Recensori in anteprimaJeff Porter

The second installment in Ann Hood’s Gracie Belle imprint challenges the traditional solemnity that characterizes nonfiction books of grief, loss, and sorrow. Planet Claire is the story of the untimely death of the author’s wife and a candid account of the following year of madness and grief. With Claire’s death, Jeff Porter tries to imagine life without her but struggles with the bewilderment that follows. There was no gradual transition, no chance to say goodbye or resolve unfinished business. The grief is crushing, her death the psychological equivalent of Pearl Harbor. As Jeff’s life unravels, he analyzes his sadness with growing interest. He talks to Claire as if to evoke a presence, to mark a space for memory. He reports on his daily walks and shares observations of life’s sadness, while reminiscing about various moments in their life together. Like Orpheus, the author searches for a lost love, and what he finds is not the dog of doom but flashes of an intimate symmetry that brighten the darkest places of sorrow. Planet Claire takes readers on a journey of sorrow that recalls memorable works by C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed), Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking), and Julian Barnes (Levels of Life). Planet Claire, however, is also playful, quirky, and self-ironic in a way that challenges the genre’s traditional solemnity. Like Max Porter’s novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, this is an unpredictably funny account of heartbreak, as if to say there’s something about the magnitude of loss that troubles even earnestness.