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A restless woman upends her world, abandoning her domestic inertia to seek refuge in a foreign hemisphere. Purposefully unsettled on the labyrinthine streets of London, she assembles a new routine amid the afterglow of a story from a century earlier. A traumatised widow, doubly bereaved, threw herself into the icy Thames. A shell-shocked soldier, heading home from war, gave himself to the depths to save her. Now disoriented by slippages in time as well as place, the woman begins imagining her own presence in the lives of these two strangers entwined by fate. But as her days blur together, as her intrigue becomes obsession, and as her sympathies grow to encompass all manner of souls lost to water--drowned, shipwrecked, cast adrift, or driven to the poles of the planet--she feels her restlessness returning with all the power of a tide in flood. In this mesmerising de but novel, Anna MacDonald finds a language of perpetual motion for an almost static experience of interior life. Lyrical, lilting, and melodious, her gentle words rise into rhythms that surge forth, then break and recede, leaving treasures in their wake. Hers is the poetry of alienation embodied: corporeal and sensory, spatial and recursive, making magic from a tilt of the head, a turn of the gaze, a stride, a halt, an interplay of gesture and orientation. In her dizzying proliferation of spirals and orbits, trajectories and bearings, her every sentence is a search for traction on a world that bewilders anew with every daily revolution.… (més)
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This exquisite short novel was just what I needed after the chaotic experience of reading Sjon's Codex 1962. A Jealous Tide is Anna MacDonald's debut novel, but it doesn't read like one, it reads like the work of a writer at the top of her game after spending many years perfecting her craft. She writes with a painterly eye, immersing the reader in the twin landscapes of urban Melbourne and riverside London, and the author's wide reading and deep cultural knowledge enhance the book with the unexpected pleasure of allusions to intriguing books, artworks and music.
The unnamed narrator is not a flaneur, but she walks urban streetscapes with an observant eye. Incurably restless, she walks the streets of South Yarra in Melbourne while she waits for her departure to London. Despite the urgency to prepare for her journey, she feels an irresistible yearning to walk:
During the afternoons, as daylight yellowed and began to fade, I would give in, walk out, and close the door behind me. Most days, I turned towards the river. If there was enough light, from Herring Island jetty I moved upstream, keeping pace with the incoming tide, walking past school playing fields where rowing crews levered racing boats from the water; where young boys outfitted as cadets qui-iick marched and dreamed the turf beneath their feet to desert, reimagining the far bank as a foreign shore, and the bagpipe band blew 'Scotland the Brave' into the creeping dark. Often, I passed fishermen setting up on the low bank before MacRobertson Bridge. As I headed out, they'd be unfolding their campstools along the edge of the river. It became a habit of mine to slow here, and watch, as one man after another secured bait to a hook, looked back over his shoulder before casting, waited for the metallic fizz of the line as it shot out from the land, across the water, and then paused, listening for the plop and bubble-rush of the sinking lure before settling onto his stool to wait.
On those days, I would walk far enough to leave the sounds of traffic and after-school games behind me, into the steep wooded banks of Hawthorn and Abbotsford, where currawongs cried in the dying light. Then, when evening had laid its mourning ribbons over the river and house lights began to pierce the darkening hills, I would turn and head for home. Often as I walked back along the high bank, I could hear the rhythmic slap of a lone oarsman keeping time in the water below me. (p.3)
Yes, I knew by page three that I was going to love this book. (In the beginning, The Spouse and I lived in two houses, alternating his and mine, and his was in Hawthorn, overlooking this very river.)
The narrator's research project revolves around the imagery of water in the novels and essays of Virginia Woolf, but in London, it becomes something else. Walking beside the Thames along the Hammersmith Bridge, she stumbles on a plaque, which reads:
She begins to spend her days in the British Library researching deaths by drowning, suicides, and survivors of shipwrecks at sea, and gradually her obsession takes her to a more dangerous alienation from reality. The first person narration interweaves with the third person omniscient as the stories of the rescuer and the rescued absorb the narrator's thoughts. The reader begins to fear for her with the same sense of looming tragedy as for Lieutenant Wood and the woman, who like Virginia Woolf is to weight her pockets with stones.
A restless woman upends her world, abandoning her domestic inertia to seek refuge in a foreign hemisphere. Purposefully unsettled on the labyrinthine streets of London, she assembles a new routine amid the afterglow of a story from a century earlier. A traumatised widow, doubly bereaved, threw herself into the icy Thames. A shell-shocked soldier, heading home from war, gave himself to the depths to save her. Now disoriented by slippages in time as well as place, the woman begins imagining her own presence in the lives of these two strangers entwined by fate. But as her days blur together, as her intrigue becomes obsession, and as her sympathies grow to encompass all manner of souls lost to water--drowned, shipwrecked, cast adrift, or driven to the poles of the planet--she feels her restlessness returning with all the power of a tide in flood. In this mesmerising de but novel, Anna MacDonald finds a language of perpetual motion for an almost static experience of interior life. Lyrical, lilting, and melodious, her gentle words rise into rhythms that surge forth, then break and recede, leaving treasures in their wake. Hers is the poetry of alienation embodied: corporeal and sensory, spatial and recursive, making magic from a tilt of the head, a turn of the gaze, a stride, a halt, an interplay of gesture and orientation. In her dizzying proliferation of spirals and orbits, trajectories and bearings, her every sentence is a search for traction on a world that bewilders anew with every daily revolution.
Google Books — S'està carregant…
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1
The unnamed narrator is not a flaneur, but she walks urban streetscapes with an observant eye. Incurably restless, she walks the streets of South Yarra in Melbourne while she waits for her departure to London. Despite the urgency to prepare for her journey, she feels an irresistible yearning to walk:
Yes, I knew by page three that I was going to love this book. (In the beginning, The Spouse and I lived in two houses, alternating his and mine, and his was in Hawthorn, overlooking this very river.)
The narrator's research project revolves around the imagery of water in the novels and essays of Virginia Woolf, but in London, it becomes something else. Walking beside the Thames along the Hammersmith Bridge, she stumbles on a plaque, which reads:
She begins to spend her days in the British Library researching deaths by drowning, suicides, and survivors of shipwrecks at sea, and gradually her obsession takes her to a more dangerous alienation from reality. The first person narration interweaves with the third person omniscient as the stories of the rescuer and the rescued absorb the narrator's thoughts. The reader begins to fear for her with the same sense of looming tragedy as for Lieutenant Wood and the woman, who like Virginia Woolf is to weight her pockets with stones.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/09/24/a-jealous-tide-by-anna-macdonald/ (