In an unnamed town, an unnamed, ambiguous narrator wakes in a church. This is a new beginning that’s nearly impossible to move towards. It is also an eerily quiet book grief both stalks and haunts the page. All the hallmarks of Didion’s writing are here: her tightly honed eloquence, her pared back prose. Instead, as the year progresses, she becomes convinced he’ll return. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didionįollowing the death of her husband, John Dunne, Didion takes the reader deep inside her experience of grief and the madness it brings, showing the near impossibility of moving beyond such a huge loss. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianĦ. In the wake of the pandemic, the continued widespread disintegration of human rights, and the tightening climate emergency, it’s a prescient book showing how language might guide us towards new beginnings.Ī nearly impossible new start … Vanessa Redgrave in the National Theatre adaptation of The Year Of Magical Thinking. This deceptively simple starting point creates a powerful polemic as each word builds on the others to create a resounding call to action. The Dictionary of the Undoing attempts to redefine what it means to be an ethical citizen by taking the reader through a series of alphabetised ideas leading to direct action. Language, Freeman argues, has been weaponised but also dulled. Dictionary of the Undoing by John Freeman McCarthy creates a story about the impossibility of escaping memory as long as fragments of it remain.ĥ. Having lost his memory he should be free to begin again, but instead he is haunted by these fragments of the past. From there the entire building follows, then finally actors are called in to recreate specific moods and events that again may or may not have happened. Initially, he spots a crack in a wall reminding him of another crack, so he decides to hire someone to recreate the whole room. Our protagonist, his memory affected after an injury, sets out to recreate a room he thinks might have existed. As the story unfolds the twins learn that their mother rethought her life without them, and they have to entirely reframe their idea of her. In the wake of their mother’s death, twins Byron and Benny are puzzled by two artefacts she leaves behind: a voice recording and a traditional Caribbean black cake. Free shows that it can take a very long time and a lot of effort to reach a new beginning.Īn incredible family saga spanning 60 years, jumping across continents and time, forming a multi-layered book about secrets and inheritance. It’s only when the old regime collapses that she begins to question what freedom means, finding that often it’s the destabilising moments that create the opportunities for change. Ypi details her childhood love of communism: the order it brought, the sense of belonging it created. Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea YpiĪ beautifully crafted memoir of growing up in Enver Hoxha’s Albania and its aftermath. Fresh starts, we learn, are a lot more complicated than they look.Ģ. She discovers it’s never possible to fully jettison your obligations. Through her lack of belongings and history, Delia is able to strip back the layers of her life, discovering what matters to her. One day, middle-aged wife and mother Delia Grinstead walks away from her family on a beach holiday, carrying almost nothing, and hitches a lift to a new town with only $500 in her pocket. I believe literature offers the best answers and starkest warnings here are some of them. I left religion behind, but I still believe in the power of books. When I could no longer entertain this as a comfortable belief, I knew a fresh start was necessary, as I describe in my book The Last Days. I believed God would destroy the wicked, saving his true followers who would begin again in a paradise Earth. When I was growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, looking forward to a new beginning was actively encouraged. The idea of a second go at living can also create a deferred experience of life. There is a warning in this set out in search of a new beginning and you may get nowhere. All these narratives embody a utopian ideal: somewhere out there, there’s something better worth beginning again for. As well as a temporary escape into reading, books suggest the possibility that life outside the story might also be lived differently. T he idea of a fresh start, of a new beginning, has a beguiling appeal that has made it an enduring trope in literature.
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