Claire-Louise Bennett

“Gorgeous and a little unnerving. . .Reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.”–The New York Times A woman confronts the afterlife of intimacy, in a deeply tender novel by one of our most acclaimed and inventive fiction writers 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.

A Novel

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

biddy

I can't remember exactly, and just as quickly my hand was no longer on his face, but it had been. It had been on his face and that's a strange thing to know, and I'd be surprised if I ever forgot that. I don't regret it. I don't regret things like that. I might do the following day, and for a few days after that, that's to say I'll likely feel absolutely mortified and green about the gills, but then time passes soon enough and so too does my nausea and mortification. In the end I don't care too much about getting carried away and making a fool of myself. The alternative is to die of boredom, the alternative is to be genial and pass the time, the alternative is to take a spoon to my brain and scoop it out, the alternative is to drink too much and become taciturn and twisted, the alternative is to not show up at all, and I've done all those things and getting carried away and making a fool of myself from time to time is, in the end, so much easier to bear.

Her eyes are holding his and feel like they are about to crack open and pour out across the stone floor. He looks at her and it is unbearable. Something is going on. Something is really going on and it is not what she foresaw, and it is too late now because now her eyes are closed and his eyes are closing and their mouths open, their lips are touching, their mouths are open and he reaches right in. We are in the dark. We are together in the dark. He is very strong in this place. I want it to go on and on. I want to stay here. The dark, the dark.

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye quotes

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