Grace McCleen

El personaje central es una niña extraordinaria en una situación extraordinaria. Huérfana de madre desde su nacimiento, Judith vive atrapada entre dos mundos excluyentes. Por un lado, su padre, un fundamentalista cristiano que recorre las calles predicando la verdadera fe y le impone una rigurosa disciplina anclada en el pasado. Y, por otro, la escuela, donde su carácter peculiar incita las burlas y agresiones de sus compañeros. Para evadirse, Judith ha construido en su habitación una réplica de su ciudad con figuritas de alambre, un cielo de gasa, un arco iris brillante de papel de caramelos y muchos otros elementos rescatados de la basura: un auténtico refugio donde dejar volar la imaginación. Así, cuando el día siguiente de haber simulado que la nieve cubría su poblado en miniatura, una nevada verdadera cae prematuramente a comienzos del otoño, Judith se cree capaz de obrar milagros. A partir de ese momento, una serie de coincidencias entre los juegos de la niña y determinados hechos que ocurren a su alrededor refuerzan su misticismo y la aproximan peligrosamente a la delgada línea que separa la realidad de la ficción.… (altro)

Judith is 10 jaar en leeft samen met haar vader. Haar moeder is bij haar geboorte overleden. Ze behoren tot een strenggelovige gemeenschap en verkondigen - langs de deuren - dat het einde van de wereld nabij is.
Judith wordt gepest op school door een jongen (en de daarbij behorende kliek). De jongen dreigt haar 's maandags te verdrinken in de wc. Op haar kamer heeft Judith een fantasiewereld gebouwd met allerlei waardeloos materiaal (stokjes, doosjes, steentjes, ...); het land van Melk en Honing. Ze bedenkt dat als het zwaar zou gaan sneeuwen ze na het weekend niet naar school zou hoeven. Ze bouwt haar fantasieland om tot een winterlandschap en het wonder geschiedt: er valt zoveel sneeuw dat de wegen zijn afgesloten; er is geen school die maandag en ook de fabriek waar haar vader werkt is gesloten.
Judith begint gesprekken met God te voeren en ze meent dat ze wonderen kan verrichten.
Maar waar het eerst heel fijn leek om macht te hebben slaat het al snel om. Het pesten gaat van kwaad tot erger; de angst regeert. Judith probeert de dingen terug te draaien, maar dat gaat zomaar niet zegt God....
Ik vond het een fantastisch boek; heb er van genoten van begin tot eind. De wereld wordt bekeken door de ogen van een kind niet alles begrijpt (maar wel veel aanvoelt). Toch kun je aan haar beschrijvingen opmaken wat er bedoeld wordt en wat er zich daadwerkelijk afspeelt.
Bij het lezen van de passages over het pesten en terroriseren voel je de woede boven komen. Ik kon me heel goed inleven in wat je zo iemand allemaal zou toewensen ook al zegt je geloof dat je de beproevingen moet doorstaan of dat je 'de andere wang moet toekeren'.… (altro)

Judith McPherson is a magical child in a broken world. As events in her town slowly break down and her father tries to keep home and hearth together, Judith creates a world in her bedroom that mirrors the outside town.

The mystery at the heart of Judith's creation is the mystical knowledge and power she comes into, and what happens as the story races to it's conclusion.

Grace McCleen's debut novel is exquisitely written and captured me from the first page. A unique story and voice, a definite must read.… (altro)

A sympathetic reviewer might call this rarefied, esoteric novel of an emotionally frozen female academic “lyrical” and “finely observed”. Hilary Mantel, for example, whose blurb appears on the over of my copy, found the book “astonishing and luminous”. After doggedly pushing through its nearly 300 pages, I am not quite as enthusiastic. We have here a chilly, “detached”, barely credible protagonist, the aptly named Elizabeth Stone, who, we eventually learn, suffered childhood trauma. Solitary and neurotic (in the classic sense), she’s a fifty-two year-old scholar of John Milton, determined to change course and complete a major project on the on the music of poetry—based on remarks by TS Eliot about the sound of words conveying more meaning than their semantics. Why does she wish to do this? Seemingly to please Edward Hunt, her poetry tutor at Oxford over thirty years before. When Elizabeth was a young woman, he had seen something special in her and had recommended her for a full scholarship. She wants to prove to him that his faith in her was justified. That’s the plot in a nutshell.

The professor’s project occupies her every waking moment. She has no family—her mother died years before apparently a suicide, and Elizabeth was taken in as a foster child by a minister and his wife. The professor also has no friends. Essentially, she has no life apart from her academic work, numerous tedious samples of which the reader is forced to wade through. Edward Hunt must’ve been a very special or very deluded man to see something exceptional in Elizabeth’s tortuously abstruse prose.

Even when Professor Stone learns she has as an aggressive brain tumour, she thinks only of getting back to her research project. To give you an idea of her thinking and writing, here are Elizabeth’s observations when the diagnosing neurologist shows her images of the mass in the right frontal lobe: to her it appears “nestled like a downy bird in the whorls of her cerebellum, a dense white mass the size of a plum.” For one thing, the cerebellum is nowhere near the right frontal lobe. It is located at the back of the brain underneath the temporal and occipital lobes, while the frontal lobe, as its name suggests, is at the front of the brain, behind the forehead. For another, I don’t know about you but to me comparing a tumour to “a downy bird” is fanciful, precious, and just weird. In any case, this is indeed a remarkable malignant growth, for it not only has the seeming capacity to travel within the confines of the skull—from front to back, it also possesses the magical ability to fully respond to treatment and completely vanish for a time, at least. This is no doubt a sign from the universe that the professor is meant to be here to complete her magnum opus. The resolution of the medical problem also allows her to travel to Oxford to review some Eliot papers and to see her former tutor after 32 years.

McCleen’s plot is almost as thin and unbelievable as her heroine. The skeletal storyline is, however, abundantly padded with descriptions of the sea, the sky, the clouds, the rain, and the sights, sounds, and smells of Oxford. Furthermore, there are many pages dedicated to Elizabeth’s thinking and research on her project, some sections that deal with her backstory (her early childhood by the sea with an anguished, book-loving mother, apparently suffering from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis), and numerous scenes in which Elizabeth is in the presence of the chain-smoking Edward Hunt, a kind of wiry Mr. Rochester with unusual tufted hair. Elizabeth’s overwrought sensibility rivals that of the heroine of a gothic novel. Branches can’t move in the wind without upsetting her stomach. While there are occasional passages of fine writing and the author sensitively portrays certain psychological states, more often than not the novel feels bloated and unwieldy. Its conclusion in which Elizabeth discovers that someone has already addressed her topic, and in which she reveals to Edward that she has terminal brain cancer, and the two engage in a rapturous consummation of their love is absolutely maudlin. Evidently, Hilary Mantel read a different novel from the one I completed.

So why did I read this book? Years ago, I was impressed with McCleen’s debut. This second novel of hers has been sitting on my shelf for a long time and I’m doing some pandemic clearing-out—i.e., I’m reading and eliminating stuff that’s just taking up space. This claustrophobic and oppressively dense novel will be exiting the house shortly.… (altro)