about it than anyone else, that was for sure. I knew the generations of monks, and after they left, the great silence of the place. I knew about all sorts: buried treasure, dead-end tunnels, which doors swelled shut in summer with the heat and which in winter with the damp. I knew where the roof leaked, where the rats nested. And still, for all my expertise, there was no sign whatsoever of where these two people had sprung from: the same old corridors, same echoes, same spiders crawling from beam to beam across the ceiling. I was wrong-footed. emotionally moving, this &#8220deply wild debut follows the unconventional love triangle&#8221(Cosmopolitan)O'Keefe, Alice (27 May 2017). "Bleaker House by Nell Stevens review – how not to write a novel". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 January 2023.

First, the positives, and I really only have one: the writing. The writing in Briefly, A Delicious Life is pretty good. It evokes the novel's setting--Mallorca--well, with some nice occasional descriptive flourishes during the more key scenes (particularly the ones involving Chopin's music). The writing was never something I had an issue with. No, what I had an issue with was pretty much everything else.Stevens tempers this excitement with tragedy, and Briefly, A Delicious Life is also about the ways a body can betray a person, especially a woman. Fundamentally, though, it is that rare thing: a literary novel concerned with pleasure — of sex, and eating, and music, and the pleasures of a narrative, of escaping somewhere else, becoming someone else. Although a local jokes about Sand and Chopin coming to Mallorca for the weather when it is mostly miserable during their stay, the novel itself is sun-kissed, steeped in the senses, and in many ways a perfect summer beach read. I will also note that—unlike some mainstream reviewers—I appreciated the modernity of Blanca’s narration. The book is actually beautifully written: there’s a precision to the language that allows it to convey sensuality, bitterness, suffering, love absurdity, all with equal finesse. Blanca has been dead for a few centuries when she falls in love – instantly and devotedly – with celebrated novelist George Sand. George is unlike anyone Blanca has encountered in hundreds of years of haunting: a woman dressed in men’s clothes, a ferocious writer, a passionate lover of men and women alike and an ambivalent mother. Briefly, a delicious life is told through the eyes of Blanca- a girl who died in Mallorca at a young age and now stays in that town as a ghost. For four hundred years she has been living in this confusing existence between life and death with the same families but different people. That is until, foreigners come to live in her hometown. Foreigners who dress up as men and live together with children out of marriage, that is. Blanca falls in love immediately with George, a mysterious woman who wears trousers and smokes cigars. Blanca also builds a connection with George’s lover Chopin and her two children, Maurice and Solange.