Secretly I am a book caresser, which is not as creepy as it sounds. I promise there won't be a CSI show about some crazy sexual fetish. It is just that when I find a book that I want to read, everytime I go into a bookshop I stop and pick up the book and reread the cover and dream of owning it and reading it. Then I go to the library website and either reserve it, or recommend it as a book to buy. I seldom buy books, as frankly they are luxury items and out of my budget now.
This was one of those books that I had looked at and touched for a couple of months before the library bought it. I was entranced by the blurb, a novel/memoir of a husband who has lost his young wife. Francisco Goldman is an author and lecturer who meets a student Aura at a function, forms a relationship and eventually they marry. Then tragically, she dies after and accident in Mexico.
This book, is really a love letter to his wife, exploring his memories and her journals and documenting their meetings, the courtship and their years together. The sense of grief is almost overwelming and by the middle of the novel, I almost felt like I couldn't continue as the sadness and depression was palpable. It was also interesting to leave the death until the end, so you enter the book, not quite sure of what has happened.
Like many in this genre of books, I am reluctant to say that I enjoyed the book. It feels like you are reaching in the glimpsing the authors heart, their raw grief and pain and they're not the most cheery seasonal reading. Still it is worth a 3/5 - a moving love story.
1 comment:
I'll admit to being a book sniffer... just adore the smell of a new book... giggle & Yes I have been known to caress a book...
sounds too sad a book for me.
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