Big Kiss, Bye-bye

Description

By (author) Bennett Claire-Louise

Short /annotation:

A woman confronts the unquenchable half-life of passion, in a new novel by one of our most acclaimed and inventive writers of fiction.

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The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept. An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she’s loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage – a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss – make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.

Review quote:

‘Bennett’s prose shimmers with a neo-baroque charisma. Her style is various, flexible and distinctive…. It has been heralded (by Anne Enright, among others) as an index of a ‘new modernism’…. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye activates and resists our expectations about testimony, confessionalism, narrative access; our presumption that we know just how the accent is falling in a life or a work, that the obsessions and preoccupations shown us are the only or even the main ones…. [It] is interested in both erotic annihilation and persistence. (It is also at times very funny.) Bennett sustains a subtle dialectic throughout – between the ecstatic “undoing” promised by eros and the ongoing possibilities of provisional reassemblage through writing and conversation…. [A] philosophical rehabilitation of romance.’
— Maureen McLane, London Review of Books

Review quote:

‘Shape-shifting and splendid in its disregard for conventional wisdom and contemporary minimalist tastes, it weaves rococo abundance and brazen mundanity into something as porous and unknowable as the narrator’s inner world. Claire-Louise Bennett is a true original, working at the brink of what language can do.’
— Annie McDermott, Times Literary Supplement

Review quote:

‘If Bennett might seem at first blush a more quietly innovative writer than the novelists with whom she is inevitably compared, this is not to her detriment, but inseparable from the extraordinary subtlety and emotional detail of the psychological portraits her fiction paints.’
— Doug Battersby, Financial Times

Review quote:

‘Big Kiss, Bye-Bye delivers an exhilarating approximation of what memory feels like. Certain specifics appear fixed – the colour of a shirt, say, or an ex-lover’s hurtful words – but the rest swirls about, shifting depending on circumstance. Bennett’s writing is unpretentious and unselfconscious, with an often startling immediacy. Her vocabulary is precise – she finds a message ‘discomposing’; her empty flat is ‘languidly transporting’ – and sometimes unexpected. Pages of spare, simple sentences are offset by meandering digressions full of possibilities. Bennett is always conscious that every moment might one day be remembered, reshuffled, retold. Memory never fully settles.’
— Zoe Guttenplan, Literary Review

Review quote:

‘Bennett draws on “polyvocal, and apparently experimental” (note the tonal eye roll) techniques no